Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Voiceover: Yesterday, connecting past. Today, with an outer view. Tomorrow, to understand the future. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow is the program that covers the current contemporary social issues in the light of our history. To understand our yesterday, to live fully today and tomorrow. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow with Inseong Kim.

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Happy, happy Mother's Day. Some of our audience might listen before Mother's Day, or on Mother's Day, or after Mother's Day. We bring a cup of tea or coffee and sit down and just have a good conversation about Mother's Day. Today, I want to share more about where and how Mother's Day started. I didn't know, and probably some of the audience already knows, but I'm going to share that today. Before we do that, I want to cheer all the moms, and especially the 85 million mothers in the United States of America.

There are 85 million mothers. That's a powerhouse. We shouldn't underestimate ourselves. We are a powerhouse. All the moms out there, we want to be more encouraged and encourage each other and be prayer warriors. Eve was deceived, but when Eve wakes up, that's a powerful force. We can pray for our family and our nation and all of the world. We all know where the world is heading, but we're still here together and encourage each other. We are blessed that we can even talk about it. We can be free and be powerful and encourage each other.

I don't want to talk about sentimental clichés today about Mother's Day or the sentimental part of this Mother's Day. Everybody has a different experience on Mother's Day. Some are very happy and appreciative, gathered all together around mom to celebrate Mother's Day and show their appreciation. Some moms can be alone, and so we have to encourage each other wherever we're at.

What I want to share today is to take you through three questions that I've been sitting with for a long time. These are three questions that I think other mothers might think about. Every person who cares about mothers should be asked as well. The first question is: why do we celebrate Mother's Day in the first place? How did it start? Where did this day actually come from? What was it supposed to be?

The second question is: why did I go to seminary to be equipped as a mother who can properly train my children? I want to share my testimony of why I went to seminary to be the better mother that I want to be because I went when I was 52. It was a quite older age than most people go to seminary, so there's some story that I want to share. The third question is the one that matters most to us: why are we losing motherhood at the very moment in our time that we claim to be celebrating it? We have some weird phenomena against motherhood. We don't want to even call it the word "mother." We're going to talk about that. Let's grab a coffee and settle in and talk about it.

Regarding the first question of why we celebrate Mother's Day, I was surprised by the story of how it started. Most people assume that Mother's Day has already existed for a long time. We don't know when some ancient traditions that always set aside a Sunday in May to honor mothers started. Mother's Day, in the form that we know it, is just over 100 years old. The story of how it came to be and what happened to it is one of the most telling stories that I know and have heard.

There is a woman named Anna Jarvis (A-N-N-A J-A-R-V-I-S), just in case anybody wants to search for her. She was born in West Virginia in 1864. She never had children of her own, but her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a remarkable woman. She was an active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and a Civil War-era activist. She was a woman who organized what she called the Mother's Day Work Club to care for wounded soldiers on both sides of the conflict. She created this Mother's Day Work Club to care for wounded soldiers. That's how this began.

Jarvis had 11 children, and only four of them lived to adulthood. As we know, in the olden days, it was very difficult to survive, and a lot of children died. She buried seven babies. In the midst of all that loss and labor and ministry, she built a life around serving her community and her family. What a courageous woman. She wasn't focusing on loss and wounds and grief, but she got up and built a life around serving her community and her family and especially taking care of wounded soldiers at that time.

One Sunday in 1876, when Anna was 12 years old, she heard her mother close a Sunday School lesson with a prayer. Her mother said (and I'm paraphrasing), "I hope, I pray that someone and someday will found the memory of Mother's Day commemorating mothers for the matchless service they rendered to humanity." That prayer lodged in Anna's heart, the daughter's heart.

Years later, in 1905, Anna's mother died. Anna was grieving and decided to answer her mother's prayer. She began a letter-writing campaign, she raised money, and she organized the first official Mother's Day service on May 10, 1908, at her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia. Within six years, she had convinced President Woodrow Wilson to make it a national holiday. By 1914, Mother's Day was on the American calendar. That's how it started.

But the story twists here. Here's a part of the story nobody tells us, and this is a part that we want to know about. Anna Jarvis hated what Mother's Day became. Almost immediately, within a decade of the holiday being established, she was horrified because she watched florists take it over. She watched the card companies take it over and she watched the candy industry take it over. She watched her holiday of honoring mothers turn into a retail event.

She once walked into a Philadelphia tearoom and saw something like a Mother's Day salad on the menu. She ordered it, and when it arrived, she stood up, dumped it on the floor, and walked out. She was that angry because the purpose of Mother's Day was honoring mothers, and it had become too commercialized. She called people profiting from Mother's Day charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites. That's her quote. Those were exactly her words.

She spent her entire inheritance fighting to preserve what the holiday was supposed to be. During that time, she was actually arrested in 1925 for disturbing the peace at the Mother's Day convention. She was a little radical. In 1943, she started a petition to have the holiday officially abolished because she didn't want to see what was happening. She died in 1948 in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania, penniless. She had no money left. She had spent all of it in lawsuits trying to protect Mother's Day from what it had become.

There is a final and devastating irony: her medical bills at the end of her life were reportedly paid by the floral industry, by the very people she'd been fighting. Today, Americans spend over $30 billion on Mother's Day. I have to probably fact-check that more, but as far as I found out, the information is $30 billion. That is more than we spend on the Super Bowl. It is Hallmark's third-biggest card-selling holiday, florists' biggest, and it's completely and totally commercialized. Anna Jarvis lost.

Why do we celebrate Mother's Day? It is, I believe, important to celebrate Mother's Day together. If your mother cooks all the time, take her out to a nice place for dinner. We should not avoid that or talk about it in a negative way. We should celebrate it, but at the same time, keep in mind why we are celebrating. I think we have to focus on that first: why are we honoring mothers?

The official answer is because a grieving daughter wanted to honor her mother's memory and through her to honor other mothers everywhere because mothers weren't recognized during those times and not much appreciated. So, she wanted to do that. That's the answer we get on the history channels. But the deeper, and I think true, answer is this: Mother's Day exists because for one day a year, we recognize, or we are supposed to recognize, something sacred. It's a kind of service rendered to humanity, as Ann Jarvis put it, that deserves to be named and honored because, under normal conditions, we forget.

Forgetting is going to come back in the third question later on: we're forgetting about motherhood. I was searching for myself, too, because a little girl becomes a young woman and then becomes a mother. This all is a new journey for all of us. We have to question and we have to grow with our children. The more I live and get older, I realize a mother's job is very important and very sacred. It's very exciting, too, and it is powerful.

The more we kneel before God, the more God empowers us and the more we find out how powerful we can be. There are 80 million moms out there, and we are very important people in important positions. How we live matters for all of those around us. Every single cell of the family involves the mother. I am not trying to focus on her as a mother, that's not what I'm trying to share, but as a mom, I recognize how important our role is in the family. The more and more I realize that.

Regarding the second question: why did I go to seminary to be equipped to be a better mom? I was struggling. I didn't know how to be a good mom. I was doing my best, but it seemed like I was not doing the job properly. There were two cultural issues that came from my being from South Korea and learning about American culture. I didn't know what the boundary was, how much I should keep my heritage, and how much I should allow them to be more open to society. I was just so confused.

I was searching and I wanted to go to seminary to learn more about God and clean up my wrong theology as well that I'd gathered all my life. Before I say another word, I want to talk about my mother. My mother did not teach me theology per se. In Korea, while we were growing up, Christianity came, and we were all trying to figure it out and learning about theology. We didn't have a clear systematic theology. But what I appreciate about her is that she gave me faith and taught me faithfulness. She gave me a prayer life modeled on her own relentless, unceasing prayer.

In Korea, they get up at 4:00 in the morning and go to church and they pray. I witnessed my mom doing that all her life, praying for her church and praying for our family and children. I am who I am today because of my mother's prayers. She taught me to pray, and I learned to pray for our family. It wasn't an easy journey. When we are young, we think we can control everything. We think we have all the power to control the situations in our family. But the older we get, we realize we don't have the power to control everything. Prayer was the answer for me: to kneel before God and pray. God is the one doing the actual work for us.

Again, I am who I am today because of my mother's prayers. Everything I have and everything I am was carried into my life on the back of my mother, who refused for one day of her life to stop praying for her children. That is the inheritance she gave me, and it is the greatest inheritance a daughter or a child can receive. She passed away during COVID, and I miss her dearly, but she empowered me with prayer. She taught me not to live in grief but with a hope that she's in a better place. She also left work for me to do: to raise my children the way she raised me.

If you are a Korean mother or a daughter of a Korean mother listening, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. They go to church for dawn prayer with tears and their knees on the floor, year after year after year. There was a stone in our nation that was North Korea all the time, and we had to kneel all the time interceding for children who did not even know they were being prayed for. That ferocious and faithful intercession is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

As moms, we can do that. I am not an expert, and I'm not saying this because I pray better than anybody else. I am literally behind anybody else, and I've met so many faithful prayer warriors. There are so many amazing moms out there praying for not only their families and their children but for the nation. My mother poured out for me every single day of my life, and I'm alive spiritually because of her prayer. I cannot overstate that.

With that context, I think God has given us incredible power to pray for ourselves and our family and our nation. When I say I went to seminary, I wanted to undo some of the things that being a Korean mom and being a Korean Christian involves. There are beautiful parts of Korean Christianity, but there were some unhealthy parts of theology that weren't really clearly established. That's why I went to seminary: to have sound doctrine and clearer theology for me to understand who God is and who I am and to have a proper worldview.

Everything stems from how we think and what we believe. Sometimes, the unhealthy habits of Christian tradition without sound doctrine or systematic theology can be toxic. We have to acknowledge that. We cannot just defend ourselves. We have to acknowledge that some of what we are handed down practices Christianity without really understanding what's in it. It can just be a tradition and become legalistic.

I went to seminary in 2014 when I was 52 years old. There were many reasons I went to seminary: to heal myself, to find God and the purpose in my life, and to process what happened in my past. But one of the most important parts of my life was going to seminary because I wanted to be a healthy mom theologically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. I was not a typical seminary student. Everyone else was young, and I was sitting in the classroom with people half my age, but I wanted to learn about God.

The people there were heading into the pulpit and into the mission field, into campus ministry, and into church planting. I was a 52-year-old mother who wanted to be a good mom. Here I was, a Korean mom beginning to have gray hair, coming to a question: how do I raise our children with the truth? These are questions that sometimes you can't go to seminary to answer, but there are online programs where people can learn and take courses.

Learning from Dr. Wayne Grudem about systematic theology helped me so much to clear up the foggy theology in my life. It became a foundation for me to change. Learning about who God really is and who we are as humans, and fundamentally that we are created in the image of God, was the most important theology that I learned. Dr. Grudem's teaching ironed out my theology, and it was a very powerful part of my life. My life changed, and it will continue to change as I learn more about God. So, thank you for listening and happy, happy Mother's Day. I hope today was an encouragement to whoever is listening. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next week.

Voiceover: You've been listening to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Inseong Kim. You can also find more from Inseong Kim at inseongkim.org. That's I-N-S-E-O-N-G-K-I-M-dot-O-R-G. Thank you for listening to the show.

Guest (Male): It's Bo time! You know those crispy, hand-breaded chicken tender Bo Bites you love? The ones with all that real southern flavor? Well, we went ahead and put them into warm, fluffy, snack-sized potato buns for the perfect little sandwich built to rip, dip in your favorite Bo sauce, and repeat. Introducing Bo's Chicken Ribbers. Order four for just yourself or grab up to 20 for the whole crew. But don't wait. Bo's Chicken Ribbers are only here for a limited time and they're only at Bojangles. It's Bo time!

Guest (Male): Everyone deserves to feel safe at home, yet a home fire is reported every 96 seconds and only one in four families has practiced a fire escape plan. Kidde, a trusted leader in fire safety for more than 100 years, offers a free digital fire drill simulator that uses augmented reality for an immersive fire safety education experience, available in both English and Spanish. All you need is a phone or tablet and an internet connection to access Kidde's prepare plan practice tools. Visit causeforalarm.org and try it today.