That's a tough question, isn't it? It has a way of bringing us back to reality when we talk about honoring our parents and speaking about joyful motherhood.

Strained relations take their toll. I see a lot of this these days. The typical story is not as dramatic as these two stories of broken relationship. It usually involves a middle-aged woman, striking out at her living parents with whom she still maintains a reasonably congenial relationship.

I received a long-distance phone call recently from a couple who had visited our church. They described raising a wonderful family of Christian children. They told how many of their friends had come and asked how they had been so successful as parents. Then they began to lament the fact that one of their daughters, now in her thirties, was beginning to lash out, in particular at her mother, accusing her of various kinds of parenting mistakes.

They described a daughter who had been a "perfect child," who had "caused no problems" during her teenage years, who now was hostile and bitter toward her mother. The more they talked the more complex the story became. They told how the daughter had gone into depression. In the process of psychological counselling, she "turned against her parents" and was hardly civil with them when they would come to visit.

This story is not unusual. I hear it with great frequency, both from the vantage point of parents who are stunned by the strained relations and from the daughters whose eyes flash of apparent hostility at the very mention of the mother in what now appears in retrospect to have been a smothering maternal control throughout the childhood that was not as happy as it appeared on the surface.

I was reminiscing with a family after the death of their mother. One of the daughters, now turning fifty, who had stood so close to her mother during her illness, turned to one of the persons in the room and said, "I was always jealous of the freedom you had as a child. My mother was still telling me what to do up to forty-eight hours before her death." Then another one of the daughters described how close she and her mother had been and began to wonder aloud why it was that even with that closeness they had some trouble getting along.

Spiritual alienation takes its toll. Seldom does a month go by but what some aging mother, with tears trickling down her cheeks, describes her love for her child, now an adult with his or her own children, a child who is not walking with Jesus. The tears sometimes turn to sobs as that parent describes how much he or she yearns to have that child come to saving faith in our Lord.

As you know, just as often, I hear friends my own age express spiritual concerns for their parents. There are many middle-aged children who came to faith in Jesus Christ during their college years or later, who observe mothers and fathers who may have gone to church in the 1950s when it was the popular thing to do but have never had their lives changed by the power of God unto salvation.