Endurance and an Encouraging Mother

My teenage daughter Emma has had probably the busiest two weeks of her life the last couple of weeks. Last week she was at horse camp for Girl Scouts--spending the whole week outside during the hottest weather in the last thirty years in horse stables. This week she has band camp (she is in color guard) from 8am to 5pm and then golf practice for the school golf team from 6:30 pm until 9:00 pm. This may just be typical activity for a lot of teenagers and, having grown up in a small town around a lot of farm kids I realize this type of activity would be like a vacation to some. But we are talking about a typical suburban fifteen year old girl who normally spends most of her summer days sleeping until noon. It's been a busy and tiring couple of weeks for her.

This morning I was awakened at 8 am by my wife Abby trying to get Emma out the door. Poor Emma was still half asleep and sore from flinging her flag around, marching, and whacking at golf balls all evening long. I think it would have been easier moving a two ton boulder than getting Emma to move. She wanted to stay home and sleep. She wanted to quit band. There was no moving her. But Abby was there, patiently talking to her. Telling her that she needed to get up. Telling Emma that she needed to fulfill her obligation. She just needed to put her other shoe on and put one foot in front of another and walk out the door. After all, it was going to be a beautiful day out and she could do it. If I would have taken the blanket off of my head and looked I probably would have seen a halo around Abby because she was behaving saintly.

I laid there thinking what a wonderful spiritual model was going on in front of me. We work hard on our spiritual life and for whatever reason we get in a rut or we just become stubborn and don't want to go on. It is too difficult to be Christian and to live our life the way Jesus wants us to. It's much easier to lay there and be spiritual slothful. It's much easier to be sinful. It's much easier, it seems, to turn our backs on God than it is to follow Him.

And who is standing there with us encouraging us to get up when we become like that?? Our Mother. The Blessed Virgin Mary is always there with us to tell us to get our butts up and to go follow her son. Mary is there to hold our hand and to tell us we can do it because we are not doing it alone. She knows that it isn't always easy to follow Jesus. After all, she followed Him all the way to the foot of the cross. But, because she saw her son hanging there she knows how much He loves us and why we need to keep on the path to Him as opposed to the one we want to take.

There is a reason Jesus gave us His mother. (John 19: 26-27) Jesus knew there would be hard and difficult times when we would need a mother's love in order to make it. Just like we need our own mothers to push us, to motivate us and to encourage us, Jesus gave us His mother in order to point us to Him.