Mother’s Day Blog

Mother’s Day is supposed to be predictable: flowers, cards, a nice brunch. But one Mother’s Day in a small church in British Columbia taught me one of my most important lessons about how we think and talk about God.

I was helping lead the service and began with what I thought was a safe joke: “Does anyone here have a mother?” I expected polite laughter, not an answer. Instead, a woman from the neighbourhood—poorly dressed, often seen wandering and mumbling to herself—stood up. In a clear, strong voice she declared, “I had a mother once!” For over five minutes she shared about her mother’s kindness and the relationship they had. There I was, standing on stage with a microphone in my hand, completely unable to stop her. That day I learned: never ask a rhetorical question unless you’re ready for a real response.

That moment has stayed with me, because Mother’s Day raises deeper questions many of us carry quietly. What do we do with our longing for mother-like tenderness, protection, and understanding—especially if our own experience of “mother” is complicated, painful, or absent? And what if, when we picture God, we only ever see a distant, stern male figure in the sky?

In many Western churches, God is almost always spoken of as “He,” “Him,” and “Father.” There are reasons for that in Christian tradition, but it can give the impression that God is literally male, as if God were just a bigger, more powerful man. Yet the Christian scriptures also say “God is spirit,” not limited by a physical body or human gender. They describe God creating humans “in the image of God… male and female,” suggesting that both masculine and feminine qualities have their source in God.

In other words, everything we admire in mothers—their tenderness, protectiveness, persistence, and emotional insight—doesn’t come out of nowhere. It reflects something of the God Christians talk about. If God is the source of all that is genuinely good in human love, then the best of motherhood flows from that same source.

Christians in other parts of the world often see this more clearly than we do. Ghanaian theologian George Kwame Kumi has written about how many Akan Christians naturally address God in prayer as “Good Father-Mother God,” without seeing that as strange or controversial in their culture. They aren’t worshiping a “goddess.” They are simply trying to express that God’s care holds together the strength we often associate with fathers and the tenderness we often associate with mothers.

The Bible itself uses motherly images when it talks about God’s care. God is described as carrying people from the womb, as a mother who cannot forget her child, as a protective mother bear, as an eagle guarding her young, and as a mother comforting her child. Jesus compares God’s search for people to a woman sweeping her house to find a lost coin and describes his own longing for his people like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings. These are not sentimental Hallmark pictures; they are chosen to communicate fierce loyalty, presence in danger, and sacrificial love.

You can see echoes of this in real life. Think of Frederick Douglass’ mother, who walked twelve miles at night after a day of back-breaking slave labour just to lie down beside her son for a few hours, knowing she had to walk back before dawn. Or the mother in an earthquake zone whose body shielded her baby from the falling rubble, saving the child’s life at the cost of her own.

Stories like these move us because they hint at a deeper kind of love—a love that says, “I will be there; I will speak to your pain; I will stand between you and what destroys you.”

For people who don’t attend church, God may feel like the opposite of that: distant, abstract, maybe even harsh. Some have walked away because the only God they were ever shown was male, strict, and disappointed in them. Others long for the kind of comfort they once found in a mother—or wish they had—but have never considered that Christian faith might have anything to say to that ache.

If that is you, here is the invitation: set aside, for a moment, the caricatures of God you may have picked up from culture wars or bad religion. Imagine instead a presence that does not leave when life falls apart, that “helps your heart around the corner” when grief feels impossible, that stands between you and what would ultimately crush you. That is how many Christians understand the God who “comforts as a mother comforts her child.”

You don’t have to start using new religious language or show up in a church building to begin exploring that possibility. You can simply be honest, in your own words: “If you are there, and if you really are like that—like the best of a mother’s love—would you meet me where I am?” For some, that simple, quiet question has been the first surprising step toward the kind of comfort they didn’t think faith could offer.