My three-year-old daughter recently took it upon herself to help me by doing dishes. She pushed the step stool up to the sink, turned on the water, grabbed the soap, scrubber and plates, and started washing. Her pile of clean plates and bowls grew steadily. Finally, she felt she had done enough.

She proudly proclaimed to the family about all her good work and wanted us to admire the clean dishes.

Everything was great until it was time for the next meal. She brought her pile of plates over for the meal to be served, and promptly got upset. “I just wash-ed all those dishes and now you’re getting them all dirty!” she huffed. “Now I have to wash them all over again!”

Gulp. She couldn’t have gotten that from me, right? (For the record, I have been known to fuss over spills on my freshly-mopped floors, but I have never fussed over kids using plates!) I felt even worse because I was in the middle of reading all the articles for this issue, filled with people praising the sainted mothers in their lives.

The adversary always wants us to feel like we aren’t good enough, or that we’ll never measure up. While we all should pause to evaluate our performance from time to time, and make course corrections as needed, we must never allow ourselves to feel like failures. This seems to be a common occurrence for many mothers, and often on Mother’s Day.
In contrast, the Lord speaks highly of women, as do the scriptures and latter-day prophets. When the Lord created our earth and everything on it, He saw that his work was “very good.” But it was not complete until Eve was created.
President Hinckley noted, “Eve became God’s final creation, the grand summation of all of the marvelous work that had gone before” (“The Women in Our Lives,” Ensign, Nov 2004, 82-85).

President Hinckley concludes, “How thankful I am, how thankful we all must be, for the women in our lives. God bless them. May His great love distill upon them and crown them with luster and beauty, grace and faith. And may His Spirit distill upon us as men and lead us ever to hold them in respect, in gratitude, giving encouragement, strength, nurture, and love, which is the very essence of the gospel of our Redeemer and Lord.” Happy Mothers Day!

All the best,

Editor@DesertSaintsMagazine.com