Kiss It Better – Sunday, May 11, 1980
A toddler awoke in the middle of the night crying for his mother and screaming in pain with an earache. She rushed to him, scooped him up into her arms, and then noticed that as he sat upon her lap, he pressed his ear to her lips again and again, seriously believing she could somehow kiss it better. Kiss it better. How many hundreds of scratches and bruises and cuts are presented to mothers each day with the plea, “Kiss it better.” For to children, mothers seem to have some secret healing power, better than Band-Aids. It is the power of love.
And even when children have outgrown the idea that mother can kiss a hurt better, they still gravitate to wherever she is in the home. They bring their bruised and battered egos, shaken up from an indifferent world. They look to her to fortify them against fear and worry and self-doubt. They know she will notice when no one else does the little victory, the hidden beauty, for she has loved them longer than any other mortal person. Loved them when they were yet a beginning. Loved them when they looked at her out of eyes too new to focus. Loved them when they stumbled over their own feet in leaning how to walk. Loved them when they faltered and failed in learning how to be.
While kisses may not heal cuts and earaches, unconditional love is healing. Mother’s love is the most powerful force in the life of an unfolding personality. And her task is no small one.
There are those who would diminish its power, equating motherhood with drudgery as if she scrubbed sinks and polished floors all day, instead of adding luster to eternal human beings.
But really, her role in a smaller way is very like the Lord’s. His “work and his glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”1 Like that, a mother’s work is the main business of life, the development of personality. As one writer noted, “ Personality is above all the quality of unity, some individual wholeness that prevents the human creature from wholly losing himself in the whirl of things. To develop this, even in common measure, in the average life, it seems to be necessary that at the point when the child is first making effort to become a person there shall be some quiet brooding, some: leisurely companionship of the beloved, a rich and generous sharing of some larger life always near when needed; . . .”2 a mother .
A mother is a healer in the truest sense both physical and emotional hurts. She helps her child achieve wholeness through the power of her love, no small task in a world full of broken hearts and shattered personalities.
1 Moses 1:39.
2 Spencer, Anna Garlin, The American Woman—Who Was She? edited by Anne Firor Scott. Prentice Hall, Inc.
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May 11, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,647