Happy Mother's Day, all you Moms and Grandmoms.  We are grateful you bore and nurtured your children, and we admire you for your examples of love and courage.  Mothers today are under pressure from all fronts, it seems.  There is still a large group out there who would have us believe motherhood should take second place to career and personal ambition.  But aside from Betty Friedan and other intellectual dinosaurs, the pressures of motherhood today usually come from over-commitment.

          Whether working or not, mothers have always been taxi drivers, but it seems their driving routes are growing longer every day.  We used to shake our heads wondering how a mother of five or six could handle all the details of raising them, but sometimes just two children in elementary school can make a mother feel like she's a prisoner.  Whether it's music lessons, or karate or soccer or school functions or dance lessons or birthday parties or cooking, cleaning, laundry and spending time with her husband now and then, a mother's time is always in demand.

          And if just one thing goes wrong in the schedule, like someone getting sick, the whole day or week is thrown into disarray.  It doesn't take much to mess up a complex life when everything must fit in its proper place.  Even little pressures can blow an organized life into pieces.

          Some of you may have already noticed part the inside page of your bulletin has a few extra creases on it.  Take a look at yours right now - it's the inside full page with liturgy on it.  The folding machine we recently got as a gift, and I'm understanding more now why it was a gift, has been adding a few random creases on its own.  Last Sunday I had to re-print about 50 copies because they were totally ruined by Mr. A. B. Dick.  Last Friday I adjusted the infernal machine again and again and again, trying to keep it from ruining the whole bulletin, and found myself remembering words I'd removed from my vocabulary years ago.  I finally discovered that turning the balance pressure roller about 1/16 of a turn solved the problem.  The wrong pressure from that small roller was causing it to pull the paper crookedly into the big rollers, causing some nasty and frustrating creases.  Your front page of the bulletin looks good because it was folded with the right adjustments.  Only the middle page is a bit of a mess.

          It doesn't take much to turn a complex human life into a mess if pressure is put on the wrong places.  This is especially true in our spiritual life.  If we don't have God with us each day, creases and cracks will appear where they shouldn't be.  If we don't have God in the center of all we do, things are never going to be right.

          The Apostle John writes some deep thoughts in this letter about God's love and life.  He wrote, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God..." (1 Jn. 4:7)  Again and again John replays his major theme that to be a Christian, we must love one another.  Loving and caring for others, even people we don't know or don't like, is central to being a child of God.

          You and I can all love people who love us back - that's easy.  But the mark of a Christian is to love even the one who is unlovable, unkind or imperfect.  To turn the other cheek is what a Christian must do, because that's what God does for us.  John also writes:  "This is love:  not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (1 Jn. 4:10-11)  The mark of a Christian is how we treat all people, especially those in the edges of life - the aged, the frail and the unborn - or the people in the shadows of life, the imperfect of body or mind.  God calls us to love all people.

          Sometimes life can be so full of pressures that it's comical.  Take, for example, the Spanish composer Georges Bizet.  Bizet is well known among the opera world.  His grandest work, "Carmen", has melodic themes millions of people will recognize, but not realize they came from a Spanish opera.  "Carmen" is a masterfully organized work with high drama and grand melody.  But Bizet's life was not so grand.  He seemed to live from one disaster to the next.  For example, after working for nearly a year on a new and wonderful symphony, he lost the only copy he had just before it was to be printed, and to this day no one knows what it sounded like.

          Then again, while working on his opera "Carmen", he was told the final copy had to be done in less than a week, so he worked feverishly night and day, completing the grand finale just as the sun arose on the deadline.  Then as he was eating breakfast, word came that production on the opera would be delayed a year due to lack of funds.  Bizet was passionately in love with a woman of inferior social status who lived in a run-down part of the city.  Going to her home early one morning, he tapped on her bedroom window to get her attention, at the exact moment the girl's mother from the window directly above him poured out the contents of the chamber pot!

          Maybe that's never happened to us, but all of us, especially mothers, know the feeling.  At the most inopportune of times, life dumps its contents right on our head.  No matter how good or wise we try to be, life's surprises hit us full in the face.  No matter how careful we may be, we botch our well-ordered life.  To cope, we need something to counter-act life's grand surprises.  Life is made up of more than a series of troubles.  We must have something to keep us from collapsing under the pressures of life.

          John says it's having Christ in our hearts.  He writes, "We know that we live in him and He in us, because He has given us of his Spirit.  And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world."  The only way to deal with life's pressures is to have God inside us, in our hearts by faith, within us by His holy Word.  When we know Christ by faith, God lives within us, and we can withstand this pressure cooker called life.  The Good News is that He is there even now!  In Baptism you were united with Christ.  When you believe in Christ, He lives in you.  When you receive His body and blood, Christ enters you to give you hope and a future.

          Human life is precarious.  It is pressure-sensitive.  Did you know that humans can live under water only to a relatively shallow depth?  Even with the aid of sophisticated air systems and high-tension steel, people can descend safely to only about 1,200 feet under the surface.  Beyond that, steel buckles and air systems can't keep us alive due to the pressure and weight of ocean water.  The finest nuclear submarine at 3,000 feet will get squashed like a bug.  Yet at 12,000 feet under the ocean's surface, there's life!  The amazing humpback whale, a mammal like us who breathes its air like we do, has been tracked through electronic devices to dive up to 12,000 feet in search for food.  Why doesn't it get crushed?  Because the pressure on the inside is the same as on the outside.  Somehow, God in His infinite wisdom has equipped certain creatures to be able to withstand the greatest of pressures on the outside, because they are balanced by equal pressure on the inside.

          It's little wonder that so many around us collapse, so many homes break apart, because so many do not have Christ within them.  Millions of people around us are living hollow lives.  We need to share that Christ is the remedy for the empty life.

          Life isn't always fair.  Its pressures can make us do stupid things that reap tragic and almost comical consequences.  Mr. J. R. Mikovsky of New Jersey found this out.  In 1992, he decided marriage was no fun and filed for divorce from his wife of 15 years.  On January 20, 1993, he was granted a full and complete divorce, and on January 21, his ex-wife won the $12.5 million dollar New Jersey Lottery!  Later that day he told reporters, "I'm very upset;  yes, I believe that describes how I feel - very upset."

          Well, Moms, we hope you're not upset.  Life doesn't always treat you fairly, but we hope we do.  We praise God for you and admire you.  You make us loved by your presence and enriched by your example.  May God give us courage and strength for each day because He lives within our hearts by faith in Christ.  Amen

Copyright © 2001 by Pastor Bob Tasler.  All rights reserved.