“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” — Isaiah 49:15
For most people, their first experience of God comes through their mother. If He is love, then a child’s first taste of that love comes through her arms.
God arranged the world with windows into eternity—prototypes and shadows scattered like signposts, drawing our eyes and hearts toward Him. We glimpse His majesty in creation, in mountains and oceans, stars and storms, but we encounter His nature in relationship.
Every bond on earth was designed to show us something of His shape, His form, His essence. And the very first of those bonds—the very first place a person comes to know His warmth, His nourishment, His comfort—is through a mother. Though not the only stage in a child’s journey, it is the first. And if they are ever to come to know the strength of fatherhood, and the love of the Father above, it begins with the embrace of a mother.
Helen, when I think of that truth, my heart returns to the day you were born. I wrote about that moment years later in my book, A Time to Be Born, because it marked the beginning of my understanding of what motherhood truly meant.
Excerpts from A Time to Be Born:
Before I’d become a mother, my dreams for myself had been lofty. I’d envisioned bustling foreign cities, the music of other languages, the spicy scents of exotic markets as I served in mission work. These “important” things dominated my thoughts. Motherhood? That was simply life’s background music, peripheral to the “important” things—that is, until Helen. But now, holding my first baby in my arms, her milky scent sweet and her chubby warm body’s weight pressed against mine made me feel as if I’d been let in on a profound secret.
My first birth proportioned my world differently than ever before, shifting the weight of my thoughts and dreams from inside to outside of myself. My memories drifted to that life-changing day of March 30, 1998 . . .
When, at last, our little wet baby Helen slipped from my body and passed from my mother’s hands into my own trembling ones, I clutched her to myself in gratitude and disbelief. She opened one eye, gazing at me as if seeing me from another world. Her tiny red fingers clutched mine, and in that moment, a light seemed to ignite in my life that cast the whole of my world in a new glow.
The reduction and triumph of birth had conveyed something to me I’d never seen before. Every time I looked into her deep, black eyes or touched her velvet skin, I thought, What could be more wonderful than holding in my hands the precious, moldable clay of a human soul? What could be more important than nurturing the seeds of eternal love in a human life? What if God gave me this child to raise to become a Sarah or an Esther?
I knew my dream had come true all in that one night; I had become a missionary, and my mission field began right there in my own bedroom. In that moment I had also become a teacher, a nurse: a mother. Something unfurled like the wet wings of a butterfly inside of me, the beginning of a transformation that would affect my view of the world, of those I loved and would come to love. In this birth, I had been reborn—as a mother.
That night was the first time I realized that a mother is not merely raising children—she is shaping souls. She is building God’s kingdom.
Scripture tells us in 1 John 4:8, “God is love.” And if our children are to learn who God is, then they must experience that love—not only in word, but in form. In our hands. In our voices. In our presence. In our being present.
Until you have taken on the full identity of what
