An Early Mother’s Day Reflection on Roots and Resurrection
Though I did not always have the ears to hear, my mother’s garden has always been a sermon.
Heavy-headed peonies bow in reverence, their perfume thick in the air of this warm spring. The rhododendrons blush with Tennessee memory, smelling like barefoot afternoons rich with cicada songs in the hills of that chapter of my childhood. The white roses—one bush in particular, a previous year’s Mother’s Day or birthday gift (I can never remember) from my sister—spills like lace over an archway trellis into our mother’s vegetable garden. It blooms fuller each year, growing as we have.
We’ve moved often. Houses with plain, patchy yards and weary soil. But wherever we landed, my mother coaxed beauty from barrenness. She never waited for perfect conditions—just knelt in the dirt and started planting. Often enlisting my siblings and I against my will (I can only speak for myself) to weed and mulch endless garden beds. I see now it wasn’t just flowers she was cultivating, but resurrection. Restoration. A kind of relentless, primal hope.
“The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.”
— Isaiah 58:11
To those of you who’ve joined me here at Flourish and Fray, thank you. I’m still just beginning, and your encouragement is a garden in itself. My grandmother wrote me after one of my first posts: “This has captured my heart,” she said.
And I thought: her heart resides within mine. Hers was the heart that shaped my mother’s, and my mother’s heart shaped mine. As do all the hearts of the women who came before me—makers and menders, gardeners and cultivators, artists and home-flippers and quiet kitchen poets. They mirrored their Maker without always knowing it.
Did you know a woman carries all the eggs she will ever have while she herself is still in her mother’s womb? That means part of me was formed inside my grandmother’s body. When Scripture says, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb… I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14), it speaks not only to divine design but to lineage, legacy, the quiet miracle of being known before time, before breath.
No human parent is perfect. No earthly mother or father omniscient. But their limitations only magnify the glory of the One who is. Where they fall short, God meets us. Not with shame, but with invitation—into healing, into wholeness, into Eden again.
Because this is a story about more than flowers. It’s about stewardship—of the soil and of the soul. About tending to one another. About what it means to walk with the Gardener Himself, who doesn’t discard us when we wither, but coaxes new life from tired ground.
This Mother’s Day, I hope to honor the women who came before me. I understand the broken and blooming places they’ve carried with burden and grace.
“You are a garden fountain,
a well of living water,
flowing down from Lebanon.”
— Song of Songs 4:15
And so I turn my gaze again to Christ.
To what He said, how He said it, to whom He spoke—and who He defended. In a time and culture where women were often viewed as property, where their testimony held no legal weight, where religious leaders avoided even speaking to them in public, Jesus saw them. He spoke with dignity to the woman at the well, touched and healed the unclean woman in the crowd, defended the one about to be stoned, and welcomed Mary to sit at His feet as a disciple. These were not small gestures. They were radical, subversive acts of love in a world that largely dismissed women’s worth.
He didn’t just include women—He lifted them. Protected them. Gave them voice and value in a society that silenced them.
And long before any culture decided what a woman was worth, God declared it in Eden.
Eve was not an afterthought. She was the final act of creation—not made from dust, but from the living side of man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. She was the ezer kenegdo—the “helper suitable,” a term not of subordination, but of strength. In Hebrew, ezer is used most often to describe God Himself as Israel’s rescuer and deliverer (Psalm 33:20; Deuteronomy 33:26).
God looked at the world He had made—even with light and oceans, fruit and beasts, sun, moon and stars—and still said something was not good: that man should be alone (Genesis 2:18). Woman was the answer to that ache.
Eve was created with intention, dignity, and purpose—to walk with God and man, to bear life, to steward creation, to be fully seen and fully known.
Her worth was not determined by her usefulness, her beauty, or her productivity. Her worth was inherent—breathed in by the Creator Himself.
And though the fall fractured everything, it did not erase that original design. Redemption began even as the thorns for his crown grew. And Christ—called the second Adam—came not just to restore individuals, but to restore the garden itself. To walk with us again in the cool of the day. To bring us back to worth, to wholeness, to Him.
So I look to Him again, and again. Because the invisible work and worth of women is still very real. It is always seen by Him.
I don’t tend gardens the way my mother does—and my husband has free, wild reign of our yard, where he listens for the Lord in the soil and birdsong. But I do what I can with the small things in my care: storing the herbs for the teas I steep, the postcards I send (albeit sometimes overdue), the time spent with others, the words offered. Admittedly it may not look like much, but it is something: a way to keep cultivating what’s been planted in me. A way to carry on the work of the garden, in my own little corner of this good green garden planet.
I want to also honor the women who aren’t mothers in the traditional sense—the aunts, the sisters, the cousins, the teachers, the friends who show up with lasagna and brownies, the late night weary phone calls, the shared prayers, praises, and presence. The ones who build gleaming little webs of community and intentionality with their time and care, often without recognition. Their work may seem invisible, but it is not unnoticed. It has held me together more times than I can count.
I’ve never been especially articulate or vulnerable out loud—my thoughts come faster than my mouth can follow. They leap and scatter, too quick to catch in real time, like jumping flying fish. But when I write, I can slow them down. I can catch them long enough to at least form some coherent semblance of what rushes through me, trace it with care, and name the deep things I feel but often fumble to say. Maybe that’s part of why I write at all: to honor the beauty I’ve been given, and to pass a little of it on.
Anyways,
Happy Mother’s Day to all the women whose lives have mothered mine.
Sincerely,
- Flourish
Really wonderful!
Beautiful