On Femininity

Mother

We all began in the womb of a mother. The first nourishment, the first safe place, the first home of growth, the first place our limbs were stretched and our nerves sensed the world and our ears took note of the pitch of voices in conversation or song, it all happened inside the wombs of our mothers. Our mothers held within themselves places of life and safety and growth.

To be sure: While in a world now suffering under sin, not each and every woman is blessed with pregnancies and children. But still, the art and purpose of God in the female nature as a house of life hasn’t been fundamentally altered. Women didn’t stop bearing children after sin and death were ushered into the world in Eden. Eve, the first woman, the one directly created by God from the flesh of the first man, was the mother of all the living, and while the curse of sin scarred childbearing (Genesis 3:16) for her and all women, the grace of God in Christ uses childbearing to bless and heal womanhood (1 Timothy 2:14-15). The conception of life and the nourishing of life and the delivering of babies and raising them up as children, these are essential parts of womanhood. And without them the world would be barren and desolate.

A married woman who can be blessed with childbearing has a profoundly worthy gift to bestow upon the world. She can hold and protect and bring forth and cultivate human life. The peak of creation is humanity, God’s chosen and hand-crafted gardeners of the world He’s made, and women bring forth humans. God breathed and spoke womanhood into being, and by His very Word we know this is at the heart of why He did. There is almost no higher calling under Heaven than motherhood. A shadow of what God waited until the sixth day to do, to breathe human life into a world fashioned for it, is inside each pregnant mother, and the shadow grows longer and wider with each sandwich she makes, each diaper she changes, each lullaby she sings, each math problem she corrects, and each Bible verse she helps to be memorized. A tiny worshiper, a tiny God-breathed gardener, a spark of flame from God’s good creative fires glows in her womb and under her watch.

While women like Hannah and Elizabeth weep over their not being able conceive children in Scripture, there are powerful forms the Eve-mother shape of womanhood can manifest in aside from the bearing and raising of children. One of the most touching, instructive relationships my children and our whole family has had over the last decade is with an older woman we shared a church with who had a daughter living in another city and as of yet no grandchildren. I love this woman to the core of my soul. She has been an aunt to my kids, an older sister to me, a mother to my wife, a wise and humble and gracious and faithful woman of noble heart and devout faith. I cherish her, and I will be thankful to the day I die for all of the thousands of little words, gestures, hugs, smiles, prayers, and patient graces she showed my children and my wife and me. She was the best of what a mother can be to us all, in different ways and in different shapes and in different times, but all of them gloriously and beautifully feminine. In the best ways, she was Eve’s gracious gift to the Thomases. I am so thankful she was. She. So much is stored in that word as a I type it while thinking of her face, her quiet but firm faith, her smiles that packed all the warmth of my parents’ living room fireplace. She was our mother, our sister, our co-heir in a family of daughters and sons. She.

Helper

The feminine nature is a glorious, life-giving good that Yahweh has woven into the world. Eve was not ancillary to the world, or to Adam. She was the only helper fit for him; nothing else under the sun would do. She was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and all future boys would be leaving their mothers and fathers to cling to the likes of her. They are blessed by wives of such beauty and motherliness, and they become better men as they are helped by and lead such wives.

It is not good for man to be alone. Because this is God’s spoken wisdom concerning a good world He made, I know that it is truer than the best guesses of our best thinkers, that it will still be true and worth living in light of a million years after the White House and the United Nations building are dust and ashes. God made man, and even before sin and all its poisons got into the bloodstream of creation, it was not good for him to be alone. And it was not enough that there were animals for him to enjoy and give names to, a world for him to work and tame, and all of it basking sinlessly in the beauty of the grace of God. It still was not good that there was no helper fit for him. And so the unimaginably righteous and knowing Father took a rib from the man He had made and fashioned the woman, a helper fit for him. She was made perfectly and beautifully to be what nothing else in creation could ever have been: His helper. She was his glory, the bone to strengthen his bones and the flesh to soften his flesh. In being what only she could be for him, she was herself. And when a woman is what only she can be for her husband, she is a most ancient and true shape of herself.

This help the woman was made to be does take shape in places other than marriage, and we see that both in unmarried women and in married women who employ the help and mercy of womanhood beyond their marriages. When Paul commended widows who had washed the feet of the saints, the heart he was commending was one of gracious help poured from deep and lively faith. There are women in our churches who exhibit this feminine glory and beauty for decades, often in ways that keep our churches healthy and holy and places of life and warmth and worship long after they’re gone. They make meals for funerals, pray thick and sympathetic prayers for the sick, graciously bear the tears and frustrations and sadnesses and despairs of their sisters in Christ. They tend the youngest and wildest of our souls, the children who ask them for gum or bump into them in the parking lot or try to listen patiently as they’re told to not run so fast. They sustain the household of God like pillars of beautiful stone mapped with the ornaments of God’s grace etched deep into their surfaces. The help Eve gave Adam is what made the carving of a home and a garden out of a good world possible, and the help the faithful women of gentle and quiet spirits give to our Savior and His Body make the carving of churches out of a hostile world just as possible. Feminine holiness and faithfulness are a distinct stripe of strength and warmth that we can’t live without. It is not good to be alone from womanhood.

The Last Stroke

The beauty of femininity is a million miles deep. It stretches down to the bedrock of this glorious, buzzing, humming, thriving, groaning world. God made it last, of all His wondrous works. The final stroke on the canvas was womanhood, and though Adam had seen all God’s beauty in moon and forests and bears and birds, from star-flung sky down to mountain roots, it was this last brushstroke that made him sing. Our wise God saw fit to close His opening chapter with femininity, and His first child Adam was wise enough to know what he saw now was stunning.

Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Genesis 2:23