You’ve been a mom to an incredible and astonishing girl for 1-1/2 years now. She amazes me, but what amazes me even more is how you’ve refused to let yourself settle into a stiff mold of what a mom should be. While rightly acknowledging God’s calling on other people to be a certain type of mom, you refused to let yourself be swayed into being something that didn’t feel true to your life and your calling.
You went to God with it again and again. You asked him why He made you a mom in the first place, where expectations for mothering come from, how you and Jonathan could continue to minister, how a baby changed your family’s mission–or if it did at all. You’ve continued to ask for big dreams and big solutions from our Father even though it often felt like your world was shrinking to the size of a rocking chair.
Sometimes you’ve told me it seems like women have children and they lose the chance to give their life to sharing Jesus because they’ve given their life to the monotonous work of raising a child. In fact, maybe God is behind it all, asking women to sacrifice themselves in the name of family instead of in the name of Jesus. And that’s kind of unfair.
This is all on my mind because of the sermon we heard last week on Luke 24.
You know the chapter. It’s the one with my name in it! It’s Sunday morning and Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna went to Jesus’ tomb with spices for embalming. When they got there, an angel asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, He is risen!” and off the Marys and Joanna went to tell the disciples.
You know what that means? It means Jesus chose women to be the first to share the gospel. The Marys and Joanna were the first evangelists.
They went to the tomb to care for Jesus’ body, a traditional woman’s role (and one with honor), but they were transformed by their encounter with the gospel–the news that Jesus is risen–and dropped what they were doing to share it.
You’ve been created in the mold of the Marys and Joanna: women who follow and serve their Savior and are set loose to share because of the gospel. And these women were probably moms. Mary was the mother of James. Joanna was the wife of Chuza, and back then if you were a wife, you were probably a mother. But God still called them to make His name known.
He’s still calling you, too.
