Yesterday was Mother’s Day and I had been debating all week whether or not I would post anything.  Better bloggers than I have written so many great posts the past couple weeks.

I wanted to share a few quick thoughts before leaving you with a couple of the best posts I saw this week.

You know the main reason I didn’t post anything?  Because in my mind I already heard the negative push-back.  “Just trust God that this is His plan for you.”  “At least you have a son!  Why are you sad today?” etc.  Those comments are really hard to hear and deal with, and I imagine I might be blogging about that in the future.  But then I thought about my readers who are hurting right now.  Who had a hard time yesterday on Mother’s Day.

I want you to know that I see you.  That I thought of you yesterday and today and all my tomorrows.

I thought of you…..the woman with no living children but with one or two or eleven children in heaven.

I thought of you…the woman with one or more living children but grieving the unique individuals who are gone forever but are living in heaven.

I thought of you…the woman who is fostering or adopting.

I thought of you…the woman who has one or all of her children married and away from home.

I thought of you…the woman who is strained or estranged from her mother.

I thought of you…the woman who has a child who is in a dark place and walking far from safe paths.

I thought of you…the woman who is struggling with primary or secondary infertility.

I thought of you…the woman who is a single mom and never catches a break.

I thought of you…the woman with lots of littles who feels like she is running herself ragged.

I thought of you…the woman who, if you are anything like me, experienced about a thousand different emotions yesterday and probably went from being thankful to being angry to being resigned to grieving and back to thankful….and then repeating that process multiple times throughout the day.

And you know what?  There is a tension there that I cannot describe.

It is possible to have unspeakable joy in one hand and unbearable pain in the other hand.  It is possible to join those hands together, to clasp them, to hold them at once.  You can be, at the same time, exquisitely thankful and yet feeling like your heart is being ripped out of your chest.

The tension in that is a strange one.  And I don’t fully understand how it works.  But it does.  And sometimes, instead of beating myself up over supposedly not trusting God enough, I need to recognize and rest in the fact that it is a tension.  Life is amazing and awful at the same time.  God did not create us to only have good feelings, to only feel joy and peace, the “spiritual” feelings.  Sometimes the spiritual feelings are pain and anguish and wrestling.  (See David, Hannah, Jeremiah, etc)

If you’re in the middle of that tension…I get it.  Your heart will always be in two places at once.  Joy and sorrow are not mutually exclusive.  When they intertwine, it is just a reminder to take those things to the lap of Jesus and rest.

And if you made it through all of that, here are those blog posts I was telling you about.  It’s called Helping Women Hold Both Joy and Sorrow on Mother’s Day.  Another great one is When Mother’s Day Feels Like A Minefield.