Mothers Who Trusted God: Lessons for Every Believer

Mother's Day can be a lot of things at once. Warm and celebratory for some. Complicated and tender for others. There are people in every congregation this week who are sitting with grief—for a mother they've lost, for a child they hoped for, for a relationship that doesn't match the greeting card version.

What I want to do this week isn't offer a sentiment. I want to look at three women in Scripture who trusted God in circumstances that weren't clean or easy and think about what their stories say to all of us—not just mothers, not just women, but anyone who has sat in a long wait and wondered if God was paying attention.

Hannah: The Weight of an Unanswered Prayer

1 Samuel 1. Hannah wants a child. She has wanted a child for what the text implies is a significant period of time. Her husband loves her. Her rival — the other wife, Peninnah, who has children — provokes her. The priest Eli misreads her grief in the temple as drunkenness.

She is, at this point in the story, misunderstood by nearly everyone around her.

What she does in that moment is the part I keep returning to. She doesn't leave. She stays in the temple and prays. Not politely. Verse 10 says she wept bitterly and was praying in anguish. She brings the full weight of her grief directly to God, without cleaning it up first.

"In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly."  — 1 Samuel 1:10

Eventually, Eli understands what's happening and blesses her. She leaves and eats, and her face is no longer downcast. The text doesn't say her prayer was answered yet. It says she believed it would be.

There's something about that shift—from anguish to trust, before the answer arrives—that I find genuinely challenging. Hannah didn't stop feeling the weight of the unanswered prayer. She laid it down anyway. The next post in this series, When the Answer Is No, picks up this exact question from a different angle.

Mary: Holding What You Don't Understand

The most repeated phrase in Luke's description of Mary is some variation of 'she kept these things and pondered them in her heart. It comes up twice—after the shepherds' announcement at the birth and again after the twelve-year-old Jesus stays behind in the temple and tells his parents he must be about his Father's business.

Mary consistently encounters things about her son that she cannot fully explain and cannot fully control. The angel's announcement. The shepherds are arriving. Simeon's prophecy in the temple that a sword would pierce her own soul. The wedding at Cana, where Jesus gently redirects her. The cross.

"But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart."  — Luke 2:19

Pondering is not the same as understanding. Mary didn't have full clarity about what was happening. She had enough trust to hold what she didn't understand without demanding resolution.

That's a posture I find myself needing regularly. There are things in my own life — things I believe God is in — that I can't fully explain to myself or anyone else. Mary's response isn't to perform certainty or to collapse into confusion. It's to hold, to ponder, to keep moving.

The Proverbs 31 Woman: Not a Standard to Meet

Proverbs 31 makes a lot of people feel tired. The woman described there wakes before dawn, runs a business, takes care of her household, gives to the poor, and is praised by her children and husband. Reading it as a checklist is exhausting.

But the chapter doesn't begin with the woman. It begins with the advice a mother gives to her son about the kind of character worth looking for. The portrait isn't a performance standard. It's a description of someone whose inner life—fear of the Lord, wisdom, and kindness—produces the outward life.

"Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised."  — Proverbs 31:30

The closing verse anchors everything that comes before it. Not efficiency. Not productivity. The fear of the Lord. The rest is what flows from that. This is the same foundation we explored in God's Lavish Love—identity rooted in relationship with God, producing everything else

What These Three Have in Common

Hannah brought her grief directly to God. Mary held what she didn't understand without demanding resolution. The Proverbs 31 woman built her life on the fear of the Lord rather than on performance or appearance.

None of them had easy circumstances. None of them had certainty about how things would unfold. What they shared was a willingness to trust God with what they couldn't resolve themselves.

That's not a lesson exclusively for mothers. It's the lesson—for anyone sitting in a long wait, holding an unanswered prayer, or trying to build something meaningful without being able to see the full picture.

The through-line in all three stories isn't a happy ending. It's a trust that held before the ending was clear.

What I See at Home

I’ve been writing about women in Scripture, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say that the most immediate example of this kind of trust lives in my own house.

Pinal my wife, is a lawyer by qualification. She’s sharp, she’s capable, and she could be doing any number of things with her time. But watching her with our two kids, what strikes me most isn’t the things she does—though she does a lot. It’s the way she holds the weight of it without needing anyone to notice.

There are mornings where one child is upset about something that feels enormous to them and the other needs something entirely different, and she moves between the two with a patience I genuinely don’t think I could replicate. Not performance patience. The real kind — the kind that costs something and doesn’t always get a thank you.

She reminds me of Mary in that way. Not because the circumstances are comparable, but because of the posture. She holds things she can’t fully control—the worries about whether we’re doing this right, the questions that don’t have clean answers yet, and the daily grind of raising two small people into who they’re going to become—and she keeps going. Not with forced confidence. With trust. With prayer. With a quiet steadiness that I think our kids will only fully appreciate years from now.

I write about leadership. But some of the clearest leadership I’ve seen happens in our living room, from someone who would never describe it that way.

Hannah brought her grief to God. Mary pondered what she couldn’t understand. The Proverbs 31 woman built on the fear of the Lord. Pinal does all three on a Thursday morning . That’s not a greeting card sentiment. That’s what I actually see.

If you're in a season of waiting, Hannah's posture of bringing the full weight of it to God—not the cleaned-up version—is worth trying.

If you're holding something you don't fully understand, Mary's pattern of pondering rather than forcing resolution is more sustainable than most of us practice.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES  →  God's Lavish Love: 1 John 3:1  ·  Easter and New Beginnings (Apr 10)  ·  Next: When the Answer Is No (May 23)