A prayer for Mother’s Day

Our Gracious God

Father, Son, Holy Spirit; our Rock, Fortress, and Salvation; our Lord and King; we bless You as You bless us.  You are our everything, Father, our covenant Parent who loves us so unconditionally.  We give You praise that You conceived life and our very lives!

Lord, we want to honour our mothers on this Mother’s Day.  We raise our mothers before You and thank You for the love, passion, energy and enthusiasm they have for their children.  We bless our mums in the name of Jesus, for their most sacred of ministries – a godly work.

We also want to pray for those who are sad on Mother’s Day; for those who have lost their mothers and miss them terribly even though there may be so many great memories of past – grief that never truly goes away.

We pray for those mothers who have experienced the grief of loss; who have lost a child; a pain that ever lingers in sorrow like sea billows that continue to roll, unfurling eternally in the farthest reaches of heaven.  We thank You, Lord, that You hold these children until the day You have appointed when these mothers might finally be reconciled with their little ones, however old they were when they went to be with You.

We pray also for the ladies, Lord Jesus, who cannot have babies, and we pray into their sadness of that ambiguous loss that may never have been – an incomprehensible grief.  For those mothers-to-be (and fathers-to-be) who have such hopes, we pray You will bless them with the capacity to conceive, to carry the baby to full term, and for healthy birth.  Yet for those who cannot conceive, we pray Your comfort and Your compensation that transcends human comprehension.  We thank You, Lord, for the mother-heart in all women called to be mothers.

We pray You would minister to people in their sorrow, where they are right now, and be the God of peace and comfort to and for each of them on this day and always.  Be with them and inside them by Your Spirit, we ask.

We want to acknowledge those also, Lord, whose mothers let them down – where thought of Mother’s Day brings memories of pain and perhaps memories of abuse and/or neglect – mothers who weren’t there for them as their mothers should have been.  We also pray into the guilt mothers might carry; guilt that is able to be reconciled at the cross.  We pray that Your Spirit would draw these aside and provide the way to forgiveness, healing, restoration, and wholeness.  And we thank You that without our mothers we would not be.

We pray for those mothers, and for those children, who are far from each other right now, particularly in these COVID days; that You would stir within them love that transcends distance and overcomes the limitations of space and time.  Thank You, Lord, for video conferencing and call technology, and for virtual hugs.

Finally, we pray for our new mothers and those expecting; that You would bless them with every confidence of love and joy, knowing the peace that they have been called by You, to be a mother – the most sacred of human roles.

We lift our mothers before You, Father, that through Your Holy Spirit You would encourage them as they give their sacrifices of love – in their 24/7 devotion to care for and be there for their children – that You would continue to equip them for the tasks of today and the mothering ahead of them, and to empower them to be all they can be for their children and families, and give to them the energy, strength, and confidence they need.

We thank You, Lord, that You impress on a woman’s heart that once she’s a mother, she’s always a mother.

We pray all these things as a requiem of praise for our Mothers, in and through the name of Jesus... AMEN.

Photo by Gerrit Klein on Unsplash