What a mom does is love, love well. We have a mom here for whom all her efforts and love were met with a sorrowful ending, the death of her only son. Imagine the devastating fear and heartbreak for her. The longing for her. And the despair as she followed his open coffin out of the city, thinking about the fact she now had no home, no protection, no way out of debt or to earn income. All hope had died with her son. This level of despair only a mom can identify well. But Jesus knows the key to healing and hope, and met her along the way. He was not going to Nain for this purpose, no, was heading elsewhere, but seeing the funeral, stopped and changed the atmosphere, changed the dirge into a song of celebration by his arrival and his words and actions: ‘Don’t weep!’ ‘Young man, I say to you, arise.’ Jesus showed something simple here: be available to love the person placed in front of you. That is it on the simplest level. What we might learn about the character of God from his action, and what we might learn about the nearsightedness of our own dim ways, that is another matter. We will begin with a discussion of the passage and expand out into a message about the way we are asked to love those God places in our lives, how I was loved by others, and how I found God allowing me to love.