Single Mother

Hope

- Try to imagine Hagar pushing off into the wilderness, supplies for a day or so at her side, and her son walking beside her. She’s been ousted by the boy’s father - someone she couldn’t even call her husband. Now she’s alone and terrified, wondering what’s she’s going to do when the bread and water give out. Then look at Hagar putting her son under the bush and walking a stone’s throw away to sit and wait hopelessly for her son’s death.

Single mothers often deal with feelings of guilt, real or imagined, combined with tremendous feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness. Single mothers are also dealing with the sudden stark reality that this child is going to take the rest of her life to raise, a life some of them had barely begun to live themselves. It doesn’t matter how they got to be single mothers: Teen pregnancy, Divorce, being widowed, or abandoned. They’re often struggling alone, isolated and scared of the future; they need constant encouragement.

Think about the enormous power that hope has to give life where none existed before. Imagine also the overwhelming power of hopelessness to destroy a heart and crush a human being beyond repair.

The first thing we can bring to the single mothers in our community is Hope. The Second is Assistance.

Assistance

Need comes in a hundred different flavors. Sometimes it’s financial, sometimes it’s emotional, or moral, or whatever else we daily rely upon.

Genesis 21:14-21. In a time of great rejoicing, when everyone else would have been having a good time; Sarah looked over in the midst of the celebration and saw that Ishmael was making fun of her new son Isaac. Paul tells us in Galatians that he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born of the spirit.

Filled with rage that her son was being tormented, she immediately told Abraham to send the woman and her son away. But Abraham was a righteous man, and he was unwilling to comply until God assured him that he would care for Hagar and her son. Filled with that assurance, Abraham acquiesced and gave Hagar a skin full of water and a loaf or so of bread and sent her off into the desert. He did the best he could, but after this moment, Hagar would be all alone.

Who knows how long they journeyed in the desert, finally the water was gone, and thirst began to set in. Ishmael now greatly humbled by his thirst walked beside his mother until he could go no further. Finally Hagar sat her son down under a scrub of a bush and walked a short distance away.

Her heart was breaking because she knew there was nothing left to do but die. She couldn’t walk far away because she didn’t want her son to die alone, but she dare not stay to close lest she be forced to watch her son die. Now in despair she began to sob.

And then God showed up.

My friends this story for all it’s familiarity is both touching and powerful. For all it’s harshness, it is full of promise and hope for those who would despair at their last moment. Because whether it’s our lives or someone else's, life itself is hopeless and painfully unbearable until God shows up.

I can't even remember exactly when I held the interview - but at least eight years ago I called up Penny Weaver the local director of the New Life Pregnancy Center (NLPC) in Decatur and started asking her what the single mother needs. Penny was very gracious to spend time with me and she gave me a list of the needs of a single mother.
I hastily took notes and stashed the paper in my Bible. Today, at least eight years later I still have that paper and I look at it often as I think about ways to help the single mothers in our community. Using that old paper I'll reconstruct as best I can the interview in hopes

When I was in Bible School (technically Moody Bible Institute is not a seminary at the undergrad level) I worked forty hours a week and went to school at least 12 hours per semester. Add on a two hour commute to and from Chicago on most days and my schedule kept me going from about 5 AM to 1 AM Every day. For the five years I was there my wife was essentially a single mother