I lost her when I was fifeteen. I would have given anything to get her back, but in God’s plan for my life and hers He saw fit to bring her home when I was young.

However, He did not leave me motherless. Instead, in each new season of life he provided multiple mother figures for me. My high school best friends mothers adopted me as their own, welcoming me into not just their homes, but their families. Treating me like a daughter, faithfully praying for me, sending care packages in college, and remembering my birthday.

Then I married a man with the most amazing mother, who also adopted me as her own. A mother-in-law who was a gift and answer to prayer.

Wherever we have lived, different women have poured into me and mentored me. They have been a mother to the motherless.

Now its my turn.

By giving me this “Kingdom-strategic home” that I had prayed for in those months before moving here, the Lord put me smack dab in the middle of several “motherless” children. To the left of us, we have Jamar, whose mother died in Haiti, and to my right, I have Jasmine (Phil Phil), from Ethiopia, who just lives with her dad.  Then there is the sibling set down the street who live with their single father, and the brothers/sisters/cousins group of kids who live with their grandmother. These kids have their fathers, but no mammas.

And they love being at our house.

And even though it is definitely more hectic and crazy now with these additions romping around, being part of meals, reading times, excursions and clean up schedules, I have to ask myself.

Is this home that Danny and I are attempting to build just for us? For strictly my biological children? For my own sanity? For my own control?

Or is it a place to welcome the motherless (or the fatherless) to experience the rhythms, the joys, the sins and failures of a home with two parents. A home ushered under the influence of the Holy Spirit as a Mamma desperately cries out to Him in the mundane, and offers Him a place, a Lordship in the midst of craziness.

These kids will not see a mamma who always has it all together, or who is always patient and kind.

But they will see a mamma that runs to the foot of the cross, in desperate need of a Savior’s mercy and sustaining power.

And if they learn to follow me there

then I have succeeded

to be a true mother to the motherless.