A Prayer For Mothers
O God, we offer Thee praise and benediction for the sweet ministries of motherhood in human life. We bless Thee for our own dear mothers who built up our lives by theirs; who bore us in travail and loved us the more for the pain we gave; who nourished us at their breast and hushed us to sleep in the warm security of their arms. We thank Thee for their tireless love, for their voiceless prayers, for the agony with which they followed us through our sins and won us back, for the Christly power of sacrifice and redemption in mother-love. We pray to forgive us if in thoughtless selfishness we have taken their love as our due without giving the tenderness which they craved as their sole reward. And if the great treasure of a mother’s life is still spared to us, may we do for her feebleness what she did for ours.
We remember before Thee all the good women who are now bearing the pain and weariness of maternity. Grant them strength of body and mind for their new tasks. Widen their vision that they may see themselves, not as the mothers of one child alone, but as the patriot women of the nation, who alone can build up the better future with fresh and purer life. Put upon the girls of our people the awe of their future calling, that they may preserve their bodies and minds in purity and strength for the holy task to which the future may summon them.
Bestow Thy special grace, we beseech Thee, on all women who have the yearnings of motherhood, but whose lives are barren of its joys. If any form of human sins has robbed them of the prize of life, grant them righteous anger and valiant hearts to fight that sin on behalf of those who come after them. Help them to overcome the bitterness of disappointment and to find an outlet for their thwarted mother-love in the wider ministrations to all the lonely and unmothered hearts in Thy great family on earth.
As the protecting love of motherhood wrought blindly in the earliest upward climb of life, may it now, with open eyes and strong with Christly passion, set its tireless strength to lift humanity from the reign of brutal force and to found the larger family of men on the blessed might of love.
—Walter Rauschenbusch.
Alternate Reading: John 6:1-15.