It’s Mother’s Day, which apparently causes a lot of angst these days on Facebook and the blogosphere. It’s amazing what a card company can do by creating a holiday.

This will be an opportunity today (and on Father’s Day) where I will take the opportunity to talk about spiritual parenting. 

This past week we have dealt in our church with some severe ramifications of bad parenting. The ripple effect on the lives of teens and adults I can look back on over the past several months have yielded the same conclusion: the vast majority of those cases had something go wrong in parenting. That didn’t lead to a “bad kid” necessarily. It could be a good kid who had something to overcome… and that something was bad parenting.

Absentee parents. Abusive parents. Didn’t know who one or both parents were… on and on.

I say “vast majority” to be a bit fair. But to be honest, in the small survey I took of what we’ve dealt with in the past few months the number is 100 percent. 

I know adults who are highly functional and successful and overcame bad parenting. It’s hard for them to grasp how I can blame bad parenting. I’m not blaming bad parenting… completely. Yet, even in their lives that have turned out well, those adults know they had to overcome bad parenting when that really didn’t need to happen.

Through events in this last week, I have made a determination in my own life. It’s something I know God has spoken to me over the past several years, but in some small way I now need to act.

But all of us, men and women, people of God, can act. We may not be physical parents, or our kids are grown and gone, but we CAN be spiritual parents. In a generation that is being parented less and less, we can do something tangible and helpful. 

We need spiritual mothers.

I have a great mother. I am so deeply thankful for love, her discipline, her care… everything about her made such a huge difference in my life.

But I also had spiritual mothers. There is an old term I heard in the Pentecostal church (and it’s used in other churches): Mothers in Zion. They were the spiritual mothers. They prayed over people. They could take on some kid or group of kids in prayer and day after day lift them up to the Lord in prayer. From time to time they would corral that kid or group of kids and give them a “talkin’ to.”

I had mothers in Zion. Great women of faith who I knew prayed for me. In my hardest hour I knew one thing that saved me was a mother in Zion who was not giving up on me in prayer… along with my own mother.

What I have determined in my own life is to be a spiritual father in a more meaningful way. I mentor several students, but I want to be more intentional about it.

This week it will be talking to some key school officials about a dream we’ve had for the past year. It’s my hope I can work with two kids next year that I can just be there for them. In any way I can.

Every man and woman of God has the capability of getting into the life of a student and being that “spiritual parent.”

This culture needs it.

So for all women reading this… you may be a mother of children in your family… you may be a spiritual mother… you may be both… Or, you can reflect on your own mother or a spiritual mother.

But today… HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY.