Mark Katrick faith column: Do you ever wonder what Jesus got Mary for Mother's Day?

Don’t you love the Etsy commercials that remind us that it’s “mission impossible” shopping for life-partners, fathers, brothers, sisters and other assorted family members and friends?

Moms are a lot easier to buy gifts for. What matters most to them is that they are timely (don’t you dare forget birthdays and Mother’s Day) and come straight from the heart.

Mother’s Day in our household was a no-brainer. After church we took my Mom to the Pandy’s Garden Center. There she could shop to her heart’s content for flowers to plant in her flower gardens, especially the circular beds in the front and the back.

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Do you ever wonder what kind of gifts from the heart that Jesus, her Son, and Joseph, her husband, would have given Mary on Mother’s Day? A breakfast of baked bread and fruit? A raised bed or a bouquet of wildflowers, like lilies of the field (Anemone coronaria) that Jesus referred to? A handwritten message or an image in the sand for his Mommy?

You can be sure that whatever message that the Christ Child was trying to convey, it was one of unconditional and undying love from his divine-human heart to his mother’s heart.

If they’d had greeting cards in Jesus’s day and time, he may have written words similar to these well-known lyrics from a song by Howard Johnson and Theodore Morse, on one of them:

“M” is for the million things she gave me/ “O” means only that she’s growing old/ “T” is for the tears were shed to save me/ “H” is for her heart of purest gold;

“E” is for her eyes, with love-light shining/ “R” means right, and right she’ll always be/ Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER”/ A word that means the world to me.

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So if you haven’t yet decided what to do on Mother’s Day, go and shop for one of those store-bought cards, or get out your crayons and markers and make up one of your very own. Then write your message, whether it’s in block print or cursive. If you’re anywhere near a beach, you can even draw it in the sand.

Then, after she’s opened up her card, tell Mom how much you love her and remind her that she means the world to you.

Mark Katrick is a pastor and spiritual guide.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Mark Katrick faith column: What did Jesus get Mary for Mother's Day?