“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you…” (Isaiah 66:13, NIV).

This week, my daughter-in-law was walking her children (Bowen, 5, and Gracie, 3) from Bowen’s tennis lesson to the car. She was talking with Bowen and realized Gracie was not present. She turned around to find Gracie standing there fighting to breathe. Running back to Gracie, she saw she was struggling for air and could not talk. Maggie began to pat her back hard, hoping the airway would open. Nothing happened. Desperately she fell to the ground, cried out to God and began pounding Gracie’s back until the candy was dislodged from her daughter’s windpipe.

The desperate love of God.

God is so much like a loving mother who is desperately caring for us.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you were not willing,” cried Jesus with the cross only a few days away (Matthew 23:37, NIV).

I love the scene in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ where Mary is watching Jesus headed for Golgotha. He falls under the weight of the cross He carries, and her mind flashes back to His childhood when she had frantically run to pick Him up after an earlier fall.

I think God looks at us that way. We fall over and over. His desperate love runs, picks us up and holds us in His arms, just like Mary and the young Jesus. Mothers know that feeling more than anyone else.

I am convinced this desperate love, longing for our present and eternal safety, is deeply woven in the heart of God. In a beautiful passage from Isaiah, where the exiled from Israel are crying out, God answers, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15, ESV).

The desperate love of God.

The difference in our desperation and God’s desperate love for us is that ours has an uncertain ending. God’s great and desperate love for us is far more intense than even that of a mother for her child, but it is desperation anchored in hope, and hope anchored in certainty. As God runs to us to lift us from our falls, or open our airways choked with despair, He knows the end. As He holds us in His arms, He is mother, and He is father, and we are safe.

Dear Father,
Thank you for the motherhood in your heart that desperately longs to keep us safe.
Amen