My grandmothers were not the kind of women who let you cherry-pick. If you were going to read the Bible, you were going to read all of it. No skipping the hard parts, no excusing the strange parts, no quietly setting the Old Testament aside like it was just prologue. The whole thing, they insisted, was equally important and equally necessary.
I didn’t know when I was a child what a gift that was. It took years, decades really – a lot of living and experiencing struggle, to understand that their insistence on the full text was what eventually gave me the tools to see the difference between Christ himself and the institution that carries his name. You can’t tell the real thing from the counterfeit if you’ve only ever been handed a partial map. My grandmothers gave me the whole map. What I did with it took most of my life to figure out. But the foundation was there, laid by women who probably didn’t think they were doing anything extraordinary. They thought they were just being faithful.
That, I’ve come to understand, is exactly what spiritual motherhood looks like.
I am also grateful, in a way that lands a little differently every year, for a woman I’ve never met. My birth mother made a choice, and because she did, I exist. I no longer romanticize it the way I did as a young girl, or pretend to know her personal story, but I am here. I was not discarded. On a day when we stop to think about mothers, she belongs in that thought.
The mother who raised me is a different story, and a longer one. She shaped me in ways I spent years resisting and more years simply refusing to see. It was only after she was gone, after Alzheimer’s had slowly taken her and then death had finished the work, that I began to truly understand her. Grief has a way of completing what presence couldn’t. The softening that comes after loss is not always sadness. Sometimes it is finally seeing someone clearly, without the static of daily life and human expectation in the way. I see her now. I love her now in a way that is cleaner and more honest than what I managed while she was here. I think she would be okay with that.
Then there is my son, Jesse. The beautiful, special needs boy who made me a mother.
The world looks at a child with special needs and tends to see the difficulty first. The appointments, the adjustments, the exhaustion, the grief of unmet expectations. I won’t pretend none of that is real. But what the world cannot see from the outside, what you can only know from the inside, is what it does to you. What it opens in you.
Raising Jesse has given me a kind of sight I did not have before. A patience that was not natural to me. A deeper understanding of what it means to love someone exactly as they are, not as you hoped they would be. A knowing that need is not weakness, and dependency is not failure, and the things the world calls inconvenient are often the things most full of grace.
I would not trade it. I don’t say that to perform for the audience. I say it because it is the truth.
Somewhere in all of that, in the grandmothers and the birth mother I never knew and the mother I understood too late and the son who has taught me more than I have taught him, I began to understand something about the nature of motherhood itself. Not just biological motherhood. Something bigger.
There is a kind of nurturing that every person is capable of, and that every person desperately needs. It doesn’t require a biological child. It doesn’t require a particular role. It requires presence. Attention. The willingness to see someone, really see them, and stay.
Paul knew this. He wrote to Timothy:
I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice. (2 Timothy 1:5)
Paul referenced these two women. He acknowledged them by name and gave them credit. The faith that moved through generations began with them. That is not incidental, and certainly not accidental. That is the point.
We are all called, at various moments, to be that presence for someone. To be the one who hands them the whole map and says: all of it matters, don’t skip the hard parts. To be the one who stays when staying is inconvenient. To be the one who sees.
God doesn’t leave that calling undefined, and he doesn’t describe it in cold or clinical terms. He reaches for it personally. In Hosea 11, God describes his own relationship with Israel the way a parent describes a child taking first steps:
I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms… I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them. (Hosea 11:3-4)
That is not the image of a distant sovereign. That is someone bent down, hands out, coaxing a wobbling child forward.
Jesus himself reached for the same kind of image when he wept over Jerusalem:
How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not. (Matthew 23:37)
Christ is using a mother’s instinct to describe his own longing for us.
And in Isaiah 49, God answers the deepest fear any of us carry – that we are forgettable – with this:
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of mine hands. (Isaiah 49:15-16)
“Graven thee upon the palms of mine hands.” That line lands differently when you know what his palms looked like.
Even Paul, when he wanted to describe the tenderness of genuine spiritual care, didn’t reach for authority or strategy. He reached for this:
We were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her children. (1 Thessalonians 2:7)
What God designed in the nurturing instinct is not small, and it is not incidental. It is a reflection of himself.
There is a reason the nurturing instinct has historically been associated with women, and it’s not because men are necessarily incapable of it. It’s because the feminine archetype, in the deepest and most ancient sense, carries something the world right now is genuinely starving for: an innate, soul deep softness that is not weakness. Presence that is not passivity. The kind of strength that shows up quietly, does not need accolades or validation, and stays even when it is invisible.
The world is not short on hardness. It is short on grace, and I think we have to be honest about what has been destroying it. It is the significant cultural movement of “feminism” over the past several decades that has perpetually told women that the nurturing instinct is a trap. It has forced into them – conditioned them to truly believe – that to be taken seriously, you must harden. That tenderness is a liability, and the highest goal is to move through the world the way men have historically moved through it, on force, on competition, on the refusal to yield.
What that movement promised was liberation. What it delivered, for a lot of women, was the loss of something they can’t quite name but feel the absence of. The world got harder. Not freer, and certainly not better. Harder.
Perhaps the sharpest irony of all is that the movement that spent decades screaming against the patriarchy has, in its latest chapter, arrived at celebrating men who claim womanhood for themselves, occupying women’s spaces, erasing women’s categories, demanding that women make room. If that is the destination, it is worth asking what was actually being fought for all along, and considering the answer.
Personally, I am not interested in being treated like a man. I am interested in being exactly what I am – a woman, a mother, a daughter, a granddaughter – and having that be enough. More than enough. Sacred, even. For much of society, that sacredness has been lost, and it shows.
Motherhood, in all its forms, is one of the places where God’s character is most legibly written. The patience. The presence. The willingness to be inconvenienced for someone else’s becoming. The love that keeps showing up even when it isn’t acknowledged or understood until much later, sometimes not until after you’re gone.
My grandmothers handed me the whole Bible. My birth mother handed me my life. My mother handed me a formation I’m still unpacking. My son handed me a deeper heart than I had before.
That is not nothing. That is everything.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Twin Tree Project 