The Mother Who Never Left

In 2007, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered a deep-sea octopus — Graneledone boreopacifica — clinging to a rocky ledge nearly a mile beneath the Pacific Ocean. She was guarding her eggs. When the team returned months later, she was still there. They came back again and again over the following years, and every single time, she had not moved.

For fifty-three months — four and a half years — that mother octopus brooded her clutch of eggs in the cold dark. She never ate. She never hunted. She slowly wasted away, her skin growing pale and loose, her eyes clouding over. Marine biologist Bruce Robison and his team documented the longest egg-brooding period ever recorded in the animal kingdom. When the eggs finally hatched, the tiny octopuses drifted up into the water column, healthy and fully developed. Their mother was gone.

She gave everything so they could live.

Something in that story catches in our throats because it echoes a deeper story — the one where the Creator of the universe wrapped Himself in human flesh and spent Himself completely so that we might be born into new life. "Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said, "than to lay down one's life for one's friends."

Sacrifice is never efficient. It is never partial. The deepest kind of love holds nothing back, not even itself. That is what El Shaddai, the Almighty, did for you.