All of us witnessed the mother in Baltimore, who smacked her son several times to rescue him from the crowd of rioters. The son had decided against his mother’s instructions to leave school and participate in the Baltimore rioting in response to the murder of Freddie Gray. The media and others paraded this mother as a hero and Mother of the Year as she went off on her son to make sure that he would not become a victim of the rioting.
This mother took charge of her son and the situation, and she did not care about who watched. According to an interview, she stated that she acted on instinct. As I tell my children all the time, my number one job is to protect them. This is what makes all moms heroes because we are willing to risk our lives and our personal needs to protect and care for our children. We do not do it for fame, we do it because it is instinctive, and it is something on the inside of us that makes us love our children in that way.
What makes a mom super is the grace of God on the inside of her. One of our favorite super moms in the Bible is the woman portrayed in Proverbs 31. She gets up early, cares for her children, and she is self-employed. She is also a wife. What makes her ‘super,’ according to the scripture, is that she is blessed.
Being a mom does require super powers. It requires us to read the minds of our children and our spouses. How many times have moms had to figure out what was bothering our children emotionally and physically, and came up with the correct remedy? How many times have we had to run faster than a speeding bullet to pick our children up from school after a late day at the office? How many times have we had to exercise super strength to lift a child, groceries, and a purse all at the same time? The greatest super power we have is to watch our children suffer, and encourage them as they go through pain, failures, and other sorts of hurts. It takes a super mom to watch her child suffer with cancer, to see her child throw away his or her future on foolishness, and to stand back and let the child fight his or her own battles. That takes super strength.
In times like these, we have to call upon our super powers. When our children experience kryptonite, we have to come and make them strong again, and moms have the power to do this. Often we think our super powers have weakened, but when we see our children bouncing back from situations, growing in grace, and repeating our words back to us, we know that we still have the power. To the super moms, it also requires heroic efforts not to give up on our children, even if it means disciplining them on national television. We need a hero to be a hero, and the hero God sent us is Jesus. When we feel like we are not so ‘super,’ the blood of Jesus gives us strength from day to day and it never loses its power.
