I look into his squinting eyes, searching for the invisible story playing in his imagination and pluck the word he’s looking for out of the air and hand it to him.

“Aquarium?”

“Yea! Aquarium!” he shouts.

This is my superpower – knowing exactly what he’s referring to without any context to his question. I turn to an invisible audience and dramatically bow every time this happens.

So goes the language of intimacy, formed between lovers, mothers and children, sometimes even between Creator and created. It’s a language developed with time and devotion, shaped through the lens of contemplative beholding.

Here’s what I’ve found to be true: such intimacy can’t be built when you’re being watched, evaluated, or consumed by others. It flourishes in private, not in public. Those things that unfold in the dark womb of our non-public lives are the things that make a life.1 In The Time Before Children I knew this to be true in the way that you ‘like’ aspirational quotes on Instagram. But then my children came along and this vague belief became a stone-cold conviction. One might consider this clarity a gift. After all, re-prioritizing our lives in favor of the slow, quiet, and hidden is surely a virtue. But the pursuit of virtue is rarely a tidy or pleasant experience.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I once felt totally at ease navigating the public online world. I thought very little about the existential impact of building, maintaining, and growing a digital presence. The public and private were blurred and I had zero feelings about it.

But then a new creative work embedded itself in the spongy lining of my uterus and proceeded to literally consume me. Almost overnight I felt all my ambition and online aspirations evaporate. People told me not to worry, it’ll be back, but it never returned. At least, not in the form it had taken before I became a mother. Being thrust into the relentless bodily needs of a tiny human snapped me out of my digital delusions: the life that really mattered was right here in front of me asking me “Mama, what’s it called?” not in the infinite chasm of the internet.

For the last couple years, I’ve largely given myself over to the gravitational pull of love turning me towards private domestic life. I had lived a good, fun public online life, and I was more than ready to let that go to grow things in the dark – to cultivate the conditions where I could thrive and so could my family. I found the physical presence of other humans infinitely more intoxicating than a glowing screen.

The internet is not known to be a place of nuance and complexity. It’s also not really known to be a place where women and girls can flourish. And yet, here I am writing to you on a social media platform. Over there are some yoga videos I created that I think you’ll really enjoy. And, at this very moment, I’m 93 unread messages behind in a group text with dear friends I met on Mark Zuckerberg’s internet.

For all the knee-jerk animosity I feel towards the noisiness, monetization, and predatory vibes of the online world, it has connected me with some very cool people and has given my creativity a place to flourish.

So I keep asking:

• What of my private life should be available for public display and consumption?
  Everything? Some things? Nothing?

• If the answer is “some things,” then how do I determine which ones? How do I not live every private moment wondering how this will fare on social media?

• At what point do I cross a line and start using my private life to advance my public life, making my children’s antics and marital frustrations fodder for followers?

• How will I know if I’m using God or my family in service of my selfish ambition and vain conceit?

• How will I find any success if I don’t?

This Spring I read Mandy Smith’s book The Vulnerable Pastor. In it, she relays a story about Mother Teresa:

In trying to discern what I should do – whether and how I want to show up online in a true, beautiful, sustainable way – I find myself hoodwinked, once again, by the belief that clarity must come first. I wait for it to descend like the tongues of fire on Pentecost – all of a sudden I’ll be supernaturally empowered to speak the language of the internet and I will know how to navigate this confusing world with power and purpose.

But instead of tongues of fire, I hear the faint echo of a Psalm I’ve read a hundred times: “You know me…Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.” (Psalm 139:4)

I think of my son, running into the kitchen asking me for the word he can’t think of but trusts that I know and will give to him. In his search for clarity, for a word that embodies the thing he sees in his imagination, he runs to me. Perhaps this is a picture of what it’s like to be known by God…

I turn to an imaginary audience and dramatically bow.

Because up until this moment I had read this Psalm with fear and trembling: God knows me which means God knows what a failure I am. I better confess sooner, better, more frequently, because God knows all. I need to get it together, be on top of things, say the right thing. I read it through that grossly murky lens of bad theology, childhood wounds, and cultural scripts about being a good girl. Instead of bringing comfort, this Psalm came with a heaping side of shame.

But God knows me in the way that a mother knows her child – bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. God knows the word I’m looking for but can’t find because we speak the language of love developed over years of shared experiences, active listening, and attuned presence. I can speak my vague question and trust that God knows.

Does God get a thrill of delight every time this happens?

The Bible tells me so.

I set out with the intention of convincing you that I do now, in fact, know how to show up in the (online) world, but after spending weeks trying to write something coherent and compelling I freely admit, I have no idea. I don’t know how to “bring you along on my journey from Online Christian Yoga Teacher to Theology & Motherhood Writer.” I don’t know how to make reels. I don’t know how to digitally engage in a way that feels sustainable and not de-humanizing.

And here’s the truest (scariest) question: I don’t know if I want to.

Do I really want to spend my limited time and energy on the internet? Do I want to share my scattered self with the world?

Desire feels kaleidoscopic these days…

I want to use the bathroom alone // I want to be the first thing my child sees when they wake up in the morning

I want to make art // I want to sleep

I want to be in the room where it happens // I want to live a slow, quiet life where interruptions don’t derail me

I want to be articulate and profound // I want to be attuned and present

And also…

I want to be a published author. I want to gather in rooms around the world and practice embodied faith. I want the stories of women to be shared and to shape our liturgies, lessons, and lives. I want my daughter to have a tangible vision of a woman who takes herself and God seriously. I want to imprint on my body, the experience of trying and failing, or trying and falling flat, and laughing at the delight of trying anyway.

Can such loving desires flourish in public and in private?

I’m still asking God.

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After the traumatic experience of my second birth, I was afraid to pray.

When the red warning lights started flashing in labor, I prayed with more desperation than ever in my life, but God did not deliver me or my son in the way I begged him too. It took a frantic 911 call, a team of callous paramedics, a ride in the back of a steel box, numerous unsuccessful interventions, a crash c-section, and four hours of surgery to repair the damage I’d sustained in labor for my son to be born (stunned but ok, thank God).

Where was God in the midst of my terror? Why did I have to endure such suffering? I’d reached for God, begged God for strength, comfort, a miraculous awareness of his presence, but all I felt was the shock of abandonment.

In the tender weeks after, I longed to know that God was there with me, even if I couldn’t sense it at the time. But praying that prayer felt too vulnerable. I didn’t know if God could be trusted with it, or rather, I didn’t know if I could face the pain of asking God and not getting an answer, just like before. And so I tossed the prayer into the void, like the seeds of dandelion you blow into the wind with a wish attached. Hoping (praying) that if God really was good and faithful, a vision of his faithful presence would descend upon me and all would be well.

One afternoon a friend and fellow mother came by with a meal and massage oil. She sat at the foot of my bed, rubbed my feet, and gently asked, “what do you want me to know about your birth?” In her question, I heard, for the first time in weeks, the gentle, patient, loving voice of Jesus. She wasn’t pushing for a clinical rundown, a deep dive into my pain, or a well-mounted theological defense of God in the face of suffering. She was content to sit at the foot of my bed and listen.

Perhaps Jesus was too? Perhaps he was content to sit with me in my confusion and grief, not pushing me towards understanding or acceptance, but just being with me in the midst of it.

Which brings us to Good Friday

I’m a nondenominational church kid; we didn’t celebrate much of Holy Week but we did observe Good Friday. In the tender wake of my son’s birth, I found myself drawn back to this story and as I did, something jumped out at me that I’d never before noticed.

On the road to Golgotha and as Jesus hangs from his cross he says barely anything. When he does speak, he speaks to the thief hanging next to him, he cries aloud, calls out to his Father, and he speaks to mothers.1

In the hours of his greatest suffering, a suffering cosmic in scale, Jesus reaches for his Father and he turns toward mothers.

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First, Luke’s Gospel gives an account of Jesus, stumbling on the road to Golgotha, his heavy cross thrust on the back of Simon of Cyrene because Jesus was too weary to carry it all the way. People crowded the street to witness his suffering and among them were women “beating their breasts and wailing for him.” Scholars assume these women were professional mourners, but nevertheless,

“Jesus turned to them and said, Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck! Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’” (Lk. 23:26-32)

Jesus doesn’t speak to anyone else on this dusty road – not even to Simon of Cyrene who carries his cross for him. But he turns to these wailing women and addresses their grief. He warns them, yet again, of the suffering coming for Jerusalem. But he specifically names the suffering they will uniquely experience as women – the particular suffering of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, the grief that consumes when one loses a child. The suffering of motherhood is the one he names as he warns about the coming destruction of Jerusalem.

Yes, it’s an echo of Old Testament prophecy. Yes, you could argue it reduces women’s experience to just that of childbearing. But in the Gospel stories I read about Jesus the Son of Man, he is never one to make grand pronouncements far removed from the felt needs of the people in front of him. Jesus sees people and their suffering. He weeps over the death of his beloved friend Lazarus and for the children of Israel in Jerusalem (John 11:35, Luke 19:41-44). He describes himself like a hen gathering her chicks under her wing, drawing them close to protect them when danger looms (Luke 13:34).

So I don’t imagine Jesus stumbling along, his body shredded, his soul crushed, just rattling off some disembodied prophetic announcement to critique the women and their mourning. I imagine him being drawn to their wailing and using what little strength he has to acknowledge their pain and warn them of what’s to come.

And then he sees his mother

All four Gospels point out that around the cross stood a number of women. Only John’s Gospel names a male disciple who remains. In his Gospel, John describes how Jesus’ gaze falls on his mother who is there, at the foot of the cross, along with other women and “the disciple whom he loved:”

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (John 19:26-27).

In his hour of death, amidst unimaginable agony, he has compassion on his mother. He honors her by acknowledging her piercing pain and loss; he provides for her future safety and wellbeing. He sees her in her grief and connects with her and in doing so, he covers her vulnerability.

Jesus hardly says anything in his final hours, but much of what he does speak, he says to women.

There is something about suffering that mothers uniquely know. Suffering for the sake of new life is a suffering Jesus knows too. His nearly naked body stretched for all to see; water and blood pouring from his pierced side; his body broken for you and for me.

“He was a man of suffering, and familiar with pain…surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,” (Isaiah 53:3-4).

And, it must be said, that his is a suffering we cannot comprehend because in and through it, Jesus defeated death, our greatest enemy, the most evil of evils. In his dying, Jesus occupies even death so that there truly is no place where Christ doesn’t reign.

Jesus in us, not just with us

One year ago, on Holy Saturday, I was dancing with Hillary McBride and a group of other friends and strangers (as one does).

The music was slowing and I was reflecting on the sacred and significant events of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. My hands were resting on my heart and my mind was resting on the image of Jesus’ friends huddled together in fear and bewilderment in the upper room. “It was not supposed to happen this way,” “what do we do now?” I imagined them thinking. The shock and grief I experienced in my birth echoed in theirs. But then, what does Jesus do? He steps through their locked doors, speaks Peace to them, and then extends his nail-pierced hands for them to touch (Luke 24:36-40).

At that moment I had a vision of Jesus’ hands wrapped around my womb, his fingers as my cervix during labor. I saw in that moment, that that is where God was the evening of my son’s birth. He wasn’t present but distant, off in some corner of the room, waving a flag and cheering “You Got This Girl!” He was closer than I could ever have imagined, holding my son safely in my body until we could get to where we needed to be for him to be born. I pictured the scars on my cervix, my bladder, my uterus, and saw his hands also scarred, willingly taking the hits. I felt his overwhelming love for me and for my son and his willingness to endure my accusations of abandonment for the sake of life.

I don’t know that I will ever comprehend what Jesus suffered on the cross. But I do know that Jesus comprehends what I suffered to bring my babies into this world. I know that he is there too, in the abyss of grief, when our babies do not make it from the darkness of the womb to the light of life.

I know all this because in his agonizing final hours Jesus reaches for mothers.

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I’m in my second semester of seminary and trying desperately to not be that person that only ever talks about what they’re learning in seminary. But I’m breaking my vow of restraint today because the thing that is most alive in me right now, the thing that would feel dishonest to not write about, is a thing I keep bumping up against in my theological education.

In the last few weeks a question that has haunted me for years has grown from a persistent whisper to a guttural scream. The question is this:

What about women?

This is not a reflection of the specific seminary I attend,1 but rather, a reflection of the ways public theology has been almost singularly shaped by men throughout history. It’s a reflection of the fact that when we tell stories about Pastors, we are almost always talking about men and their leadership. It’s a reflection of the ways women’s stories, voices, and contributions to public theology have been minimized, marginalized, and sometimes, silenced altogether.

To argue this is true is not to also argue the superiority of one voice over another. The male voices that have shaped my theological education thus far have been by and large insightful, thoughtful, and divinely inspired. Their contributions to the field of theology are good and useful; they are a blessing to the Church.

But their voices only represent half the Church.

Theology doesn’t occur in a vacuum – all theology is socially located. I don’t believe we check our race, gender, wealth, geography, or families of origin at the door when we step into the pews or open the Bible. We cannot untangle the people we are and the places we come from when we interpret Scripture and pastor the Church. This isn’t a wrong to be corrected, but rather, a reality to be acknowledged and even embraced. The way God’s Spirit illuminates and enlivens Scripture in your life and context is different than in mine.

I need your voice and the voices of women interpreting, teaching, preaching, and creatively sharing the Triune God alive to us today and described in the Scriptures.

To live in this world as a man is different than to live in this world as a woman. To be a father is different from being a mother. Particularly in the Church, women and men’s experiences and expectations differ widely. If we genuinely believe that women are not just derivatives of men, some variant of the norm, but that both men and women are distinctly made in God’s image, then we need the voices of both men and women to shape our theological imagination.

We need the voices of mothers pointing to the holiness of hidden love within our bodies and our homes so as to enlarge our imagination about what God’s love looks, feels, sounds, and tastes like. We need the voices of time-poor, touched-out, sleep-deprived mothers cloistered in their domestic monasteries2 to teach us about a life of discipleship and cruciform transformation.

We need these stories so that the women God is calling into public ministry do not have to see their feminine bodies and lives as a distraction or disruption from their calling but as the site of God’s abiding presence and power. Women and men, particularly those discerning a call to ministry leadership, need these stories so as to better shepherd their entire flock.

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Women, and especially mothers, have been engaging in theology since the days of Eve. But for reasons well beyond the scope of my education and this Substack, that theology has by and large been exercised privately rather than publicly.3 In recent years there has been a boom in female authorship within the realm of Christian publishing. There are arguably more public theologians who are women than ever before in history, and their contributions are profound and essential. And still, I sit in my (digital) seminary classroom and find myself asking, “what about women?”

Now it’s personal

Becoming a mother five years ago ushered in the most existentially confronting, confusing, and distressing chapter of my life. I was not prepared for how undone I would become as my body grew another, nurtured another, and loved another as rabidly as I loved my daughter. My body and brain felt like they’d been hijacked by a love so ferocious it scared me. I felt unmoored from everything and everyone in my life. Everyone, that is, except God, who, through the act of mothering, felt more alive and real to me than ever before.

As my daughter grew and later, my son came along, I found myself thrashing against the walls of my home. I sensed my world growing smaller as the intense and relentless needs of young children chained me to a daily liturgy I couldn’t escape. But simultaneously, I couldn’t imagine myself being anywhere different. I was chained but freer than I ever had been. Nothing else in the world mattered more than these beautiful babies before me. No public space held a candle to the holiness of the private sphere; nothing felt more important than doing whatever was needed to be the kind of woman and mother my children deserved.

I sensed an ancient calling away from the noisiness of the world and into the cloistered, regimented, attentive, prayerful life of a monastery, a domestic monastery.

In his book by the same name, Fr. Richard Rolheiser points to parenting, and particularly motherhood, as a realm akin to a monastery:

“The mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is certainly monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centers of social life and from the centers of important power. She feels removed.”4

I would argue this is almost universally true for mothers, no matter the degree they stay home with small children (though especially so if they do). Even if a mother is engaged in the public world, the cosmic umbilical cord tethering her to her children remains taught. She will feel removed, other, among a once-familiar world.

“Perhaps more so even than the monk or the minister of the gospel, she is forced, almost against her will to mature. For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put in second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature almost anyone.”5

She is a theologian, a minister, a leader, but not foremost a public one.

I am grateful for the way Fr. Rolheiser dignifies mothering, locating the mother in a sacred space and naming the work she undertakes as monastic in nature. She matures not through her effort but through her undoing.

In conversations with other mothers both within and outside the Church, I hear a longing to be seen as more than a meme. There is an ache for motherhood and mothering to be revered rather than reduced to a stereotype or political cause.

We are doing this work within and among ourselves – choosing to inhabit our domestic monasteries and give them our full devotion. And the questions that emerge are potent, alive. The insights gained are simultaneously imminent and transcendent. The self that is put to death daily is being born again into the humble, self-giving, prodigally loving likeness of Christ.

I want to learn from and lead alongside these kind of women always and forever, amen.

This is the part where I call you to action – Do this! Believe this!

But really, I’d rather just give voice to the ache inside me because I think, perhaps, it could be an ache inside you too. I’ve had the gift of working almost exclusively alongside and on behalf of women for the last decade. Their curiosity, passion, courage, devotion, sensitivity, and strength have shaped me in ways I’m only beginning to grasp. As I sit in more male-dominated spaces these days, I’m seeing the gift of this communal mothering more clearly.

I’m writing to remind myself (and you), yet again, that I don’t need to become more like the men in the room to be taken seriously. My womanhood and motherhood are an expression of God’s image just as much as another’s manhood and fatherhood. The Church and our world need the wisdom and love of mothers to nurture, nourish, and lead us on the path of life.

So yes to centering women’s stories.

Yes to the hard, holy, hidden work of the domestic monastery.

Yes to blessing the private and the public.

Yes to the image of God born in and through mothers everyday.

Finally, I would be wrong to not name some of the women who have shaped my theological imagination over the years:

Barbara Brown Taylor, Kathleen Norris, Jessie Harrold, Hillary McBride, Natalie Carnes, Mandy Smith, , , , , , to name but a few.

Who are the women and mothers who have shaped your theological imagination?

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That same evening I got tricked into clicking an ad on Instagram I knew was AI generated but the caption so specifically pinpointed my deepest fears about the kind of mother I am that I clicked through, took the quiz, and nearly put down $30 to access their “expert-backed” plan to turn me into the kind of mother I long to be. Using their “research-proven” daily exercises, I could be a mother who did not scar her children for life in less than six weeks!

A cursory search on Reddit snapped me back to reality as I realized it was a blatant scam that preys on people’s shame and vulnerability. I couldn’t believe I nearly fell for it. But in my exhaustion I was an easy target.

For many reasons (I hope to soon unpack with an in-network professional), the holidays fill me with dread; I am relieved when they are over. We took our tree down last night and today I feel lighter in every way. Finally, life can return to normal.

Except, as Christians who marvel at this God who comes to earth as a baby, life is not meant to return to normal after the birth of Christ. Just as life after the birth of any child is never the same. In The God Who Births: Part One, I wrote about birth stories – God’s, Mary’s, Jesus’.

Any woman who’s ever birthed a baby knows there is no dusting yourself off, zipping up your jeans, and walking out of the delivery room a little tired but otherwise fine and ready to get on with things. Birth changes us at a cellular and cosmic level and what we must do in the wake of it is recover.

And friends, what is the first and most important stage of recovery?

r e s t

So as we enter this new year (however we enter this new year), let’s imagine what it would be like to rest as Mary and Jesus do together in their fourth trimester.

What if we didn’t just pack up the Nativity story along with our Christmas decorations but instead prayerfully considered what came after Jesus’ birth, literally. How does Jesus spend his first few days, weeks, and months on earth? How does Mary mother Jesus? How can we draw from their example as we consider what it means to follow Jesus in the year ahead?

For myriad reasons, resting after birthing is hard.1 And yet, this rhythm is imprinted into each of us as image-bearers of a creative, birthing God.

“And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation” (Genesis 2:2-3).

Common in other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies but missing from the Genesis account is the depiction of a temple where the deity abided or rested. God did not create a temple to dwell in, and yet Genesis is adamant that God rested. In other words, all of the created world was God’s sacred space.

God the Creator chooses to rest with us and not separate from us.

Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary, chooses to rest with us and not separate from us.

In Jesus, this rest is made manifest not in a theologically abstract way, but in a skin-to-skin, nervous system co-regulation, breath syncing kind of way. In Jesus, this rest takes the form of whispered adoration, long sleepy gazes, the soft stroking of perfect features. It’s hushed ecstasy, tender gestures, the studying of one so familiar and foreign at the same time.

Oh come let us adore him.

In the aftermath of a messy, stretching, harrowing birth, may we not rush to “bounce back,” but rest longer than culturally approved with the holy one, Immanuel, God With Us.

In the wake of a noisy, grief-stricken, exhausting holiday season, may we not rush to “get back to normal,” but allow ourselves to be held in the adoring gaze of the One who first birthed us.

Some questions to ponder

Every now and then, a topic lends itself well to some reflection questions, and who doesn’t love a good reflection question at the start of the new year (it’s ok if the answer is “not me!” Scroll to the last, very important qualifier section).

As you consider these questions, do so prayerfully, meaning, with Jesus. The judgmental inner critic and the enemy of our soul loves to distort, demean, and dehumanize. Listen with the voice of Love, look through the eyes of Christ, and seek to respond in grace and truth.

1. If you are a mother, recall your own postpartum experience(s). What was uniquely hard? What was uniquely precious? What do you carry with you from that experience today?

2. Imagine holding an infant child–what do they smell like? How heavy are they? How tiny are their fingers (answer: so tiny!)? What happens in your body as you imagine holding them? What does Love inspire you to say over them?

3. Now imagine you are that infant child held in the arms of a loving, birthing, nurturing God. Imagine God gazing at you with the eyes of adoring love. How does it feel to be loved in this way by God?

4. Bring to mind the pressure on mothers to skip the resting phase of recovery. Whether or not you are a mother, the pressure to forgo rest in the name of productivity, responsibility, societal pressure, or any other number of things is real for all of us. How might God be inviting you to embrace rest with Jesus at the start of this new year?

Finally, it needs to be said

The postpartum experience is bumpy with high highs and low lows. Some mothers love it and others loathe it and most cycle through love and loathe hourly. I don’t think Mary the mother of Jesus was exempt from this roller coaster. And still, there was Jesus, accompanying Mary through her own recovery. Each woman’s postpartum and mothering experience is unique, specific, and worthy of curiosity, compassion, and robust support.

May you encounter the presence of Jesus in the midst of your own rage, remorse, regret, and rebirth.

May you rest in adoration as both the one gazing lovingly at Jesus and the one being lovingly gazed upon.

May you embrace the invitation to rest with God at the start of this new year.

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As we near the end of Advent and the arrival of Christmas, Mary, the Mother of God, fills my imagination. She seems to come up in most conversations I have with other mothers this time of year. As a Protestant, Advent is the one time of year we are widely encouraged to fill our spiritual imagination with a woman’s story and experience.1 Through the accounts of Matthew and Luke, we are given a remarkable glimpse into Mary’s outer and inner world. Luke notes twice within a span of 22 verses that “Mary treasured these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19, 51b). This experience, this birth, so profoundly impacted Mary that she spoke of it often enough that Luke made a point to document this in his Gospel twice.2

How could it not?! Angelic visitations aside, birth marks us, completely, profoundly, and eternally. Even when everything goes “smoothly,” birth carries us to the threshold of life and death and asks us to surrender. It is blood, urine, sweat, amniotic fluid; it is pressure, pressure, pressure. It is a ring of fire. It is primal, feral even. And long after the cord connecting baby to mother is cut, both continue to hover at the threshold of life and death.

A few hundred years before Mary births Jesus, the sounds of birth are uttered by God and recorded in Isaiah.

“For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant” (Isaiah 42:14).

God is speaking to the people of Israel who are in exile, promising them that despite what it may seem, God will act on their behalf. They will not always live in exile, but will one day return home by the hand of God the Deliverer. Although in this passage, God the Deliverer is God the gasping and panting mother in labor. I’ve labored through two births and my husband tells me there’s a sound I make when birth is near that he’s never heard me make at any other time. Those who work in the birth world will affirm this. It’s a roar, a deep deep moan, a coiling of strength, will, shock, desperation, and surrender.

I imagine God hearing and seeing the suffering of his children and crying out with this kind of ferocious anguish so that life can be born, so that all that was lost can be restored. I imagine Mary echoing this cry as she pushes Jesus the Deliverer3 into the world of flesh and blood, breath and heartbeat. And I imagine Jesus the Deliver, hanging on the cross, crying out in ferocious anguish as his body is broken so that life can be born and all that was lost can be restored.

Birth is at the very heart of our Christian faith. Messy, stretching, harrowing birth.

“There is no God apart from the one who willed to dwell in the womb of Mary,” writes Rev. Dr. Amy Peeler.4

The mystery I can’t fathom is how God is the one who births and God is also the one who is birthed. God suffers to bring forth new life, and God is the one who is squeezed into this world. This God imprints the image of the Divine into each of us and this God also bears resemblance to the form and substance of the mother who carried him in her body for nine months.5

Jesus knows what it’s like to be mothered.

To have a mother’s face be the first one that comes into focus.

To be sustained by the milk her body makes for him.

To be shaped by her love.

Nourished by her body.

Caught by her arms.

Taught by her example.

The Son of God depended on the love of a mother.

And each of us depends on the mother-love of the Triune God.

As we draw close to the coming birth of Christ, let us not tune out the gasps and pants of labor. Perhaps we keep vigil with Joseph and the midwives as they tend to Mary in her labor. Perhaps we allow our kinship with Mary to deepen as we recall our own birth stories. Perhaps we collapse into the arms the Deliverer who, in great vulnerability, comes to us.

What does the experience of birth and mothering teach us about adoration, devotion, and worship? Join me next week for Part Two of The God Who Births where we’ll consider the Twelve (Postpartum) Days of Christmas.

Until then, may you encounter the gift of light that comes to us, like the shepherds, while we’re out in the fields, tending our flock at night.

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Today we sat down and chatted about encountering God as a mother amidst our own experiences of motherhood and matrescence. We talked about birth, breastfeeding, sleepless nights, and the obliteration that happens in motherhood. But we also talked about where we see maternal depictions of God in the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments. We lamented about what gets lost when we overlook this aspect of God’s character – the mother wounds that go unhealed, the women and men who miss out on the warm embrace of God’s love. We tried to say the quiet parts out loud.

You can watch/listen to the replay of our conversation above.

Both of us hope this is the first of many conversations, that this consideration of the maternal heart of God moves beyond just scribbled wonderings in our journal or whispered conversations among trusted friends. May this aspect of God’s character be one that forms us privately and publicly from the pew and the platform. Because all of us are made to know the love of a Mother.

Elizabeth’s book, Love Like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God releases in May. You can pre-order it here!

[Substack generated the text below but I loved seeing so many familiar names pop up as we chatted. Thanks for joining us lived!]

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

I’d love to hear what resonated with you from our conversation - leave a comment below!

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“This is deep, heavy stuff. Not many choose to go here,” she reminded me with wide eyes and a slow nod of her head.

I gulped. She was right. Who were we to think we could invite ten women to Greece for a retreat focused on the mother heart of God and dare to touch the deepest, rawest mother wounds within each of us? Who were we to ask these women to do some of the most vulnerable things imaginable – to trust other women, to rest, to play?

It’s been two months since my dear friend and I led our fifth (!) retreat at our home away from home in Greece and I catch my mind wandering again and again back to that week. To the long table we laughed, cried, prayed, and feasted around. To the deck under the pine trees where we did yoga in our gloriously changing postpartum and menopausal bodies. To the sea where we plunged into the salty water and felt ourselves reborn. To the deck under the stars as we danced and danced and danced. To the town where we shopped with the ferociousness of mothers who have not shopped without children in forever. To the feeling of a sister’s squeeze and a mother’s embrace.

I remembered when I was with them, that this is what it feels like to be seen, known, and loved by a God whose image women and mothers uniquely bear. I remember, even know, how God’s invitation to us, as the hands and feet of Christ, is to lay the table and invite others to the feast.

God is the one who nourishes, abundantly, deliciously, again and again, just like a mother.

We walked through some hard and heavy stuff together that week and I marvel still at the bravery of these women to follow the Spirit’s lead into the most tender of places. To sit in a circle with them was precious, holy ground.

Oh, what a joy it is to bear the image of God as a woman.

I’m grateful to you, dear reader, for your grace in my absence here the last couple of months. After a week of retreat-leading, my family and some friends flew out to Greece and we spent a week playing at the villa. And then we went to England for a few days. And then we came home and two weeks later I was off to Michigan for a week of in-person classes for my M.Div. program at Western Theological Seminary. This last weekend was my daughter’s birthday and Halloween and yes, I’m ready to curl up in bed and hibernate until Spring.

If motherhood has awakened me to anything, it’s my limits. Starting in ohhh about February I started worrying about *all this* and had mentally blocked off September and October for anything other than survival. Like most of my hypervigilant futurecasting, things turned out way more fun and wonderful than I imagined they would be, and also, more exhausting than a brain is capable of conjuring.

Seasons of big travel like this make me fantasize about the days when humans traveled by ship. Yes, I’m sure it was nauseating for many reasons, but to have weeks to transition between places feels luxurious. I’m not sure a human is meant to go from Greece to Seattle in 10 hours, picking right back up where they left off as if they hadn’t just experienced something so wildly different. Anyway, I think my body, brain, heart, and spirit have finally caught up with each other and I’m sensing my creative energy returning.

I have some new pieces, conversations, and art to share with you in the coming weeks. But for now, I leave you with this blessing that grounded us all week in Greece:

Psalm to the Three-in-One
by Carla A. Grosch-Miller

Blessed are You, O Holy One,
who crowns the earth with beauty,
who brings forth the greening
and blesses the dying,
who summons the songs of the beloved.
Blessed are You.

Blessed are You, O Holy One,
who absorbs the pain of the world,
who cradles broken bodies and sorrowful spirits,
who loves us back to life.
Blessed are You.

Blessed are You, O Holy One,
who waits in silence,
who holds the seeds of new life,
who keeps counsel with the wind.
Blessed are You.

Blessed are You, Three-in-One and One-in-Three,
whose love holds the universe together
and binds the human family to dust and stars.
Blessed are You.

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To all of us feeling exposed by the glory and grief of motherhood, this is for you.

I used to worry about out-running God.

By nature, I like to move quickly. I talk fast, I walk fast, and when I get an idea in my head, I’m stubbornly unstoppable. Within the first week of moving to New York City back in 2015, I knew I was home and had found my people.

But I always sensed an inner voice whispering that I was going at the wrong pace. Sometimes, this voice was Love, gentle and quiet, beckoning me to slow down. Other times, this voice was accusatory and condemning, drawing my focus to all the ways I failed to pace myself correctly.

What is God’s pace? What is my pace? I was hyper-vigilant to these questions. But really, the desire that sat beneath these questions was the desire to just be near God.

I can’t pinpoint when the fear first took root, but every time the spark of an idea flickered in my mind, I’d see myself running way ahead, leaving God in my dust as I raced after the shiny idea that’d caught my attention.

This was obviously a bad thing–one should not run faster than God. Surely God would not be happy with me for running too fast and too far.

In the last few years (right about the time I became a mom), my fear evolved from worrying I was out-running God to worrying that I wasn’t keeping up with God. New ideas and opportunities languished as I found my well of creativity bone dry by about noon every day. Friends, colleagues, and strangers on the internet were all doing great things for God, while I was trying to just dig myself out from under the mountain of domestic tasks that seemed to infinitely multiply after my kids arrived.

This was obviously a bad thing, too–one should not move too slowly for God. Surely God would not be happy with me for not doing more for Him.

It’s exhausting to constantly feel like you’re letting God down.

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to start running again. Running was my first love. Long before I knew the word ‘embodiment,’ or stepped on a yoga mat, I’d lace up my tennis shoes and go for a run around the neighborhood for no other real reason than it made me feel good. I wasn’t training for anything or trying to manipulate my body into a certain size, I just liked how clear-headed, relaxed, and settled I felt after a run.

During my junior year of college I ran a marathon, and then shortly after, fell in love with yoga. I moved from the beautiful wooded trails of the Pacific Northwest to the crowded city streets of Washington, D.C. and New York, and I stopped running. Then I got pregnant and had a marathon birth that shredded my pelvic floor and all hope of running (or sneezing without leaking) seemed lost forever.

But this Spring, I longed to feel strong in my body again. I’d spent nine months working with a pelvic floor physical therapist, building back core and pelvic floor strength after my son’s birth in 2023 and I was curious about what my body was capable of now. After growing and birthing two babies, I felt like I was starting from ground zero, reacquainting myself with my body again, discovering what was possible with the right amount of training and care.

I knew I was finally emerging from my second postpartum cave this Spring, when I started to wonder if I should dig out my running shoes from the back of my closet and start training for a race again. A race that would require some training, but nothing too time-consuming…a race that would motivate me to move my body regularly and find the edges of my strength, endurance, and capacity in this season.

And so I (and my husband, God bless him) signed up for a 10k race around beautiful Lake Union in Seattle, scheduled on the morning of our son’s 2nd birthday. We decided we’d run it as a family–he and I taking turns pushing the kids in the stroller.

I learned a lot training for this 10k the last few months:

1. Living at one of the highest points in our neighborhood makes for beautiful views but terrible second-half runs.

2. Strength-training makes a huge difference! Incorporating a couple of heavier-lifting workouts in each week helped me feel sturdier and stronger.

3. Getting into your body is the quickest and most effective way to get out of the spiral funk in your head. Even though the runs felt hard more often than not, I ended every single one of them feeling happier, lighter, and clearer.

   

But the most healing part of training for this 10k was the unmasking of the fallacy that I could somehow run too fast or too slow to keep up with God.

My daughter is “four-and-a-half-almost-five,” and she joined me for a few of my training runs. She learned to ride a pedal bike this Spring and begged to ride her bike alongside me while I ran. Other times, we’d go for family runs with the stroller and she’d beg to get out and run with us.

All she wanted was to be part of what we were doing…and I can’t write that sentence without tears welling up in my eyes.

At times she’d run (or pedal) far ahead, testing out her own speed and strength, but I never let her go farther than I could reach her with my eyes or voice. She’d inevitably slow down and wait for me to catch up, or turn around and race back to me, her eyes gleaming with pride and excitement. Other times she’d tire and ask to slow down and take a break. I learned to check my own frustrated agenda because it was way more important to share this experience with her than meet my training goal for the day. I would gladly slow down and take as many rests as she needed so we could continue running together.

Here was God’s heart for me: the heart of a proud parent for a giddy child.

She wasn’t running ahead to defy or escape me, she was following her curiosity, her speed fueled by wonder and delight. When she started whining about her legs being tired and needing a break, my heart swelled with gratitude that she felt safe enough to tell me how she felt and ask for what she needed. I was glad to slow down and savor the rest with her.

Isn’t this what God does for us, his beloved children?

I was raised to prioritize Doing (Great) Things for God above all else. I had to maintain a daily quiet time. I had to study my Bible. I had to modulate my pace to keep up with God.

Me, me, me.

God might have been first on my to-do list but I was at the center of my faith.

My faith was built on what I could do for God and how to keep myself in God’s good graces.

But I have learned over the years that I don’t actually have that kind of power. There is actually nothing I can do to make God love me more or less. God is not surprised or disappointed when I run fast. His heart is tethered to mine, and I am never not within the reach of his eyes or voice.

“There goes my girl,” I imagine him saying with such tender joy and compassion in his eyes when I take off and race ahead.

And God is not frustrated when I need to slow down, when my legs are tired and the finish line feels impossibly far away. He does not leave me in the dust to run with the fitter, faster kids.

He stoops low, draws close, and offers me rest.

Now I am no puppet master, pulling the Divine’s strings, bending God to my will and my pace. Again, I don’t have that kind of power. God sees what I can’t and knows what I can never comprehend. There are times when I shout for my daughter to slow down and wait for me, other times she asks to rest but I encourage her to keep going, just a little farther, because I know the perfect rest stop is just ahead. As I hear myself mothering my daughter in these ways, I am reminded that this is what God does for me too.

Earlier this month, we ran the 10k and my daughter hopped out of the stroller to run about a mile of it with us. Like both her parents, she was highly motivated by the promise of a shiny medal at the finish line. She loved running fast and her presence helped me go farther and faster than I thought I could go. I hadn’t run longer than four miles in my training but somehow we made it all 6.2 miles, together, and it was love that fueled me the whole way.

I don’t control God. God doesn’t control me.

Together, we pace ourselves so we can run alongside one another, on the same path, towards the same finish line: love.

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Are they still held together by a hair tie? Or do you, like me, opt for oversize shirts so you can unbutton your jeans the second you sit down?

Perhaps you’ve just waved the white flag of surrender and bid your Zipper Pants days goodbye, opting for leggings instead?

There’s no shame in this. For a season, or perhaps forever, the kindest and most loving choice one can make is to free themselves from the constraint of stiff fabrics and snug waistbands. But I longed to uncover the thread of familiarity that connected pre-mom-Caroline to mom-Caroline and finding well-fitting, non-frumpy jeans became my fixation.

So here’s my confession:

It took me 20 months after my son’s birth to work up the mental fortitude to venture into a proper clothing store, grab an armful of various sizes and styles, try them on, and eventually walk out with a pair that really, truly fit. Friend, I’m talking about the kind of pants that fit comfortably when you’re standing AND sitting–huzzah!

For nearly two years I did not own a pair of Zipper Pants that I could comfortably breathe in. I was sure my body would continue to shrink as the months of breastfeeding went on, but it didn’t. Surely, I thought, once I stopped breastfeeding, all the extra weight would melt off. But it didn’t.

The new, bigger jeans I’d bought after my daughter was born were now too small and the grief of growing larger, yet again, felt overwhelming. Within five years I’d gone up four sizes. Throw in some shame about having feelings about my bigger body and I found myself paralyzed by the prospect of clothing my new self and my new shape.

So for awhile, anytime I had to leave the house, I stuffed myself into jeans that were too small, leaving the button open and praying my shirt was long enough to hide the overflow, then peeling them off the moment I came home.

Eventually this became too intolerable, so I signed up for a clothing subscription service. Once a month, I picked out six items that arrived at my doorstep and were mine to wear for the next 30 days before I had to pack them back up and drop them off at the UPS Store.

For seven months I did this, spending hundreds of dollars on clothes that were not mine to adorn a body that did not feel like mine.

In April of this year, I realized what my grief and denial had cost me: dozens of hours lost to scrolling and selecting clothes to borrow, the monthly trek to UPS to return them, and nearly $700 in subscription fees.

All I had to show for it was a handful of pictures of me in borrowed clothes. I still did not own a pair of Zipper Pants that fit me.

The God of Growth Curves

The question I am committed to asking every moment of every day for the entirety of my days is, God, where are you in this?

If I really believe God is present, familiar with my suffering, and desires to dwell with me then even here, in my reluctance to accept my rounder and softer bodily home, God abides.

As I gaze at my children’s ankles and bellies peeking out of their too small clothes, I smile with pride and longing, amazed at their voracious growth. And in that moment, I’m reminded that this is how God looks at me too, with eyes of endless compassion, as it becomes unavoidably apparent that I’ve grown too big for my old clothes.

Perhaps my daughter, son, and I are all right on our growth curves, even as they grow taller while I grow wider. Mothering has enlarged me in every possible way.

Why would I think my body would escape that expansion?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. - Matthew 6:28-29

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus points to the lilies in the field, inviting us to notice their innate splendor and beauty through every season, achieved not because of anything they’d done but because of how God made them. “They don’t worry about what they’ll wear, so why do you?” Jesus asks.

I used to read this verse as a chastisement against vanity and caring too much about clothes (a not unfair interpretation for a young woman who loved blowing all her babysitting money at the mall). But these verses speak something different to me today, twenty years older and twenty pounds heavier. When I read Jesus’ words today, I hear him asking me to trust God in the midst of changing seasons – seasons that see us flourishing one month and wilting the next, only to return again a few months later arrayed in fresh beauty.

There are summer seasons where our self-expression is vibrant, delightful, enchanting even. And there are winter seasons where our color is gone and we look like every other trampled plant underfoot. Season to season, we change. Through them all, God cares for us and clothes us, like a mother lovingly clothes her children.

Can I trust that God will clothe me, differently but purposefully, season to season?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow…if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?

Off to the Mall

I hold this image of God, joyfully clothing me, as I block time on our family calendar this Spring, 20 months postpartum, to trek to the mall and endeavor to find pants that fit. Pants that allow me to sit and breathe at the same time. Pants that will help me feel a little more like “me,” whoever that is in this nebulous season.

I think of the lilies of the field and how they change every season. Even summer to summer they look different depending on factors out of their control. If God sees, delights, and cares for them, how much more does God see, delight, and care for me?

Perhaps, if I can experience myself held under this gaze of a seamstress God, I can find the courage to change from season to season, surrendering to the care of a God who makes the sun shine and rain fall and considers me in my little plot.

I walk into a shop in Full Mom Mode, confessing to the assistant that I don’t know what size I am and asking them what kind of pants the kids are wearing these days.

She graciously plucks a few pairs from around the store and assures me she’ll be back in a few minutes to check on me. The first pair is too small. The next is too frumpy. Eight pairs later, I find the perfect fit and I sigh in relief. It’s just a pair of Zipper Pants but they fit well and feel great. This feels like a miracle of biblical proportions.

I did not expect to have to buy new clothes a year after giving birth. I did not expect to have to replace those new clothes three years later after having my second baby. I expected my body to be different, but surely, with enough exercise and healthy eating, I could slide into my old jeans and throw on my favorite t-shirt. But there’s no going back to the size or the woman I once was.

Yes God, you are here, in this too, mothering and clothing us through our enlarging seasons.

A question or two

If God was to walk arm-in-arm with you into a fabric store and measure you for new clothes, what kind of attire do you imagine God making for you?

How do you long to be clothed in this season of your life?

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Many a Gospel story begins this way. These stories carry a scent of familiarity because we’ve heard them numerous times, but the who, what, where, and when of it all is quite foreign to us living in the modern Western world. We do not make our livelihoods on small fishing boats, after all. But the who and the where of these stories matters because they speak to us about who God is and how God is present in our lives.

The significance of this setting – a boat with some fisherman in the Sea of Galilee – is its utter ordinariness. It is a common place with common people doing a common thing. And it’s here, in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it of it all that Immanuel appears.

A modern day equivalent might be a group of women and men sitting around a conference table in a drab windowless room, reviewing quarterly budget numbers, or a mom at the grocery store, doing her big shop for the week. It’s regular people in regular places doing regular things.

When Jesus begins his public ministry he walks straight into these ordinary places and invites twelve men to follow him. These men have no power, no real authority, nothing of significance, but Jesus chooses them and, finding him impossible to reject, they leave their lives to join his. And for the next three years, these disciples traverse this Sea many times with Jesus.

The Gospels tell the stories of these men, with their boats, on this Sea, with Jesus. And even though I’ve heard them countless times, in different seasons of my life a story will grip me, captivating my imagination for months at a time. Through imaginative prayer practices I learned from beloved Spiritual Directors who learned them from St. Ignatius, I prayerfully put myself in the boat, on the sea, with the disciples and Jesus.

A few years ago, I was stuck for months in the story of Jesus sleeping in the boat while a wild storm raged and the disciples panicked. For a group of men who’d likely spent their lives on this very water and weathered many storms, this one must have been especially scary for them to react as desperately as they did. Feeling like I too had obediently gotten into a boat only to be surprised by a massive storm, I kept trying to shake Jesus awake, incredulous that he would sleep when *all this* was happening. I thought Jesus was attentive? Caring? Kind? Why wouldn’t he proactively calm the storm?

In time, I discovered the safest place for me – the invitation Jesus was extending to me through this story – was to lie down next to him and rest. To not panic about the storm or try to stop it; to not question if I’d made the wrong decision to go sailing when a storm was brewing; most critically, to not mistrust the heart and intentions of Jesus amidst it. It was ok to succumb to my own weariness, draw close to him, and receive his rest.

This story kept me from drowning in a stormy season.

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These days, the story that’s gripping me also features the disciples in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, but Jesus is not with them. At least, not initially.

John 21 tells the story of a handful of disciples who, after witnessing Jesus’ horrific crucifixion and encountering him twice in his resurrected body, decide to go out fishing one night. This alone makes me smile – how utterly human of them.

After watching their beloved friend and teacher be arrested, tortured and crucified, they lock themselves in a room out of fear for their own lives, only for Jesus to walk through the locked door and breathe the peace of God on them.

Can you imagine their absolute shock?
How does one even begin to make sense of anything after experiencing what they did?

So what do they do? They do the one thing they’ve always known:

“I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” (John 21:3)

John recounts how they push their boat out into the water and spend the whole night fishing but catch nothing. It’s the epitome of adding insult to injury – they can’t even do the one thing they once relied on as their livelihood.

How often, in our own Seasons of Disillusionment, do we find ourselves pulled back to the people, places, and things we’ve always known?

These Seasons of Disollusionment are ones we thought would look one way but end up completely differently, ones we thought we had everything figured out, only to be left feeling like the rug was pulled out from under us. In these seasons, we’re tempted to put back on the clothes of our former selves, hoping they’ll return to us a sense of identity and purpose. But, like the disciples who spend a fruitless night on the sea, these things God has already called us out of will no longer satisfy.

As dawn breaks, a man on the shore yells out to the disciples asking if they’ve caught anything, telling them to cast their nets to the other side of the boat. Immediately, two of the disciples realize it is Jesus.

They make their way to shore with a net full of fish and find Jesus waiting for them with a fire, bread, and fish.

“Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.”” (v12)

In the midst of their overwhelm, when they don't know where to turn or what to do or how to explain what just happened, Jesus meets them and feeds them. He knows that what they need after a fruitless night of fishing is a good breakfast, and so he makes one for them. He collects the coals, bread, and fish; he builds the fire and tends to the cooking.

We often skip past this detail and focus on what comes next: Jesus takes Peter for a walk and asks him three times whether Peter loves him. It’s tender and redemptive, well-deserving of our prayerful study. But there is power to behold in Jesus’ generously simple act of preparing and sharing breakfast with his disillusioned friends.

In my own disillusioned weariness, my own wrestling with my failure and uncertainty about the future, I return to this story and remember how Jesus met his friends with breakfast on the beach.

I imagine Jesus doing this for me: greeting me in the morning with a cup of coffee, laying out a plate of my favorite snacks when I grow hungry and frustrated mid-morning and want to just give up. He’s there, with food, and a heart to connect with me. He’s not too busy to sit down and share a meal, to take me for a walk and talk to me about what’s on his heart.

Through an act of service that mirrors what a mother does for her children hour after hour and day after day – preparing and serving a meal – Jesus is showing his disciples the heart of God. This God will gladly do the unseen work of building a fire, gathering the food, and preparing it for his tired, confused, beloved friends.

This is the mothering heart of God.

Friend, this is all Jesus asks of us: to sit and eat what he has prepared. To draw close when we want to run and hide. To believe he really is the God of Plenty who is able to give us more than we can ask, think, or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).

Friend, Jesus really is this good.

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I don’t remember much from that podcast episode, other than this poem written by Allison Woodard, which I think about all the time. And so, in honor of Mother’s Day (The Most Complicated of Days), I thought I’d share it here.

To all the women who mother in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways, may you know the deep blessing of God’s image and likeness radiating in and through you.

God Our Mother

by Allison Woodard

To be a Mother is to suffer;
To travail in the dark,
stretched and torn,
exposed in half-naked humiliation,
subjected to indignities
for the sake of new life.

To be a Mother is to say,
“This is my body, broken for you,”
And, in the next instant, in response to the created’s primal hunger,
“This is my body, take and eat.”

To be a Mother is to self-empty,
To neither slumber nor sleep,
so attuned You are to cries in the night—
Offering the comfort of Yourself,
and assurances of “I’m here.”

To be a Mother is to weep
over the fighting and exclusions and wounds
your children inflict on one another;
To long for reconciliation and brotherly love
and—when all is said and done—
To gather all parties, the offender and the offended,
into the folds of your embrace
and to whisper in their ears
that they are Beloved.

To be a mother is to be vulnerable—
To be misunderstood,
Railed against,
Blamed
For the heartaches of the bewildered children
who don’t know where else to cast
the angst they feel
over their own existence
in this perplexing universe

To be a mother is to hoist onto your hips those on whom your image is imprinted,
bearing the burden of their weight,
rejoicing in their returned affection,
delighting in their wonder,
bleeding in the presence of their pain.

To be a mother is to be accused of sentimentality one moment,
And injustice the next.
To be the Receiver of endless demands,
Absorber of perpetual complaints,
Reckoner of bottomless needs.

To be a mother is to be an artist;
A keeper of memories past,
Weaver of stories untold,
Visionary of lives looming ahead.

To be a mother is to be the first voice listened to,
And the first disregarded;
To be a Mender of broken creations,
And Comforter of the distraught children
whose hands wrought them.

To be a mother is to be a Touchstone
and the Source,
Bestower of names,
Influencer of identities;
Life giver,
Life shaper,
Empath,
Healer,
and
Original Love.

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He’s at the age where his language skills are exploding – he “talks” nonstop, though only we really understand him. He’ll repeat himself until you repeat back to him both what he’s literally saying and attempting to say:

Anders: bawa!

Me: ….

Anders: BAWA!

Me: ….ba…wa…?

Anders: BAWA!!

Me: ... Paw….Patrol??

Anders: YEA!!!! BAWA!!!!!!

So goes our days.

His grasp on language is immense but his ability to communicate verbally is still very much developing. Boy is he cute though. I love being the one he turns to when no one else understands him because he trusts I’ll stick with him until his meaning is clear. I love speaking a transitory and fleeting language only a handful of people in the world know, and of which I am the leading expert.

This is an essay about language and love, the songs my children and I sing together each night. It’s an essay about a duet between creator and created. But to tell it to you in its fullness, I need to tell you what happened three years ago.

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When my daughter was 18 months old, I boarded a plane, by myself, and flew halfway around the world. Then I took a taxi, a train, a boat, a bus, and another boat to a tiny remote island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland – the Isle of Iona. Pre-kids me would have relished the opportunity to attend this weeklong retreat with a dear friend in such a sacred place. But Mother me was hesitant. I had never been so far away from my baby. I had never been away from my baby for so long. I felt so viscerally exposed, as if my skin had been flayed. I told anyone who even looked at me that I was traveling for the first time without my baby – an urgent confession, a desperate plea for understanding and sympathy. My crazed look was mostly met with perfunctory nods.

The retreat I attended was led by teacher and author John Philip Newell and his wife Alison and was centered around Celtic Christianity. John Philip and Alison are love and light personified. They are deep wells of wisdom, exuding generosity and gentleness. This retreat on this holy island felt like crawling into the lap of God and being sung to sleep for a week.

It was heavenly.

And I was an absolute mess.

The arrival of my daughter obliterated my sense of self. The pandemic was still raging. Two years earlier we’d left New York City to live in the woods of the Pacific Northwest but I still didn’t feel at home. I’d just paid a company $70,000 to rebuild my company’s website and it was a complete disaster. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating, and could not for the life of me figure out how to be ME – Caroline, wife, mother, business owner, friend, daughter, internet person, etc etc. I felt estranged from myself and from God.

When we finally arrived on Iona, I made my way to the Abbey, collapsed on the cold stone floor and wept.

Language failed me; all I had were tears.

On the final morning of the retreat, John Philip and Alison invited each of us forward to receive an anointing and blessing. The words they offered was drawn from an ancient Gaelic blessing that had been compiled and put to music in the 1970s:

Deep peace of the running wave to you

Deep peace of the flowing air to you

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you

Deep peace of the shining stars to you

Deep peace of the gentle night to you

Moon and stars pour their healing light on you

Deep peace of Christ, of Christ

Of Christ, the light of the world to you

Deep peace of Christ to you.

I watched my fellow retreatants walk up one-by-one to receive a version of this blessing while I remained glued to my seat, tears streaming down my face. Finally, when there was no one left, I shuffled to the front, shoulders heaving from tears that came from some subterranean place within, a place language still could not penetrate.

John Philip and Alison made the shape of the cross on my forehead, looked me in the eyes, and tenderly said:

Caroline,

Deep peace of the running wave to you

Deep peace of the flowing air to you

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you

Deep peace of the shining stars to you

Deep peace of the gentle night to you

Deep peace of Christ to you

In a season where I felt I had nothing to offer God but my groanings, questions, and failures, a prolonged season where I felt like formless goo, this blessing was a reminder of the enduring sturdiness of God’s presence and peace.

This blessing imprinted itself on me and when Anders was born 18 months later, I had it printed and hung over his crib. When he was nine months old he went ten days without pooping and after a night of vomiting, I drove his limp and lethargic body to the emergency room. While we waited to be seen, the words of this Gaelic blessing returned to me and I started humming my own melody, a prayer for help sung in the last place any parent wants to be.

I felt sturdier than I had two years earlier in Iona. Sure, I was in the throes of my second matrescence but I felt more sure of God’s deep peace abiding with me amidst the gooeyness of daily life. As I sang this blessing over my son, I sensed the faithfulness of God to bridge the gap between us and draw close even if I didn’t have all the words. My voice was shaky, off key, but I knew I was singing a duet and not a solo.

After that day in the emergency room, I started singing this blessing over each of my children each night. As I tuck my daughter in she asks me to sing “Deepeas.” My son is still learning to talk (see BAWA! above), but he knows this song too and sings along in his own way.

Here is the lede I have deeply buried!

LISTEN TO MY PERFECT SON SING OUR LULLABY WITH ME AT BEDTIME

The room is dark, the soft hum of his white noise machine drowns out his sister’s yelling. I’ve zipped him in his sleep sack and wrapped him in my arms as we sway and sing Deep Peace together. He’s nuzzling his head into mine and playing with my hair, giggling at the joy of being so close.

The bliss of the connection we share in this moment eclipses everything else.

I have died and gone to heaven.

Or rather, I am fully alive and heaven is here.

I don’t have to stretch my imagination far to experience God holding me and singing heaven’s Deep Peace over me. I am still learning the words of heaven and so my attempt at a duet sounds more like fumbling through different sounds, trying to match my timing with the sound of my Creator.

God doesn’t care that I don’t know the words or the tune, that I’m not hitting every note perfectly. He doesn’t mind that I’m distracted or if I interrupt him. All of my not-enoughness is eclipsed by the bliss of being held by the God, the God who rejoices over me with gladness and singing, the God who quiets me with love.

The Lord your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.

Zephaniah 3:17

This proclamation in Zephaniah is a celebration of the reunion between God and his people. They are no longer estranged from him but he draws them near.

***

May you know, in the midst of your own estrangement from yourself, God, or others, the insatiable longing of God to swoop you up and sing over you with gladness.

You don’t have to know the words, you just have to be held.

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*Friends, we had three spots on our Greece Retreat just open up. If you’re a reader of my Substack you are the EXACT PERSON I WANT TO COME! Seriously. This will be my fifth retreat at this heaven-on-earth spot and our theme for the week is being mothered by God alongside one another. It’s going to be so special and I’d LOVE for you to be there. Please message me if you’re interested or have any questions! All the details are here.

My son prefers to push his head into the hard wooden sides of his crib; the corners are his particular favorite. Like the hands of a clock, he’ll make his way around his crib, corner to corner, all night long. Around 5am he’ll start stirring and we’ll bring him into bed with us to steal another hour of sleep. While our bed has plenty of warm bodies, it is void of hard wooden corners where one can smash their still squishy skull. Not to be deterred, my son has found a sufficient alternative: my jawbone.

He nuzzles his head right under my chin and curls his knees into my belly, taking the shape he took in my womb, the most primal of human shapes. As in pregnancy, the bigger he gets, the more uncomfortable this is for me, particularly when he presses his feet into my thighs and launches his head harder into my jaw, seeking the sensory input of bone against bone, that soothing pressure of being held by the boundaries of another’s body. Though he has existed twice as long outside my body as inside, I marvel at the way he so instinctually returns to the shape of his first home.

I recently led a yoga class in The Yoga Abbey focused on Jesus’ instructions to a religious leader that in order to see the kingdom of God, one needed to be born again.1

Oh how this phrase “born again” has been used and abused, a shorthand for drawing boundary lines of belonging, an identity marker that tells us more about cultural practices than heart postures. But that’s another post for another day. What I’m more interested in today is how Jesus uses the metaphor of birth to describe the requirements of encountering God’s kingdom. It’s not more knowledge or better behavior that gives one the ability to see—it’s the experience of returning to the womb of God and enduring the terrifying, mysterious, and bloody ordeal of birth.

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When Jesus tells this religious leader that he must be born again he’s inviting us to remember how completely dependent an infant is on his mother—an infant can do nothing to care for, protect, nourish, or sustain itself. He is helpless, entirely reliant on his mother and the pulsing cord that connects them.

This is the existence we must return to if we want to see the kingdom of God.

The physiological phenomenon of birth has not changed much in the two thousand years since Jesus spoke these words. Sure, we have more tools and procedures that save lives and can sometimes make the process more endurable. Having relied on these modern medical interventions to birth both my babies, I am glad they exist. But no one survives the process of birth without immense pressure, pain, and blood.

For the infant especially, the experience must be uniquely shocking. All they’ve ever known is the dark warm enclosure of their mother’s body until the day they are squeezed out of it, thrust into the bright, loud, cold world and the cord connecting them to their first life source is severed. How utterly terrifying.

And also, how utterly exquisite to see the face of the voice that has soothed them from the very beginning. To touch her skin, to smell her body. To know her through all five senses for the very first time.

What pure ecstasy.

As I’ve started tracing the imprints of the maternal heart of God across the Scriptures, I’ve discovered that the images of a mothering God are plentiful but veiled. Much of the imagery has been lost in translation, the nuance of the ancient Hebrew language simplified into our modern English. Take, for example, the Hebrew word raḥam which is often translated as mercy or compassion but also means womb.

In her meaty but brilliant book, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, renowned theologian Phyllis Trible writes,

“Our metaphor lies in the semantic movement from a physical organ of the female body to a psychic mode of being. It journeys from the concrete to the abstract…To the responsive imagination, this metaphor suggests the meaning of love as selfless participation in life. The womb protects and nourishes but does not possess and control. It yields its treasure in order that wholeness and well-being may happen.”2

When Jesus tells the religious leader he must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God, the religious man scoffs – “surely one cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” What one must endure, Jesus insists, is rebirth facilitated by water and Spirit – a rebirth of surrender, submission, mystery, and total dependence.

This is the metaphor I return to at 6am as my son pushes his skull into mine and reaches his pudgy arms around my waist. I imagine Jesus squished inside Mary’s body just like my son wedges himself into mine, his human instinct no different than my son’s.

What does it look like to live a life sustained by the womb of God, and then to submit to the process of being squeezed from that womb, by the power of the Spirit, “in order that wholeness and well-being may happen,” as Trible writes?

I imagine myself curled into the warm body of God just like this, returning to my first home, enclosed and held by God’s mercy and compassion.

And, as I inhale my son’s delicious hair and stroke his perfect skin, I imagine God’s utter delight at my presence in his lap, his gladness over my choice to rest one more hour in his mercy rather than go out and conquer the day.

To choose a life lived with God rather than a life lived for God, this is what it means to be born again.

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You, darkness, of whom I am born –

I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations–just as they are.

It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

-Rilke1

The Bible opens with an epic Hebrew poem about creation.

Two characters appear in the opening lines: God – Elohim – and the Spirit of God – rûaḥ.

Elohim is the one who creates.

And rûaḥ is the one present amidst the creating.

In Hebrew, Elohim is a masculine noun and rûaḥ is a feminine noun. In the opening lines of Genesis, rûaḥ is translated as Spirit, but it’s translated elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as wind or breath.

We believe these characters to be of each other and one with each other, distinct but united. In the same way my breath is a distinct feature and function of my body, it is also the animating force of my body. One does not exist without the other; the same is true of Elohim and rûaḥ.

Masculine and feminine, both present in creation, then and now. Neither are above the other in importance or authority, rather, the Bible depicts Almighty God and hovering Spirit as co-creating.

And where is this Spirit at the beginning of creation?

The second verse of Genesis tells us the earth was formless, empty, dark, watery, and deep. In Hebrew these words paint a picture of “a land that ‘awaits’ to be developed.”2 The setting is anticipatory, mysterious, ripe with potential but without order.

This is where we find rûaḥ, the Spirit of God – in a dark, formless space.

This liminal space is the kind I try to escape as quickly as possible. I want to be where the light is! Give me order! Give me boundaries! Let me connect the dots so it’s clear to me and everyone else what form I and this season are meant to take!

I have heaped on suffering time and again by demanding the amorphous season I find myself in be more defined.

And yet, here is where the Spirit of God abides. She does not make her appearance after the boundary lines have been drawn and names have been given. She is here, when everything is empty and undeveloped.

What do we miss when we bypass these primordial seasons? When we’re too eager to gain clarity rather than communion? When we’d rather flee from the dark abyss rather than abide with the Spirit of God in the midst of it?

I think about my children and their own ever-evolving stages of development. From their first moment of being, I was with them. My son, now 18-months, still refers to himself as Mama. To him, we remain one and the same. But even as those boundary lines of identity become less porous, I remain with him.

Perhaps most surprising is what the Spirit of God is doing in this dark and formless space:

“…rûaḥ was hovering over the surface of the waters.”

The Hebrew word translated as “hover” is the verb rāḥap̄. Strong’s Concordance defines it as “to brood; by implication, to be relaxed:—flutter, move, shake,” while Gesenius' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon describes it as the experiencing of being “moved, affected, specially with the feeling of tender love, hence to cherish.”3

This same verb is used again in Deuteronomy to describe a mother eagle hovering over her nest and spreading her wings to catch her babies as they learn to fly.

The opening scene of the Bible depicts a feminine and maternal Spirit of God brooding over her fledgling young. She is neither anxious nor harried; she is not alarmed by the formless void below her. Her affection for her offspring keeps her alert but relaxed. Though seemingly empty, rûaḥ has her eyes fixed on this abyss that’s ripe with potential.

I don’t have to sleep with one eye open, prepared for whatever monster may arise from the deep dark abyss. There is One who already and always is sweeping the horizon on my behalf. This Spirit sees potential when all I see is emptiness. She is relaxed and unrushed in the waiting.

What a relief to be cherished by a non-anxious Spirit, a Spirit who is moved by tender love and not rigid demands.

What a relief it is to be held by God in this way.

Oh, what a relief.

I find so much comfort knowing this is who God is too. Motherhood so often feels amorphous, gooey, and unfamiliar. What is being formed within me and my children is mysterious and largely out of my control. What I want to do is create, exert control, find the boundary lines of definition.

But really, what I am invited to do again and again is surrender.

Rest.

Trust.

Let go.

Believe that even if I can’t see or comprehend, God is hovering here with me.

Order will come. Meanwhile, rûaḥ remains.

We’re taking a brief departure from our monthly rhythm as I have some very exciting retreat news I want to share with you.

In a previous life, I led yoga retreats around the world. This was my dream - traveling to beautiful places with wonderful people! So fun! And also, so exhausting! It’s been a few years since I’ve led one and for awhile, I wasn’t sure I ever would. But when I sold my business last Fall I noticed almost immediately an energy and joy about leading retreats that I hadn’t felt for a long time. I sat with this excitement for a few months, cautious of redirecting my creative energy into just another new project. But when the new year hit, I knew it was time.

My dear friend Melissa and I have led a few retreats at the most wonderful place in the world – Villa Amalia in Amfilochia, Greece – and we’re going back this September 7-13, 2025!!!!

This will be a week to reconnect with ourselves, one another, and God through rest, play, movement, journaling, creating, group Spiritual Direction, adventuring, dancing, and EATING.

Click here for all the details!

We used to “sell” these retreats – big sales pages and promotional campaigns. But friends, I’m too tired for that. I don’t want to have to convince you to fly across the world to spend the week playing, resting, and processing. Whether because you know me or Melissa or you feel something spark inside you that floods you with warmth and delight, I’m trusting that you’ll just know it’s right for you.

This is not a self-improvement retreat, but an invitation to reconnect with your Belovedness. We’ll practice some gentle yoga every day but not with the goal of getting better at yoga or doing fancy tricks, but to connect with our embodied selves. It will be an intimate group size – less than 12 – so you don’t have to shout to be heard.

This is a retreat for women longing to come alive after big transition seasons where our sense of self feels a little more blurry or invisible. For women longing to nurture their interior life through silence and adventure. For women who love God and long to explore what it is to be mothered by God.

Yes, this is the retreat I’ve been dreaming of.

All the details about where, when, and how much can be found here on my website.

We won’t be opening registration publicly but just to those on the interest list. So, if you are at all interested, please add your name and email!

And of course, please reach out with any questions or if you just want to chat more about what it’s like.

Hope to see you in Greece!

We live in a hundred year old house with narrow passageways and a small kitchen. Countless times a day I slam on my brakes to avoid knocking a kid over as I speed from room to room. My children, ages 4 and 18 months, especially love to position themselves in threshold spaces – lingering right inside the frame of the front door, testing their balance on the beam separating the porch from the living room or standing – just standing – in the narrow bend connecting the kitchen and dining area. I too stand at these thresholds, buzzing behind them, my arms often full of bags, coats, snacks, still-hot meals, begging them to notice me and move, move, MOVE!

It’s as though their small squishy bodies are a brick wall I crash into a dozen times a day. Or, more accurately, a glass door that tricks you into thinking there’s no barrier until you smack right into it (and the tears start flowing).

Nothing else in parenting launches me from calm to irate faster than this does.

I let out my angry monster yell I try to “make fun” by roaring in a silly tone but really it’s my own kind of pressure valve releasing because everything in me wants to just plow forward and yell GAAAHHHHHH WILL YOU PLEASE MOVE?!?!?!

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They (the Instagram parenting influencers that be) say to pay extra attention to the things that trigger us in parenting as our outsized responses often point to our own unresolved stuff. In short, that triggering event points to our work.

When I zoom out and consider what these moments poke at deep within, it is this:

I cannot go where I want to go.

I cannot do what I want to do.

Again and again, and often during some of the most stressful moments of the day, I am stopped, forced to slow down by Love plopping itself right in my path.

I wrote last month about how motherhood thrusts us into the daily (hourly?) work of taking up our cross. Motherhood demands a constant surrendering of my desire, my body, my energy, my creativity, and my time.

But this morning, as my son stooped down to pick up a crusty Cheerio from the floor while I hovered behind him with plates of toast and bowls of oatmeal, the breakfast table just one single step away, I was reminded too that motherhood is an unequivocal taming of my ambition.

More than any other, this restraint digs deepest into my skin. I pull at it constantly, trying to wriggle free but there’s no freeing myself; instead, my bucking and rearing just causes more anguish and exhaustion.

To not go where I want to go, when I want to go, at the pace I want to go enrages me.

Please God, does this part of me really need to be tamed too?

My mentor Alicia Britt Chole, talks about how a strength is not truly a strength unless we know how to restrain it.1 My ambition, speed, and vision have gotten me far in life but they’ve also driven me to supreme burn-out and soul-deep exhaustion. I love making plans and, for the most part, am good at setting a successful path to get there. But my failure is becoming so fixated on the goal, I run over everyone else, myself included. I, of my own free (and stubborn) will, sacrifice my desire, my body, my energy, my creativity, and my time at the altar of this one goal.

Motherhood humbles us by asking us to revisit our goal of Write a Book This Year and set something just as ambitious but far more realistic: Finish Your Bowl of Oatmeal While It’s Still Hot.

God, where are you in all this?

A couple verses have met me in a tender place for many years. At different times of my life I’ve returned to them and they’ve been a source of confession and comfort.

This declaration of God from Isaiah 55 is one such passage:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9

God speaks these words to Israel as they return from exile in Babylon.

This idea of exile is one I keep coming back to when I consider my experience of becoming a mother. To be taken into exile is to leave everything that is familiar and take up residence in a foreign land. Will you return home again? Is home even there? What does home even mean?

This feels very much like the experience of matrescence to me…

Google’s AI overview (*cringe*) helps back this up:

Do I feel like anything is possible?

Yes.

Do I feel discouraged and like my future is uncertain?

Yes.

Am I struggling to meet my basic needs?

Definitely sometimes.

Am I struggling to rebuild my life after the life I knew is no more?

Yup.

Here you meet me God, just as you’ve met your people for millennia.

Your thoughts are not my thoughts.

Your ways are not my ways.

My pace is not your pace

My ambition is not your ambition

I grew up drinking the Kool-Aid of Doing Great Things for God. But what if the greatest thing God is asking me to do right now is to slow myself waaaaaaaay down and not lose my mind every time my child plants themself right in my path?

To lay on the altar our pace and our place (or whatever else we cling to as a cloak of identity) and be baptized in the waters of self-forgetfulness, this is the grisly stuff motherhood asks of us.

And this is the stuff that forms us into the image and likeness of Jesus who modeled this unhurried, present, and connected life for us. How does God choose to come to earth after all, but as a vulnerable baby who grows into a wobbly toddler who likely stopped and stood right in front of Mary all the ever-loving time.

A Mantra

This lesson is on its return visit to me. I remember wrestling with it when my daughter was a similar age as my son is now and the words that came to me then were, move at the pace of Love.

Love is not in a hurry.

Love just wants to be near to us, no matter what we’re doing.

Love delights in our delight.

Love trusts in God’s perfect ways, thoughts, and time.

Love knows that there will always be more than enough.

Love rests, deeply.

Whatever plants itself in your path today, whether cute or maddening (or, likely, both), may you experience them as God’s grace toward you, and may you move at the pace of Love.

Tell me I’m not the only one taking many slow deep breaths…

What’s taming your ambition right now?

What’s stopping you in your tracks?

Seriously, I love hearing how this resonates with you ♥️

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So is life. Rather than resist its gravitational pull I have decided to just go with it, at least until the end of this year. I don’t want to look back on this season and regret not leaning into my deep need to rest, release, and just be.

But what continues to sit at the front of my heart is these questions of motherhood and God. When the creative wave crests it’s churning with questions about how God is, what it is to be a mother, and what it is to be mothered by God. I madly type them into my Notes app, a list of half-formed thoughts and run-on sentences written with one hand while the other holds a child.

I finally harnessed one of those waves and channeled its energy into this reflection on how mothers have a profound lived experience of Jesus’ instruction to “deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

I hope you enjoy; please let me know what you think in the comments.

Around this time two years ago I found out I was pregnant with my second child, my son. I’d suspected for a few days already – a cellular exhaustion had gripped me and I was waking up in the middle of the night needing to use the bathroom. All signs I remembered from the first time around.

I dug through the closet to find the box of pregnancy tests, scanning the back to see if these kinds of things expired, and then slipped into the bathroom. While waiting the requisite two minutes, I lay on the floor of our living room, watching my two year old climb onto the coffee table and jump off – her latest trick.

Conceiving both our children happened quickly, for which I’m grateful, but I was deeply ambivalent both times I saw the test results.

The first time around I was awash with anxiety, aware that my life would seismically change but having no concept for how. I found pregnancy to be deeply draining and grieved for the ways life would never be the same. Excitement and panic feel quite similar in our bodies and I found myself tipping constantly between the two.

This experience of grief, excitement, loss, and bliss only amplified after my daughter arrived. Gone was the fear that life wouldn’t be as great as before but present was the suffocating realization that this was forever and the self I knew was no more.

I had birthed a daughter and a mother, and now it was time to raise both.

Two years ago, just before Thanksgiving, my husband sheepishly walked out of the bathroom holding up a positive pregnancy test and this remembering came crashing back.

This time I knew what was coming – the exhaustion, the nausea, the probing doctors appointments. But I also knew (with a sinking feeling) that the next two years of life would not be mine. My body, my time, my creative energy belonged to another. The bras that finally fit again would have to be retired. The cute jeans I’d recently bought wouldn’t last longer than a couple more weeks. I would not be joining my friends on any fun big trips and, alas, there would be no Friday G&Ts (a sacred ritual in our house).

Yes, these are the superficial things that pregnancy and the first few postpartum months take from a mother, but they are emblematic of a deeper loss:

The things that helped me feel like me were now out of reach. My self, as I knew and experienced her, was, like the proverbial caterpillar, spinning a cocoon and melting into goo.

A Biblical parallel

“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus says to his disciples.1

I cringed at this requirement of Jesus’ for many years. Partly, I think, because it’s been poorly interpreted and partly because our culture sets such rigid lines for what a woman should do/think/feel that many of us have already spent a lifetime self-denying (but not in a holy, God-pleasing kind of way). But I digress.

The Greek word translated “deny” is the word aparneomai which is used elsewhere in the New Testament to mean “to forget one's self, lose sight of one's self and one's own interests.”2

to forget one’s self

to lose sight of one’s self

to lose sight of one’s own interests

Is this not what motherhood plunges us into, like it or not? Some of us enter this portal of self-denial kicking and screaming, claw marks tearing through the wallpaper, but deny ourselves we must inevitably and eventually do.

This is the holy invitation and sacred gift of motherhood, to see matrescence3 as a rite of passage that is intrinsically and wholly transformative.

This radical transformation was what so shocked me when I became a mother. No one told me my life would never be the same not only because I now had the responsibility of caring for another, but because I wouldn’t be the same. I would become someone new.

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Here, let me show you

I remember stumbling into my husband’s home office when our firstborn was just a few weeks old. He’d been in there all day, working away, by himself, while I’d been downstairs desperately trying to eat with one hand, use the bathroom with one hand, and empty the dishwasher with one hand. My daughter had finally fallen asleep and I now had two hands with which to conduct my affairs. Overwhelmed at all that was now possible I trudged into his office to say hi. After chatting a bit about the day he asked if I’d thought anymore about going to Hawaii on vacation in a couple months.

I stared at him blankly, a million rage-filled thoughts bubbling to the surface.

“I literally…cannot think…more than…three hours…from now,” I stammered as I raked my fingers through my unwashed hair.

I was enraged. Bewildered. Devastated. Horrified.

What is wrong with me? Why is my brain stuck in this three hour time loop? How can he just sit here, by himself, all day, working away, as if nothing is different WHEN MY LIFE HAS BEEN OBLITERATED AND NOTHING IS THE SAME?! Hawaii?! HA! Caroline of two months ago would love to go to Hawaii. But the Caroline of this moment cannot comprehend driving to the grocery store with this tiny human let alone getting on an airplane and flying across an ocean.

This is when it became clear that my dear blessed husband and I were having two very, very different experiences.

I did not know who I was anymore and this alarmed me. Perhaps most terrifying was the feeling that I had no control over what was happening to me – no amount of rallying or new clothes or cute planners was going to snap me out of this. I did not know how long this unbecoming would last or if there was even a someone new I was becoming. Was there a light at the end of this endless three-hour-loop tunnel?

Here, in this soup of shedding skin, arrives Jesus’ invitation to follow.

As mothers, Jesus’ instruction to deny ourselves is not some path we stumble upon in the woods, ponder for a bit, and then willingly enter after rationally weighing the pros and cons. As mothers, denying oneself is not an act of effort and will. Rather, it is thrust upon us the moment we surrender our bodies to give life to another.

In light of *all this,* I wish we mothers would give ourselves massive grace, particularly during the intense early years of matrescence. The things we used to do to follow Jesus (read the Bible, journal, go to church, serve, give, lead) are usually stripped from us because of the demands of caring for another. When our relationship with God is built only on what we do, our sense of belonging in relationship is jeopardized when we are no longer able to do those things.

But what if, in the midst of losing sight of ourselves and our interests, we knew ourselves as right in the center of God’s love?

Not doing is perhaps the hardest work of all. It requires trust that we are enough, just as we are, and a belief that our worth isn’t predicated on what we can do for God. Letting go and trusting…this indeed is what it means to follow Jesus.

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Some closing questions

My son is nearly 16 months old now. I stopped nursing him a few months ago. My cycle is back and regular again. My clothes still don’t fit but I’m accepting that perhaps this is the new shape of my body, so I’ll be asking Santa for a gift card to Nordstrom this year. I have passed the two year mark from conception and am slowly feeling into the contours of this new self I am becoming.

I am softer, slower. More resilient and ok with uncertainty. I have more gray hairs and skin like tissue paper around my belly button. But boy am I strong, brave, and more determined than ever.

These are the questions that have been churning lately that I’ll leave you with:

• What if nothing is wrong with us?

• What if we are right where we’re meant to be?

• What if none of this surprises or disappoints God, but actually brings great delight to the One in whose image we are made?

• What if it is actually a gift to know, in our bodies, outside of our effort and control, that giving up our lives for the sake of another is the most Christlike thing we do?

• What if it’s ok to feel bewildered, adrift, lost, and out of touch?

• What if we trusted that the Light will meet us in this darkness and lead us home?

I would genuinely love to hear how this resonates with you. Please let me know in the comments <3

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Lighting a candle and thinking of you this Advent season.

xo

P.s. We did actually make it to Hawaii. We checked more bags than I ever had in my life and spent more time in our AirBnb than at the beach. It was most certainly not a vacation. But memories were made! Huzzah!

This baby wasn’t an actual human baby (something my therapist reminded me of multiple times over the years).

It was a business that I birthed nearly seven years ago and poured my whole self into for many of those years.

Birthing, growing, and nurturing this baby – The Yoga Abbey – was all the things you can imagine: thrilling, terrifying, stretching, fulfilling, and excessively stressful. There were many years where I wasn’t sure where I ended and the business started, we were so intertwined. I deeply love The Yoga Abbey and, as every leader who’s ever stepped aside says, it truly was the honor of my lifetime to be part of this God vision for its early years.

But some time ago it became clear to me that my relationship with this first baby needed to change. I could no longer give it what it needed; my ambition, vision, and energy had been overtaken (hijacked?) by another baby – an actual human one this time.

The timing of all of this – selling my business + launching this Substack – feels rather serendipitous as my first human baby turns four this week. It’s her birthday and mine; the day she came into this world and the day my world as I knew it was obliterated. Her birth was so universe-altering that I now think about time as B.C. (before Charlie).

Life B.C. feels like a dream, the life of some other version of Caroline. What was it like to reliably fit into the same clothes year after year? To go where I wanted, when I wanted, listening to whatever I wanted? Let’s be real – I mostly worked all the time and worried about whether I was making the most of my one “wild and precious life.” I smile when I think of my earnestness and naiveté.

And also, when I close my eyes I can so viscerally remember myself back in my tiny New York apartment, bopping off to yoga classes, coffee shops, and kid-free walks in Central Park. Many times over the last few months I’ve turned to my husband and asked him if he remembered what it was like to actually look forward to the weekend that would reliably be filled with sleep, sex, and doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. How blissful it was to be the center of my own universe.

Anyway, here we are, four years and another baby later.

To wrap words around the experience of becoming a mother feels elusive. There is both a universality and individuality to the experience. Becoming a mother to my ferocious firstborn was different than becoming a mother to my easygoing second-born. Mothering a daughter is different than mothering a son. Mothering during a pandemic is different from mothering in whatever crazy non-pandemic times we find ourselves in today. What remains constant is how relentlessly my children need my body, my presence, and my provision.

As I tend to my children, I feel intimately aware of the ways God tends to me. I see myself reflected in their meltdowns, complaints, and need for comfort.

As I kneel down to attune to their feelings, wipe their tears, and wrap them in my arms, I remember that this is what God longs to do for me when I am swept up in the overwhelming current of frustration and powerlessness. 

I see God reflected in the way I give even when it feels like I have nothing left to give.

“This is my body, broken for you…”

When my daughter reaches for my hand as we walk down the street sharing every thought that pops into her head, I feel God’s delight and joy swell my own heart. “Yes, this is what walking hand in hand with God is meant to be like. This is enough.”

And as I hold my little one in a dark room, rocking him to sleep, my eyes fixed on his perfect features, I sense God holding me with a loving gaze, for as long as it takes, savoring every beautiful feature.

“God is Love loving”1

-David Fleming

When I became a parent, Jesus’ teaching that we are to call God “Father” was a revelation. The Old Testament gives us many names for God reflecting many of God’s attributes but by and large, the attributes reflected by these names emphasize God’s power, sovereignty, and might. God was something big and out there.

And then Jesus comes along and refers to God as a parent – as one who is bound to you by blood and lineage for eternity, as one who wept at your birth, as the one you call when your tire pops or you overdraw on our bank account or when your favorite team wins. This God isn’t distant. This God is intimate. 

And while Jesus refers to God as Father (making this name for God good and true and right), the Bible is also full of feminine and maternal imagery for God. Yahweh describes themself2 as a birthing mother, a nursing mother, a midwife, a mourning mother, a mother hen, a mother bear, and a mother eagle. Jesus himself is depicted doing things typically reserved for women, such as preparing and serving food. 

These days I do not have hours to spend studying my Bible, serving my church, or listening to the latest and greatest sermon. If I’m lucky, I have thirty minutes alone to shower/eat/think a complete thought. So this daily life has to be the place where God meets me and where I meet God.

The most powerful spiritual encounter I’ve had these last few years has come to me in the daily grind of mothering.

So, here we are. A Substack exploring the ideas of Mothering and God, God as Mother, and all the other things that are true about motherhood and God that don’t often get talked about.

What to expect

I’m aiming for one long-form essay a month centered on the mothering heart of God. If my children sleep past 6:30am, don’t get sick, or there are no good shows to watch, I’ll write more 👍

These essays will pull threads from Scripture, the science of mothering, and reflections from my own journey to weave a fuller picture of who God is and the sacredness of mothering.

I am writing about this as a woman in my mid-30s mothering two young children alongside my work-from-home husband. But I sincerely hope you’ll join me here whether or not our life seasons overlap. Every single one of us yearns to be mothered and our world is in desperate need of mothering. Connecting with the mothering heart of God is not just for women nursing their babies or cooking dinner for their families.

Please subscribe!

*All subscribers* will enjoy one free post a month but *paid subscribers* will receive an additional behind the scenes post into the messy muddle of how I’m embracing the mother heart of God in my own life. These posts will be more intimate and raw, a reminder, hopefully, of how there is no destination with mothering or being mothered, just a continued becoming. 

Paid subscribers will also get to leave comments which, honestly, is the best part. The best encouragement I’ve received as a mother is, “me too.” In this unnaturally isolating mothering environment, a little solidarity goes a long way. I’d love to hear how these posts resonate with you and what Mother, God means to you.

Your paid subscriptions will help cover the costs of childcare, our Disney+ subscription, and our ever-growing Costco bill (💸💸💸).

If paying for a subscription means cutting your own Disney+ cord, then shoot me an email at caroline@carolinewilliamsyoga.com and I’ll share one with you (let the children keep watching Bluey!).

I’m super excited to be here, with you, finally writing about the thing that has consumed me the last four+ years. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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