When I first thought through this topic, I thought I would be writing about single mom’s and how they use the Bible.  But on further contemplation, I believe it’s about single mothers who are written about in the Bible. Who would care about those women from a time long ago?  This is a different day and age. The trials, tribulations and stress that we deal with on a day to day basis are surely quite different from those that these women lived in a few thousand years ago.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that they do face many of the same issues and worse than we do today.  And the one thing that we all have in common is ‘faith’.  The women who are written about in the Bible had a strong enduring love and faith for God.  There may be some who will read this and say to themselves that they don’t believe in God, or they don’t believe in MY God.  But that does not mean that they don’t have faith.  Or that they don’t have the strong love for what they do believe in.

So I went about looking for mention for single mothers in the Bible and I found that the bible barely addresses them. There are, however, many examples of God’s gentle interaction with women, mothers, widows and their children. These examples apply whether a mother is single or married or widowed or divorced. God knows each person intimately, and knows her situation completely. The Bible warns that sex outside of marriage is sinful and dangerous, and will bring troubles, one of which is that a woman might have to raise a child by herself, which is undoubtedly difficult. And if it is her own sin that has resulted in single motherhood, God is still just as willing to bring help and comfort.

Is it my job to preach to each of you single mom’s out there about pre-marital….or NO-marital sex?  No, it’s not.  But that seems to be the biggest part of what the Bible stresses in regards to single mothers.  I expected to find the stories of those mothers who lost their husbands and raised their son’s to adulthood despite the plagues and laws that came about during the biblical years.  How they raised those son’s to be God-fearing, and triumphant in the face of temptation.  But the writers of the Bible didn’t choose to write that way.

We know the story of Moses, but he was raised in a palace by the Pharaoh’s wife, and I don’t believe it is clear that his birth mother was a single woman or not.  Even later when he met her again, the children were grown and I still don’t find it clear whether a husband and father was around.  The one thing I do get from the Bible is that many of the women were very strong. And in some way managed to hold their family together or provide for them while their ‘men’ were out of the home.