mothers on Family Dysfunction

Thank You, Lord, for the gifts of life, of love and of care that come from You, wrapped in our moms and step-moms, in our grand-moms, great-grandmas, daughters, sisters, and aunts. We’re grateful for...

I was standing in line in a crowded public rest room engaged in one of my favorite hobbies, people watching, when I observed a brief interaction between a mother and daughter. Mother looked harried an...

In his excellent book, The Magnificent Story , James Bryan Smith shares a true story from Japanese culture that illustrates just how demanding strict disciplinarian fathers can be. The Japanese...

Children are God’s gifts to immature people to help them grow up. They are also God’s gifts to help parents go deep with God. . . . Parenting is not for anything. It is not a contract with God in whic...

In her compelling memoir Still Life , author Gillian Marchenko recounts her struggles with depression. In this excerpt, Marchenko shares a funny but poignant moment as she deals with the challenges...

In his book The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of rejec...

"There's nothing like your mother's sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears."

One day the fair was in town and a father of five children decided it was a good opportunity to give his wife a break. When they arrived, the father, who was quite the shot, knew instantly what game h...

A mother ran into the bedroom when she heard her seven-year-old son scream. She found his two-year-old sister pulling his hair. She gently released the little girl’s grip and said comfortingly to the ...

Author and blogger Shontell Brewer offers this fictional, but very realistic bio of a modern Christian mother trying to balance all the activities of a mother today: Sally is a stay-at-home mom of t...

An empty-nester friend of mine was recently reflecting on the long days at home with a growing family. “You just gotta keep slinging chow,” she said with a laugh. I laughed too . . . but not quite as ...

Have you ever heard the story of the mother who wanted to teach her daughter a moral lesson? She gave the little girl a quarter and a dollar for church “Put whichever one you want in the collection pl...

I never considered myself a perfectionist before I had children. Perfectionism was someone else’s problem. It was the affliction of those pasty-faced library moles that haunted the campus stacks on Sa...

For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?

As a mother you learn what it is to be both martyr and devil. In motherhood I have experienced myself as both more virtuous and more terrible, and more implicated too in the world’s virtue and terror,...

“He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark."

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak arrested my heart a few years back. It begins with a poem by William Stafford, “Ask Me”, that begs this question: “Some time when the river is ice ask me mista...

Davon Huss tells the story of a boy who came home one hot afternoon, anxious to take a cool swim in the pond behind his home. He lived in south Florida, so taking a quick dip was a common way to cool ...

Motherhood is a million little moments that God weaves together with grace, redemption, laughter, tears, and most of all, love.

When my niece bore her first child, she invited her brother and mother to stand in the delivery room. After witnessing three hours of pushing, when the baby finally crowned, my nephew turned to his mo...

Father-God, our burden bearer; Jesus, God the Son and lover of our souls; Spirit of God–giver of life and power: Thank You! Thank You for those we love and those who love us. Thank You for mothers and...

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

Leader: Mother's Day can be full of joy and celebration, but it can also be challenging for many people. So as we pray for all mothers, let us also pray for those who are struggling today. All: ...

"If at first you don't succeed, try doing it the way mom told you to in the beginning."

If I have done anything in life worth attention, I feel sure that I inherited the disposition from my mother.

Mothers can forgive anything! Tell me all, and be sure that I will never let you go, though the whole world should turn from you.

Mother's love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.

Leader: Loving God, you know us through and through, having knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. People: We praise you for gathering us like a mother hen, for protecting us with the ferocity of a...

Mother’s Day is complicated for a pastor. Among the happy families that are celebrating, there are children who were abused by mothers, mothers who lost lost a child, and women suffering from inferti...