Unconditionally

I finally gave my mom her Mother’s Day present on Friday. Yes let’s do the math: May 13-July 13. That’s a full two months, and I consider myself generally good about deadlines.  So why?  My excuse was that graduation was also May 13, and I’ve...gotten busy this summer?  Yes, that’s it. I was busy with such essential and shopping-impairing activities such as reading books...erm working out...I mean, walking the dog.

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All right so I don’t really have an excuse.  I wanted to find the perfect gift, but I promise you that doesn’t take two months.  I know it bothered my mom, though she’d never admit it herself before I gave her the present.  Most of all, though, it bothered me.

It’s not really that I felt I “owed” her.  I mean, in a sense, I do completely. One of my friends is planning on paying her parents back, dollar for dollar, their expenditure for college.  I thought that’d be such a great idea!  I could pay them back for everything!  But then I thought about how they would react to me writing them a check for the cost of raising me plus college expenses—all their time, money, grief, and love condensed to a check that, assuming they spent the average cost of raising a child on me, would be about $450,000.  Sure, that’s quite a bit of money, but I’ll be a disgrace to my economics major and say that I don’t think it’s really possible to monetize the love that went into the changing dirty diapers, the 2 am’s comforting me from nightmares, staying up worrying when I stayed out too late, or stressing with me over college admissions.  Even if I take care of them when they get old, I don’t think it’s possible to make up for how much they subordinated their lives to mine for the past almost-22 years.

I also don’t think they’d want me to.  Their care was freely given in love, not conditional on some sort of repayment. 

So, no, it’s not that I merely reneged on a debt. It’s more than that.  I can’t ever “pay back” my mother for her unconditional love.  But I can recognize what she’s done and honor her for it—even if it’s just by making her feel extra special one day out of the year.  Funny how there’s a Commandment that says to do just that.  And it’s really just sad how little that Commandment gets talked about.

There’s a reason the commandment “honor your father and monther” is listed just below the commandments concerning how we are to deal with God (“you shall have no other Gods before me,” “you shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain”, and “keep holy the Sabbath”) —even above the commandment “you shall not kill.”   See, the first three commandments are really hard to do right.  But our relationship to our parents can teach us about our relationship to God.  Just like I can’t pay my parents back for raising me, we can’t put a monetary value on what God has given us (God created all the gold in the world, in the first place). But our relationship with God isn’t transactional. It’s not like I have some spiritual bank account where Jesus grants me certain favors and I, to settle the account, say a certain number of prayers or drive to church and space out while some priest lectures the congregation for a while.  

Like we set aside a special day for mothers once a year, we set aside a special day for Him once a week in which we more remind ourselves what it means to for Him to be God, and to thank Him for His unconditional love and sacrifice for us.  But our everyday praise is also pleasing to the Lord—just like some of the texts I’ve sent to my mom that she still has saved on her phone.

So no wonder it bothered me that I wasn’t on top of Mother’s Day.  Not only does it mean I’m disrespecting my mother, but that I’m not learning what I should about my relationship with God. 

Certainly, not all parents are perfect; they are fallen humans, too, and our relationship with them can only brokenly reflect our relationship with God.  But, in the vast majority of cases, there is certainly something there through which we should be learning how to properly honor.  The Commandment does not state tell us to “honor your parents to the extent that an outside judge and jury would,” just like we are not supposed to honor God based on how much we like the gifts and duties He has given us.  It tells us to honor our parents. 

If we don’t bother to do it with our parents, how on Earth do we expect to bother to do it with our God?