Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Archives of Humanity

Sharman Robertson strolls down an aisle of metal shelves and well-aligned file boxes, stopping midway to pull one down and into her arms. It is box B3F.1 and inside it are the remnants of Mother’s Day 1931—in greeting cards. Robertson is corporate archivist at Hallmark Cards, keeper of a vast history in pictures and poems. “You could launch 500 dissertations from the material here,” notes her interviewer, “from gender studies or marketing to design or art history to psychology or anthropology.”(1)

Card companies speak openly about the changing dynamics of culture and its affects on card-writing. There are categories and identified-groups today that would never have crossed card-makers’ minds decades earlier. Whether it is a changing culture or an expanding market that has had the most influence is hard to say—likely, it is both. Mothers have been adopting for years; they just haven’t always had an entire line of cards that focused on it. Yet despite the growing number of targeted relationships, there are still a great number of people who find card-shopping an exercise in missing the mark. More than once before a wall of cards, I’ve suspected I didn’t fit into a Hallmark category. But I wonder if more accurately it’s that the categories don’t really fit any of us. It’s not that the things said on my mother’s day cards aren’t real; it’s just that my mom is so much more real than anything a card could ever articulate for me.

Scripture’s unadorned images of motherhood do not fit neatly into categories either. Naomi was embittered by the death of her husband and her two young sons. Rebekah conspired with her son to trick her ailing husband. Sarah, Hannah, Michal, and Elizabeth—among others—suffered the despair and scorn of barren wombs. The parents of the prodigal son faced the blatant disregard of their youngest child and the exuberant relief of his return. Mary sang with hope when she learned she would have a son. Later, she would watch him die an agonizing death. Like those we celebrate on Mother’s Day, the women we find in Scripture tell their stories from a vast array of settings and situations. They come to us scheming or flourishing or despairing, silenced or prayerful or with a strength we can hardly fathom, but the confrontation is always real.

The humanity found in the Bible is not often something we stop to consider. Maybe it is more comfortable to try to line up with images of life on greeting cards than with these stories of struggle and desperation, mystery and bravery. And yet, it is in this very story weighted with every complexity of our humanness that God became human himself. To real and wanting people, a God in real flesh came near.

Hannah’s hopeful voice comes as she finds the courage to express her grief and position, and it is here that she finds God. The story imparts: “In bitterness of soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the LORD. And she made a vow, saying, ‘O LORD Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life.’”(2) In tearful honesty, she sought God. And Hannah’s pain in childlessness became her child’s link to God.

The images of motherhood in Scripture give us insights into our ourselves, into our mothers, into the pain of lost hope, the ache of longed-for identities, the startling gift of prayer, and the beauty of faith. Many of these women describe what it’s like to feel abandoned by God, to cry out as with nothing—and everything—to lose. Their lives encourage us to seek God where God can be found, even along roads that aren’t what we expected. Their real and difficult stories are given a place in Christ’s story, and this speaks volumes into our own.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Ted Anthony, “Mother’s Day Cards Change With Time,” Associated Press, May. 7, 1999.

(2) 1 Samuel 1:10-11.