(reflection on 2 Maccabees 7)
Upon Further Reflection…
Well, after drafting this morning’s Daily Bread reflection about the woman with the seven sons from 2 Maccabees, I had to run out the door to my annual OB-GYN appointment. Her office was already fully decorated for Christmas, and when I walked into the waiting room it looked like a Winter Wonderland—garlands, a tree with a few ornaments, and lots of cute little “Santa Claus” decorations for the keiki (kids) accompanying their moms to get excited about.
Once I was escorted into the exam room, I ended up sitting there for about twenty minutes, shivering in that paper gown. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and unexpectedly reflective. My mind drifted back to the years when these kinds of visits were a constant rhythm of my life.
Six pregnancies in eight years!
Four beautiful babies brought to life.
The room brought all of it back.
Posters charting how a child forms month by month in the womb.
Christmas music faintly piping through the speakers.
And the ultrasound machine sitting quietly next to me.
I remembered the miracle of seeing those first tiny heartbeats in each of our children… and the sadness of the one that slipped away—my second pregnancy, when I was alone at a routine visit and learned there was no longer a heartbeat. That news barreled over me like a cruel wave and broke my heart.
As the Christmas music played on, I felt myself transported back to those joyfully chaotic Christmas mornings with my three sons and daughter—wrapping paper everywhere, stocking stuffers and candy littering the carpet, new bikes and scooters and anything else with wheels hitting the driveway and sidewalk before the crack of dawn, my husband and I thrilled at their happiness.
As I took in that exam room and all it held, today’s Scripture reading echoed differently in my heart.
I thought of the mother in 2 Maccabees and the unimaginable courage it took to watch her seven sons die one by one rather than abandon their faith. Each son faced torture, each son faced death, yet they honored their mother by remaining steadfast in God, refusing to compromise their fidelity. She wept, but she also proclaimed her trust in God, knowing He alone gives and restores life:
“I do not know how you came into existence in my womb…”
Sitting there, I felt the truth of that line.
She carried her children, she loved them, she nurtured them—but she did not create them.
She did not orchestrate their breath or knit their bones in those earliest hidden days.
“It was not I who gave you the breath of life.”
Her humility humbles me. Her clarity moves me.
Because if she wasn’t the source of their life, then she was not the final authority over it either. And in that recognition, she could trust God to raise them even after the world destroyed them, as she encouraged them to remain faithful.
“The Creator of the universe… will give you back both breath and life.”
A belief in the resurrection—centuries before Jesus walked the earth.
A hope grounded not in an empty wish, but in God’s proven character, revealed again and again throughout the Old Testament:
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the God who creates from nothing,
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the God who brings life out of barren places,
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the God who restores what is lost,
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the God who keeps every promise He makes.
Her sons honored her by honoring God first. She mourned, yet she also glorified God through her courage.
She believed in resurrection because she knew who God is.
And as I sat on that exam table, remembering the beginning of my children’s lives and imagining what she faced, I had to be honest:
I don’t know if I could stand as she did.
I don’t know if my faith would hold.
I fear I would cave under pressure.
I fear I would fight for survival instead of fidelity.
But I don’t want to live that way.
So sitting there this morning, in a room filled with memories of life’s beginnings, I prayed:
Lord, give me that mother’s hope—
the hope rooted in who You are,
the hope that looks beyond fear,
the hope that trusts You to breathe life again,
the hope that stands firm because resurrection is real.
May God, who shaped us in the womb, shape our faith today.
May the hope that sustained His people before Christ strengthen us now that Christ has risen.
This is the root of all hope.
