The Mother's Day card

For years I have exercised my petit rebellion against the greeting card industry by refusing to send Mother’s Day cards to grandmothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, and favorite hairdressers. But there is nothing like receiving a Mother’s Day card from a person who is not your child to make you pause at least a moment to question whether you are principled or just a curmudgeon.

My Mother’s Day card from my husband (not the father of my children, who died in 1999) was waiting on the bedroom dresser at the end of the eponymous day of madres. What should have been a happy day was emotionally hard, entirely from internal “demons” (demons truly torment us, so the expression is not as figurative as people who fling it casually fecklessly imagine) and not from any lack of class or care on the part of my generous offspring. I was staggering and reeling from the haunting consequences of my failings, and by the most daunting realization that a human can ever have—that there is no taking it back. Life is not a dress rehearsal but always the real play.

The card was pink and religious, and the front said, “Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13, NLT).

Inside was a message that read thus on the cover flap of a new homemade card insert glued to the commercial one:

“As a mother forgiven of every mistake, this is the pledge, the vow that I make.”

Below that was the word “You” with an arrow leading from it to the word “I,” indicating that the vow was meant to be mine.

Turn the cover page of this inside “book” and it continued:

“But one thing I do, / Forgetting those things / Which are behind / And reaching forward / To those things / Which are ahead, / I press toward / The goal / For the prize / Of the upward call / Of God / In Christ Jesus. / I love you, good mother of today. Happy Mother’s Day. David.”

A certain good king of old was devastated when his awful sin was brought to his attention, and he lay on his face and prayed and fasted seven days. But after he had asked forgiveness:

“Then David arose from the earth and washed and anointed himself and changed his clothes. And he went into the house of the LORD and worshiped” (2 Samuel 12:20, ESV).

His servants were perplexed by his new invigoration and back-to-work schedule, but it is not so hard to understand: Once we are forgiven we must take sides with God against our own condemning self-evaluation and believe that we are restored and white as snow. For “there is now no condemnation.” We must cast our sin where God cast it, into the sea of forgetfulness.

Today is the beginning of the rest of your life.