Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms reading this! This mother’s day is probably my last before I am a mother myself. I am thinking today about my baby who is probably lying in an orphanage in Russia with dozens of other children and only a few child care workers watching over them. I don’t know who my child is. I don’t know where my child is. I don’t know what his birth mother experienced that she felt she had to give him up.

I pray a blessing on that mother today, and I pray for my child and every other child who is spending today without a mother and a father. I also pray for the mothers who have lost their children because of their poor choices, and are now in prison or have had their parental rights suspended or terminated. Lord, move in all of these lives. Please bring families together and bring orphans into loving families. Please protect and bless the children around the world who are motherless. Thank you for my mother.

I’ve learned a lot from my mom. Sometimes it’s hard to think of what I’ve learned from her, but I know that I only feel that way because it is so hard to determine what I didn’t learn from her. She has taught me so many of the things that I do every day. Her support and love throughout my life has been so important and strengthening to me.

Thank you Mom for teaching me a love of music, and a love of nature, and a love for beauty wherever it is found. Thank you for teaching me to cook. Thank you for teaching me how to laugh at myself. Thank you for showing me how to stand up in front of others and speak or sing, whether I was great or not so great. Thank you for teaching me to love the people around me, my family and friends, with God’s graceful love.  Thank you for letting me try so many things that I didn’t know how to do, and a lot of the time didn’t even finish. Thank you for teaching me to honor and value others and myself. Thank you for reading to me. Thank you for singing me to sleep millions of times.

I’m so blessed to have grown up in a loving family, with such a wonderful mom. I hope that you will teach me how to be a mom like you are, to be able to give so selflessly into my children and my marriage, bringing life to all that I touch. Like you do.

Happy Mother’s Day.