As you might’ve guessed, I’m not a mother. But I have known many over the years through my local church and my family—and then there was a rather unusual stretch of time where I worked for a pretty popular live chat service (“Ask Ligonier”) designed to answer biblical and theological questions. I had the unique experience of being able to speak one-on-one with thousands of parents each week. And so, when I think of motherhood specifically, my mind is drawn to the stories. I think of a friend describing the way her mother could, radar like, detect when her children were quietly getting up to mischief—and disrupt their plans with a well-aimed chancla from across the room. I think of the ninety-nine-year-old woman I once met in a nursing home who had outlived both of her sons. I remember how she described the longing she still felt thirty years later to just absorb some of their sickness into herself; perhaps then they wouldn’t have had to suffer so. I think of my friend who is only now getting used to life without a mom but worries that moving on means she somehow loves her less. And, of course, I think of my own mom. Her well-worn Bible contains two bookmarks, each emblazoned with a picture of my brother and me—mementos of our blunder years—serving as daily reminders to bring us to the Lord in prayer.
Though we all have stories about our mothers—some happy and some somber—we all feel something of the challenge that comes with defining what motherhood actually is. Is motherhood self-sacrifice? Can motherhood diminish a woman’s potential? Are mothers of less importance in the family unit than fathers? More essentially, what is a woman to begin with? If one is unable to bear children, are they somehow less than the woman who does? And so, we turn to the Scriptures with our burdens and fears so that we might be conformed to God’s word rather than cultural inventions. Yet, as Kendra Dahl demonstrates in “Restoring Eve,” some of the most common narratives surrounding what it means to be a woman are grounded in faulty exegesis. In this essay, Kendra helps us to reorient our beliefs about womanhood around a true understanding of Eve—and what it means to be a true daughter of Eve in a fallen world.
One of the recurring themes I’ve heard in conversation with Christian mothers over the years has been the difficulty of reconciling their influence on their children’s lives with the hard realities of what they cannot change. Mothers are often confronted with temptations to doubt the covenant faithfulness of the Lord in profound ways. What does it mean for a mother to exercise the Christian virtue of hope—particularly when so much of her everyday experience seems contrary to it? As Simonetta Carr shows us in “Hope Against Hope,” God has not called her to a simple sort of optimism “tinged with Christian hues.” A Christian mother’s hope, like that of all believers, is intertwined with faith and love. She is not called to cast herself onto a fanciful sort of false hope, but into the arms of a true and certain Savior.
In many respects, parenting will cause you to come face to face with your limitations in ways that are as profound as they humbling. Yet this, too, is a good gift from the Lord. By revealing to us our limitation and failings—and often the failings of our own parents—our gaze is drawn by our loving heavenly Father to consider his care for us and for our children: his unfailing faithfulness rather than to our own. This is not to denigrate the profound role which God has entrusted to mothers to raise their children. Rather, as Bryan Chapell points out in “The Promise-Driven Family,” God gives himself to us as our model of what it means to be a godly parent—what it means to raise them in the patterns of his love. In so doing, mothers are taught to discern the love they require and, thus, the love which they are privileged to give.
