Weeks ago I found myself at lunch, at one of my favorite spots in Antigua with some people I admire deeply - my friend Gabe, his wife Kendall, their two beautiful energetic daughters, and my husband Joe. Gabe had requested the lunch, not having met Joe before, and I was busy zoning out - or honestly, refilling my cup by mindlessly playing with the babies - when Kendall asked me how my heart capacity was.

I had to stop.

I had never really thought about it that way - heart capacity - as if the heart were a muscle being measured, tested, trained. But after sitting with the question for a while, I think the answer is this: my heart is flexible. Ever changing. Expanding when needed.

That is the heart of a mother, after all.

At times only a little love is required. A hand on a shoulder, a quiet presence, enough. But other times mothers muster energy enough to move a car, running on no sleep and still finding the ability to be gentle, or energetic, or both at once depending on what the moment needs. We find the time to bake a hundred cupcakes and plan two birthday parties simultaneously - building the cake from scratch, wrapping the presents, making sure each daughter is separately honored in her own style - all while watching the single mom budget we have been finagling and perfecting for years. Or my favorite memory, unloading the eight foot Christmas tree off the top of the car alone, quieting your whimpers as you drag it inside and attempt to put it in the base straight before they attack it with the many boxes of Tupperware full of ornaments you managed to get down from the attic without dying.

We learn to cry in closets. You get very good at looking like you are searching for a long lost dress when the door opens unexpectedly. Later you discover you can cry in the shower, but that method only becomes available once the girls are old enough to bathe themselves. You file that one away and use it often.

The calendar fills. Jobs, sometimes two or three. Soccer, dance, every ceremony and meeting, and of course you volunteer to be the Team Mom because it was never an obligation - it was a gift you kept giving yourself. The weekend is full and you are full in it.

And then the season shifts.

They are in their twenties now and they do not need me the way they once did. But the capacity is still there - still wanting to cook any meal at any hour, still showing up to the games now that she is coaching instead of playing, still ready to snuggle when they want to snuggle. Showing up at their house with breakfast on their first day at a new job, or bringing them a sweater at work. Still running on no sleep, though for different reasons now. The heart does not shrink just because the need changes shape.

This is what mothers do. We find the capacity. We find it when we are certain there is none left. We find it in the closet and the shower and the carpool line and the kitchen at eleven at night. We find it because we have to, and then we find out we always could.

And I do not think that is an accident. I think God designed us this way on purpose. Stretching us to prepare us.

I have watched this my entire life. Not just in myself but in women all around me - women who showed me what capacity actually looks like when it is pressed all the way to its edge and still does not break. Women who draw from a source that does not run dry because the source is not in them. It is in who made them.

My grandmother could not have children. In a time when that fact alone could define a woman’s worth in the eyes of her family, she found a way. She adopted two babies and loved them through to adulthood, then turned that same love on their children without hesitation, without reserve. Her family frowned on it. She did it anyway. That is a woman who decided that love was not something you waited to receive permission for. She found the capacity because that is what mothers do.

My own mother has expanded her heart to fit thousands. Not metaphorically - thousands. She has made it her life’s work to make sure one more person does not have to choose between rent and a meal. One more. Always one more. The capacity does not run out. It just keeps making room.

My other mother came upon two children she never thought she would have and loved them without hesitation, and has shown up for my own daughters as their grandmother in every way that counts. Biology did not factor into it. It never does for women like her. You find the love and then you find the capacity to sustain it, and she has never once stopped.

I watch young friends start with one child and now navigate two or three. I have watched them learn to love a life they did not fully plan for - learning each child, loving each child differently, figuring out who they each are while also remembering who they themselves are, while also loving their husbands, while also showing up for their friends, while running on the particular kind of exhausted that does not have a name yet. And they do it. Beautifully, messily, fully. Because that is what mothers do. They find the capacity and then they find a little more.

We love because he first loved us. I think that is where the extra comes from. That is where it has always come from.

And then there is the capacity that surprises you. The kind you did not know you were being prepared for until you are standing in the middle of it.

I have found myself in worship rooms on the other side of the world, surrounded by young missionaries - racers - deep in the middle of hard months far from home. And in those moments, when the worship rises and the weight of everything they are carrying becomes visible, some of them need a mother. Their parents are not in the room. But I am. And something in me that was trained in closets and shower cries and Christmas trees dragged through doorways alone reaches out and holds them. It is not a decision I make. It is just what is there. God stretched me for decades in one kind of motherhood and it turned out he was also preparing me for this one - to be the mom in the room for someone else’s child when they need one most.

I have met a mother in Guatemala who was pulled out of school in the sixth grade to work the coffee farms, married into a loveless marriage with a man who beats her, raising five children without a dollar of support from him. She feeds them. Every day she finds a way to feed them. And she thanks God the whole way. Her daughter will not live the life she lived. She has decided this quietly, humbly, and without anyone’s permission. That is capacity. That is a mother.

And she is not alone on that street. There are mothers in Guatemala who opened their homes to feed their communities - not just their own children but their neighbors, their block, anyone who needed it - and then looked up one day to find a group of non-Spanish-speaking twenty-something young men standing on their doorstep and welcomed them in like they had always been coming. Into her kitchen. Teaching them her ways. On a desolate street where nobody had any business being generous, they were generous anyway. They made room at the table they had stretched as far as it would go and then they stretched it further. Thanking God the whole way. Because that is what mothers do.

It was in Guatemala that a man named Chicho prayed over Joe and me. He spoke words over us that I have carried ever since - that we would be parents to many nations, that we would have children all over the world. I did not fully understand it then. I am starting to. God knew I wanted a big family. He just had a much larger vision for what that family would look like than I did. He was not withholding anything. He was expanding everything.

I have sat with a mother who wept telling us that her community believed her crippled daughter was God’s punishment on her life. She did not believe it. She knew God had given her this daughter for a reason, even knowing her daughter would never be able to say the word mama. She held her anyway. She chose her every single day. She found the capacity in a place the rest of us cannot even locate in ourselves. God put it there. She just kept reaching for it.

I have looked into the eyes of mothers on Red Street in the Philippines who were there for one reason - to feed their children. I will not dress that up. I will only say that what I saw was not what the world would have you see. What I saw was a mother finding the only capacity she had left and spending it entirely on her kids.

I have sat in a small upstairs room in the tourist district of Nepal with mothers praising God for healing - not asking, praising, as if it had already been done - and watched them welcome me and my family as if we had always belonged to them. Their capacity for love and hospitality came from the same place it always comes from. They knew the source. You could see it in the way they gave. Regardless of being in a country that is only 1.8 percent Christian.

Mothers are a different breed. God made us that way and it is worth saying plainly and celebrating fully. He knit into us something specific and particular - a capacity to lay down our lives the way Jesus laid down his, to love past the point of reason, to find more when there is nothing left. We are not better than anyone. We are just made for this. Designed for it. Called to it.

And God himself showed us how sacred that calling is. In his final hours, hanging on a cross with the weight of the world on him, Jesus looked down and made sure his mother was cared for. He looked at John and said - here is your mother. Take care of her. In the moment that held all of human history, he stopped for her. That tells us everything about how God sees the mothers he made.

This is what we do. All of us. My grandmother and my mothers and my friends learning to love two and three children while also loving themselves and their husbands and their people. The mother in Guatemala thanking God on the way to feeding five children alone. The women on that desolate street stretching a table that had no business stretching. The mother in the Philippines spending the last of what she had on her kids. The women in Nepal with their arms wide open to strangers, praising before the answer came. And the young mothers right here, right now, saying yes to callings that scare them while also figuring out nap schedules and learning that their heart is bigger than they thought.

We find the capacity. We always find the capacity. Not because we are extraordinary, though we are. But because we were made by a God who is, and he put something of himself in us when he made us mothers. We love because he first loved us. We give because he first gave. We lay down our lives in a thousand small ways every single day because we were designed by someone who did it once for all of us.

My heart has been training for these moments for a lifetime.

And so has yours.

Kendall - thank you for asking the question. Watching you love your girls, navigate two under two, and still say yes when God calls you to teach things outside your comfort zone - that is capacity expanding in real time. You started this whole conversation without knowing it. I hope you know what a gift that is.

Happy Mother’s Day.