What a child needs

Today is mother’s day. It is a day set aside to honor mothers and remember all that they do for us. I want to do that today. I want to honor my own mother, who I am sure kept dad from killing me on several occasions. I want to honor the mothers in church today, the ones who have decided that as for them and their house they will follow the Lord.

In some ways I think being a mom is harder now than it used to be. It has always been a tough job but I think parenting has changed so much in recent years that it is no longer just a matter of being a good parent but of knowing what that is.

I think that years ago a mom knew what was required of her. She was to feed and cloth the kids, to teach them manners, how to behave and how to get along with others. Mom’s taught there kids skills they would need to succeed in the world. Before public schools if you learned to read it was either because you were wealthy enough to have tutors or private schooling or because your mother taught you. Girls learned how to keep house and raise kids from mom and boys learned how to farm from dad.

Of course all kids started out with mom, she taught them how to eat with a spoon, how to dress themselves, the dreaded potty training and a thousand other skills. If Mom gave you the information you needed to “grow up” then she did her job and was a successful mother, she could expect her kids to grow up like they were supposed to and stick to their raising.

Today it is different. Today’s kids go to daycare, public school, organized sports, college, a whole list of activities that fill up our days that can be done with very little contact or input from mom and dad. So what does a mom do now, how do you be a good mom today? What does motherhood look like in this brave new world.

I want us to take a look at a mother from long ago to see that it may not have changed as much as we think.

1 Samuel 1:1–11 NASB95

Now there was a certain man from Ramathaim-zophim from the hill country of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. He had two wives: the name of one was Hannah and the name of the other Peninnah; and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. Now this man would go up from his city yearly to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests to the Lord there. When the day came that Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and her daughters; but to Hannah he would give a double portion, for he loved Hannah, but the Lord had closed her womb. Her rival, however, would provoke her bitterly to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. It happened year after year, as often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she would provoke her; so she wept and would not eat. Then Elkanah her husband said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” Then Hannah rose after eating and drinking in Shiloh. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat by the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. She, greatly distressed, prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly. She made a vow and said, “O Lord of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your maidservant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and a razor shall never come on his head.”

1 Samuel 1:24–28 NASB95

Now when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with a three-year-old bull and one ephah of flour and a jug of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord in Shiloh, although the child was young. Then they slaughtered the bull, and brought the boy to Eli. She said, “Oh, my lord! As your soul lives, my lord, I am the woman who stood here beside you, praying to the Lord. “For this boy I prayed, and the Lord has given me my petition which I asked of Him. “So I have also dedicated him to the Lord; as long as he lives he is dedicated to the Lord.” And he worshiped the Lord there.

1 Samuel 2:18–21 NASB95

Now Samuel was ministering before the Lord, as a boy wearing a linen ephod. And his mother would make him a little robe and bring it to him from year to year when she would come up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice. Then Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife and say, “May the Lord give you children from this woman in place of the one she dedicated to the Lord.” And they went to their own home. The Lord visited Hannah; and she conceived and gave birth to three sons and two daughters. And the boy Samuel grew before the Lord.

Hannah had a problem. She wanted to be a mom in the worst way and she went to God with a plan. Her plan was that if God would give her a child she would give that child back to God. She would dedicate her child’s life to God. I imagine that the entire time that Hannah was raising Samuel she was telling him about her promise and about his purpose. Everything he learned and everything he did was centered around the idea that he would be dedicated to God.

Now Hannah did not know how God would use her son, maybe he would be a servant to the priest, or maybe he would be a teacher, or worker who kept the temple in good repair, what Hannah knew was that her son was to be committed to the service of the Lord. So she prepared him for that.

We don’t know what God has planned for our children today, the possibilities are almost endless. At one time if your dad was a carpenter you would probably be one, if your dad was a farmer you would inherit land and work the farm, if your parents were royalty you would be royalty, the roles were pretty much set. Now kids can go to school or learn a trade and be almost anything. It is almost impossible for a mother today to figure out what her child will be when they grow up, but she can still know what they need. All children still have to learn to feed themselves, clothe themselves and other life skills. We can still know that God has a plan even if we don’t know what the plan is.

Hannah made a set of clothes for her son every year even after she left him at the temple, she continued to care for him as best she could and to let him know he was not forgotten, that he was loved, that he was important. That may be the most important thing we get from our mothers today. The idea that we matter to someone, that someone loves us. There is enough depression and bitterness in the world today to prove that we all need to feel that we are valuable, that we are loved.

But the world today has changed. Once it was a parents job to give their children information. Most of what you learned early in life came from mom and dad, now we are in information overload.

I graduated high school in 1985 without ever touching a computer in school. We took typing instead of keyboarding and we carried bags full of books instead of laptops to school. 1985 was the year of the CRAY-2 supercomputer, it was built for the department of defense for its nuclear weapon program and could perform 1.9 billions operations per second which was way way over the 12,250 operations that the Apollo 11 guidance computer could perform. It was 5.5 feet across and weighed over 5,500 lbs. Now imagine that you take 5,000 of these supercomputers placed side by side and linked them all together, it would cover an area of approximately two acres and weigh 27.5 million pounds. and when you got that done you would be able to perform the same number of actions per second as the I-phone 12.

Kids today have thousands of times more information available in their pockets than NASA had when they launched the first space shuttle. The world has changed. Mom your kids can find information on just about anything almost whenever they want, so what do they need from you.

Well all that information is there but it is not organized and it is not in any kind of framework we can use. We have more information than we will ever need but the amount of information is overwhelming. What we need desperately is a way to process and sort all of the information that is available.

This is a puzzle. I used to put together a lot of puzzles. There are lots of theories on the best way to put together a puzzle. Now if you are putting together a puzzle with five pieces you just pick one piece up and put it where it goes. With a hundred pieces you can probably do it however you want. At 500 pieces you might put together the edge pieces first and then sort through the pieces and put them in place. If it is a thousand piece puzzle you may need a system, the number of pieces can be overwhelming so maybe you sort them by color and deal with them one section at a time.

If have put together one or two puzzles that were 2,500 pieces, for those I had to put them together in stages on a really big table. First I sorted by color and then by shape in order to help make sense of it all, I would look at the picture on the box and try to figure out where a particular color went and use that information to help. Today we are in an information flood. Not only has the puzzle become huge but there are pieces that don’t fit. It is like multiple puzzles have been dumped out on the table together and we are trying to sort it all out and put everything in its place. It can be overwhelming.

This box has 10 puzzles in it, they are bagged separately to keep the pieces sorted, the world today is much worse than it would be to open all of these bags and dump them all out in one big pile and mix them together. If you had that many pieces from that many puzzles your only hope would be to look at the pictures on the box and try to sort out the pieces by looking at the final picture. We live in a world where there are almost infinite opinions and almost infinite information, much of it contradicting each other and you can find an opinion or point of view for almost any side of any point you want to make somewhere on the internet. So how do you make sense of it all.

Mom, that is where you come in. I believe that one of the greatest gifts you can give your children today is a way to make sense of all the information that is out there, a way to sort it out and process it. A big picture to hold the individual pieces of information up against and see where they fit like holding a puzzle piece up against the picture on the box to figure out where it goes. You have spent years building a picture of the world, what is true and what is not true, who to trust and who not to trust, how to make decisions and how to sort information. You have spent your life building a big picture, a worldview of how the world works and where everything fits.

I know you don’t have it all figured out and it doesn’t take long for your kids to learn that either but you have a place to start. You can show your children a picture of the world that makes the world make sense, your picture, your world. Give them the chance to take all the pieces of information that are available to them and make sense of it all, organize it in a way that gives them a framework to judge the world by, to determine what is true and what is false, to figure out how to process all the vast amounts of information that they have access too.

Mom you are the first person to give your kids a view of the world, to explain how the world works and why, to make sense of it all. Kids are always asking why and always trying to understand, to make everything fit together and they start out by coming to you. You have the golden ticket, you have a chance to start you kids off on the right foot and to reinforce that throughout their most formative years, maybe even long after that.

May I make a suggestion. If your big picture, your idea of how the world works and how it all fits together comes from the one who made the world and who knows how it all fits together. If your idea of what is true comes from the author of truth itself. If your big picture comes from the artist who painted the world and everything in it, if you get your big picture from God and pass that on to your children then you will have given them the best gift that you can give them. A framework to make sense of the world, a sense of right and wrong, a belief in truth and the firmest foundation that a human being can ever have.

Mom’s, show your kids that you see the world the way God sees the world, teach them to see what you see. Show your kids that what you believe is real is what God says is real and teach them so see the world the way you see it. You will never be able to control everything your kids see or learn, but you can show them how to take any information that comes there way and look at it through the big picture, the diagram of how it all works, the word of God.