She is a Color They Will Always See
We had our sixth child yesterday, and as I went home to spend the night with the other kids while my wife and our newest son stayed at the hospital, I took note of the little changes made in each of them by Mommy’s absence. The little twists, the unexpected ripples I saw in their habits or moods or questions, made me very happy. I am, as I sit here back in the hospital and think about my wife, incredibly grateful for her motherhood. She is spending herself on something significant. She has left marks, eternal and meaningful scores, on the souls of our children. Our God has been gracious enough to use her efforts and sweat and sleepless nights and prayers and meals and hugs and read stories and afternoon walks, He has used her, to forever stain the wood in my children’s souls.
The world felt a little different for my children last night. God was still God, and we read our Bible and sang “Tis So Sweet” and had our little nightly routines. Fun was still had we were still a family. But a color was missing. The world felt altered for all of us, though they saw it more clearly, probably a feature of their being children and free to be mere observers of life than Daddy can be. Their world was missing a color. There was a specific shape of hug, a particular shade of mercy, a single note in the symphony of voices that was absent. And it was noticed. By five little souls seeking to experience the world God made, who are always watching and always listening and always, always feeling, it was noticed.
How significant is a life? A truth of God’s Word is that no human being is worthless. Every person suffering under God’s wrath in Hell has weight and moment and worth as a human. None of us gets to be an insect. None of us gets to be redundant. We are humans. We are the peak of God’s creation. Within the spectrum of human experience, though, God allows us to make more or less of our lives. We can spend them on hobbies, on vocations, on pleasures, on parenting, on any number and combination of endeavors. Through the faithful example of her mothers in the faith, my wife’s heart was shaped to hunger being the wife of a Christian man and raising children in fear and worship of God. It was a desire she felt from the earliest days of childhood. And because He is a good God, He answered that desire with a “Yes.”
Satan’s trickery brought about a curse of God’s good world, including upon the gendered callings of dominion work and motherhood. But Satan cannot uncreate, and so here we still stand on God’s world, male and female, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and we are called to be faithful amidst the weeds and pains of a world infected with our sin. As we adopt that calling we are to pray in faith for His blessing. And as a good God, He listens to those prayers and takes note of that faith. God is still making and shaping and redeeming His world, and He uses flesh and blood people in His work. My wife could have been a wonderful employee at a non-profit, writing stories and putting on events and being a warm ray of light in a vocational workplace. But the poetry she writes she now writes upon souls, and the light she sheds now warms the babies God has given her, as it lights the way for their twelve little steps. She is a daughter of Sarah, not fearing anything frightening, and having a beauty that is quite imperishable.
What do I say to my young brothers and sisters in Christ? Men, marry and protect and cherish and lead a woman in such a way as to make her calling of motherhood and home a story she hungers to be told through her hands. Women, do not be led by our day’s misguided desires for women to be men. God crafted Eve with wise intent and with a smiling desire upon her body and soul to be the helper of her husband and the mother of all the living. Our scarred and groaning world bears a curse, but it is blessed wherever daughters of the Most High take up Eve’s calling and carry it in faith.
My wife is a color my children will always see. And always see through. And like my first father Adam, I look at her and marvel at what my God has made.