“It is easier to have children than it is to become a mother.”
My older sister said this once, and I’ll never forget it. Coming from a woman who has five children, including a set of twins and two kids with cystic fibrosis, her words carry a unique weight.
What about having children is hard? Is it the children themselves, who are by no means easy creatures to care for? Or is it the deep identity shift that takes place in our hearts as we bend from autonomous to tethered, independent to constantly required, orderly and available to overwhelmed and spoken for?
As someone who is in the trenches of the little years, I can confidently tell you that it is the latter.
It is hard to become a mother, as hard as it is, I’m sure, for the caterpillar to weave its tomb-like cocoon around itself and wait in suffocating tightness to emerge into the light. Suddenly, you have to love someone else unwaveringly well, and that responsibility can feel suffocating. Threatening. World-shattering. For a while, it might feel as though your days in the light are over.
Motherhood is certainly a putting to death of so many things… but this tomb is less like a casket and more like a womb. Less like a grave and more like a cocoon.
We may spend a lot of our lives running from suffering, especially in our affluent, comfort-obsessed culture. But in doing so, are we perhaps choosing to live as worms in the dirt? Is our narrow pursuit of personal pleasure keeping us from soaring in the heavens?
Suffocating sanctification is not limited to the mothers among us. It is a stretching that every Jesus-follower must and will experience. God wants each of his children to become capable of big love, transformative love, Christ-like love, and this requires cross-carrying. It requires dying. But we die in order to live. We are cocooned in order to become something new.
To embrace love—real, God-designed and God-defined love—is to let the self-centered worm in us die. It’s to look up and aim beyond our own preferences and pleasures. It’s to have our world temporarily and painfully shrink, in order that it may expand more fully and beautifully in the long term.
To love is to die, and to die is to live. Which means that burden you’re bearing, the identity shift you’re enduring, that painful thorn that feels like it’s killing you, is actually helping you finally, truly, live.
So next time you are feeling crushed by suffering or simply the responsibility of love, remember the cocoon. Remember the seed that falls to the ground, dies, and produces an unimaginable harvest.
As we walk in surrender to the Lord’s commands, as we follow his call to love others as he has loved us, we will repeatedly find ourselves in tightly knit cocoons that feel as though they are killing us when they are actually preparing us for flight.