How to give a gift, especially to Mum.

How to give a gift, especially to Mum.

Gifts can be tricky things. We all know stories of people giving gifts to spouses that really were something they themselves wanted.  One husband finally stopped giving his wife power tools for her birthday, when she gave him a frilly nightdress for his!  To truly give a gift, you need to understand what the person may truly want or need, you need to get ‘inside the skin’ as it were.  Then such a gift goes straight to the heart.

We see this in the life of Jesus.  One of the truly amazing things, I find, is that he lived our human life for 30 years before he began his preaching.  Given that he came from God, you would have thought he would have come and just told us what to do. But no, he came experiencing all our stages of growth.  By the time he began preaching he was a very mature age.  When Jesus offers us guidance for life, we know he has been inside our skin. 

Mother’s Day is coming soon and it is very easy for us to presume that we know what our mother would want – after all we have truly been inside her skin.  We can presume too much.  A good idea over the coming week would be to ponder on our mother is like and ask “What does she really want?”  We may be surprised to realise that it is not so much presents as presence.

Loving God, your Son Jesus experienced what is was to have a human mother, to know growth as a human person.  Send us your Spirit that we may live in awe at the mystery of every person, especially our mother.  We ask this in Jesus’ name, confident that you will hear us.

Sr Kym Harris osb