Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s epic is said to have been source material for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, thinks the women of this summer’s blockbuster are a little mid. The queens and goddesses of the original Odyssey are cunning, deceptive, funny, and ambitious. But in Nolan’s adaptation, “the script allows only for a set of all too brief tableaux of female victims.”1

Yes, the passive roles of women in storytelling is lamentable—enraging? The damsel in distress trope has gotten old. But I think the prominence of women’s pain in Nolan’s retelling is intentional. And I think he’s depicting something else that often goes ignored: the grief of existing in a depraved world.

Unlike his other films, where that depravity of mankind is shown on screen (e.g. The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer, etc.), the stomach churning scenes in The Odyssey are largely due to grotesque portrayals of monsters and magic. The horrors that men do to each other, and especially to women, are only implied, silhouetted, shown briefly, or recounted by women themselves.

It’s here, I think, that Nolan gives us the most interesting look at the Bronze Age (though Caleb Wait’s analysis of Zeus’s Law in this film is fascinating). Women’s pain and suffering has so often been used as a backdrop for the stories of war and glory that have been told and retold through the centuries (exceptions exist, of course), but their voices are rarely featured in these tales. Their grief is rarely valued beyond embellishing the hero’s.

What Wilson laments as uncomplicated women, I would argue, are actually very real portrayals of complicated grief which so often go unseen and unvalidated.

The pain of women has always existed, and it frames the question of human depravity particularly well.

Uncomplicated Women

From the moment Eve heard news of Abel’s death at the hand of her other son, Cain, we see women suffering the consequences of the pride, arrogance, greed, cowardice, ambition, and godlessness of men. And while women are, of course, depraved sinners as well, they serve as a unique canvas to portray the fruit of sin. Nolan shows this well.

When Clytemnestra rams a dagger into Agamemnon, the rage and despair of a mother whose child has been sacrificed by the very man with whom she made her is squarely in frame. We don’t see Agamemnon’s face in the moment of his murder—this part of the story is not his.

And while Clytemnestra might be fictional, the women whose husbands offered up their children to Moloch (2 Kings 16:3; 2 Kings 21:6) or as foundation sacrifices for the building of Jericho (1 Kings 16:34) were real.

When Helen begs to be forgiven by Penelope for the crimes of war committed in her name, we see the grief of a woman who has been kept and fought for as an object—emphasized in Nolan’s adaptation with the brutal scars that sever her face. Perhaps most women have not been the catalyst for war, but many have known the invisibleness of their own pain, objectification, or violation used as an excuse for vengeance and violence. Helen needed comfort, protection, and healing; instead she was given the bloodguilt of other men.

When Telemachus presses his mother about her suitors and the need for Ithaca to have a king, we see Penelope’s bitterness at the years of her own rule, the wisdom and experience she has gained, being overlooked and undervalued. She maintains stability for a people who still claim the throne is “empty.” She brings to life the injustice brought on by the Greek and Roman household codes, and the minimal agency and legal rights women had to their own homes and children—invisible even where their value should be considered indispensable. Now there’s something the modern woman can appreciate.

Nolan’s women may appear passive, but their pain is not. It is given the full stage. Bronze Age women, no less than the modern ones, deserve this validation.

And it’s not as though this is a major deviation from the source material. Homer writes a weeping Odysseus when, at the end of his journeys, he hears the song of his conquests.

So the famous singer sang his tale, but Odysseus

Melted, and from under his eyes the tears ran down, drenching

His cheeks. As a woman weeps, lying over the body

Of her dead husband, who fell fighting for her city and her people

As he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children;

She sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body

About him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her,

Hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders,

Force her up and lead her away into slavery, to have

Hard work and sorrow, and her cheeks are wracked with pitiful weeping.2

It is the weariness of women through loss, betrayal, and violation that depicts so cleanly for us human depravity—and whether or not Homer and Nolan give it the same lines, it was always there, if not in the women Homer wrote, than in the women who read them.

Circe’s Pigs

Circe’s role in Nolan’s The Odyssey is complicated. On the one hand, she is a witch—and a goddess in the original source material—who uses trickery and false hospitality to turn men into animals. (She’s also turned her sister into a crow and clearly needs some therapy, so we’re definitely not giving her a pass here.) But when Nolan’s Odysseus comes to plead for the lives of his men, she gives a compelling defense of her actions. Haven’t his men behaved like pigs? Pillaging, plundering, and most likely raping their way across the Mediterranean? Hadn’t he been callous to send hot-blooded hungry men up to her home, where they could have done anything to her?

Of course, in this particular case, all they’d done was eat her food, but every woman I know has walked to her car—even in broad daylight—with her keys in her hands just in case. Every mom I know has a routine for getting their littles in and out of the vehicle in a crowded parking lot in the safest way possible. And far, far too many women I’ve met, known, and loved (more than you’d like to think about) have experienced personally what Circe says she fears could have happened to her.

St. Augustine also attests to Circe’s fears, writing in defense of women who have committed suicide to avoid the ravages of war, notably the sack of Rome in 410 AD. Though he condemns their actions as homicide, he writes in The City of God:

And consequently, even if some of these virgins killed themselves to avoid such disgrace, who that has any human feeling would refuse to forgive them? And as for those who would not put an end to their lives, lest they might seem to escape the crime of another by a sin of their own, he who lays this to their charge as a great wickedness is himself not guiltless of the fault of folly.3

Because women are the weaker vessel, our pain provides a unique lens through which to view human depravity—not because women can’t sin against men or each other; not because men don’t sin against men as well; but because men’s sin affects women, both directly and indirectly, in deeply devastating ways.

When Circe ushers the men back into their human bodies, out of the swinian states she cast them into, she quietly whispers, “Back into your disguises.”

For Circe, men are pigs, and their noble human forms simply mask their true natures.

Nature, Corruption, and the Image of God

It would be easy to believe that the queasiness of seeing men turned into hogs is because of the stunning animatronics and stomach-churning disproportions of their faces and bodies as Circe works her witchcraft. But I think our unease bespeaks a deeper truth—an obvious one: men aren’t pigs and their transformation is a violation of their innate human dignity. The human body and the human man are inseparable.

A proper anthropology would explain that humans have been made in the image of God as embodied creatures and nothing—not sin, nor suffering, nor disfigurment—can remove from us our deserved dignity as image bearers. Sin has, however, corrupted our natures such that our actions are often heinously unfit for the image we have been bestowed.

In this way, the transgressions of God’s law by Odysseus’ men of war is as much a violation of their own human bodies as Circe’s sorcery (cf Matt. 15:11; Mark 7:15). Their pillaging is contrary to the design for which God made us. Following Cain’s murder of Abel, one of the first ways in which we see sin manifest is in the assault of women. When the mighty men of Genesis 6 begin to lust after “the daughters of man” and take them carelessly, God sees this sin and “it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 6:6).

First, he sends a flood. Then he sends his Son.

And this Son—God himself—takes on that human form. The body of Jesus does not disguise some wretched inner boar; rather it’s the perfection of our human nature. He is the proto-type man. And at every turn, he dignifies the women he meets—the bleeding outcast, the prostitute, the woman of many husbands, old and young alike. He sees women and their pain in a world that so often overlooks us. He does this because, women too, despite our sin and suffering, are also image bearers of the Almighty God.

Women too, because of our sin and suffering, need a redeemer.

Nolan shows us hurting women. It’s beautiful, really. As Circe’s pigs create a jarring contradiction that points to the truth of who we were really made to be, so the sadness of Nolan’s women presses upon us this world’s desperation, its need for restoration and wholeness. It shows us that something is broken.

That is, unfortunately, all it can show us. Only Scripture can point to the one who can mend these broken pieces.

Circe, Helen, and Penelope need the God-man as much as Odysseus and his men. And unlike the gods of the Greek pantheon who are content to use humans as pawns in their petty pursuits, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became one himself. Unlike Agamemnon, he sacrifices himself to save his people. And unlike Odysseus, his quest to rescue his bride from her pressing and dangerous suitors is not fraught with personal failure and shameful deeds. He is good and faithful. And he is coming for us.

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A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTERS
To the God of generations

Our Father, God Who Sees us
Before you, needfully, I bow
And to your mercy seat
I bring my daughters now

I pray you’d keep them safe
Let them know your perfect peace
When they walk through shadowed valleys
May your mercies never cease

And let it not be only
An earthly, temporary calm
But assure them of eternity
Safeheld within your palm

Lord, shower them with blessings
Meet them with every need
Send them mana in the wilderness
Break not the wounded reed

And if they sit in darkness
Their souls adrift and lone
Grant that they may know forgiveness
Please love them as your own

Chase them with your goodness
Catch their tears in jars
Count their hairs and number them
Among Abram’s descendant-stars

God, be faithful to your promises
To your covenant, be true
For as I belong to it
My girls belong to you

Lord, may they be like sparrows
Which you keep your eye on
And, above all this, I pray
May their names be writ in Zion

This, Lord, this
Is the marrow of my prayer
When I go to be with you in Paradise
May I see my daughters there

I opened the front door before my husband even reached for the handle. “What’s wrong?” Immediate concern brushed his face as he took in mine—worried, tear-soaked, tired. “I got rid of Instagram,” I said.

He paused and then stepped inside.

The constant stream of information from social media, news headlines, and the “have you seen this?” texts from friends and family have been exhausting. We want to be informed, but we also want to stay sane, and the truth is the tension of living in this particular season of the world’s curse can wear a person down to threads.

How do moms do it? How do you continue the hum-drum responsibilities of daily caring for small humans and the house you all live in when the world feels so unwell? How do you make oatmeal for your toddler while your husband warms up the car outside your kitchen window when you know there’s a woman in Minnesota that same week who can be seen making a desperate phone call to someone to take care of her kids while an ICE agent drags her away from her house—all because she stepped outside to warm up her car? It’s hard to hold the joy and the exhaustion of nursing your own baby when a mother was taken from hers at the last stage of her Green Card appointment in San Diego—the baby was only six months old. And in what kind of world should it be possible to look into the faces of your children as they ask you a million questions, hum their absentminded songs, or contentedly dismantle your house from top to bottom, when there’s a list made public to the world of countless children who endured unspeakable horrors at the hands of people who have—decades later—still not been held accountable?

I see the weariness of moms—not just moms, but definitely moms—who have to find a way to switch their minds from processing the chaos of the Minnesota tragedies and the release of the sickening information found in the Files to finishing dinner prep or walking a restless baby or helping a toddler through the witching hour before bedtime. The good and ordinary mix with the unimaginable and overwhelming. The disparity between a cursed world that feels so unsafe and the cozy walls of our little homes creates a disorienting reality.

Moriah Steiner writes a poem entitled “Mothering” in which she encapsulates this frustration:

The world is breaking
I am mothering
And I wonder has it always been like this?
In some ways yes
Power grasps by terrible, small men
A tale as old as time
And still mothers rock their babies to sleep

And in those still, small moments of grief and overwhelm, where do we look? Do we pray for the next election cycle? Are we calling our representatives? Do we hope the party will save us (maybe you feel like the party has already let you down), or the courts, or some cultural tide of enlightenment?

I don’t know about you, but I feel helpless.

I feel weary, angry, brokenhearted, overwhelmed, and helpless.

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This is where I think every Christian—every Christian, but definitely moms—should understand the doctrine of Christ’s Two Kingdoms (or, as Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck would put it, Christ’s two-fold reign over his kingdom).

Maybe Two Kingdoms theology is not something you’re familiar with, yet. Maybe it’s something you know intellectually but you’re not sure how to apply it to your daily task of living well. Maybe you’ve heard of Two Kingdoms theology and you immediately assume the worst (you’re not alone). But if you’re tired of the fight or the weariness or the unwinableness of whatever is consuming your thoughts right now, consider—just consider—the scriptural and applicational merits of this doctrine that bulwarks our unshakeable hope in the victory of Christ the King.

What are the Two Kingdoms?

The basic introduction of this doctrine is that Christ reigns over two kingdoms—the earthly and the eternal.1 He is sovereign over both, but in the earthly kingdom he has allowed ordinary means of providence to carry forth the tides of his omnipotent reign (Rom. 13:1–2). Governments, just and unjust, dictate the structures of human civilizations; mankind establishes authorities to mete out justice; God’s perfectly ordered world is refracted through the corrupted but God-ordained rulers of this age.

God establishes the right—and responsibility—for governments to carry out justice in Genesis 9:5–6, and the Westminster Divines summarized this authority beautifully in the Westminster Confession (XXIII):

God, the Supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates to be under him, over the people, for his own glory and the public good, and to this end hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the defense and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evil-doers.

There’s more there, so if you’re hungry for the technicalities of “the power of the sword,” go read the whole chapter!

Essentially, all peoples have this right to be governed by an earthly authority—not just Christian nations and not just “Christian authority.” And God rules them all. The kingdoms of this earth still belong to our Lord.

But there is a second kingdom we can look to as Christians—the kingdom of Christ’s church. The Westminster Confession (XXX) states: “The Lord Jesus, as king and head of his Church, hath therein appointed a government in the hand of Church officers, distinct from the civil magistrate.”

The church and state are two separate entities. This should not be a foreign concept to Americans raised on the principles of freedom of religion. But this is more than a political mantra—it’s deeply biblical as well.

In his book, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture, David VanDrunen writes, “When Christ came, he did not establish the state, or the family, or a school, or a business venture. These things already existed and were governed and preserved under the covenant with Noah. The Lord Jesus Christ established one thing: his church.”

The earthly kingdom is set in service of the heavenly one, the church. God works providentially through earthly rulers to carry out his eternal purposes for the kingdom of heaven. Bavinck writes, “In order that Christ may truly be king over his people, the king who redeems, protects, and preserves them, he must have power in heaven and on earth, over Satan and the world. It is a kingship of power, subordinate to, and a means for, his kingdom of grace.”2

Governments, schools, families, trade—all good things and all ordained as ordinary blessings by God for humans to enjoy! But Christ came for the church (Luke 4:43). He came not to influence educational models or prop up political parties. He came to save his people, to purchase their redemption and secure their eternal inheritance. And one day, he will come again to judge the living and the dead, to restore creation, and to make all things new.

In the meantime, although our citizenship is ultimately in that heavenly kingdom, we’re living in the ordinary kingdom of the earth, amidst all its curse-driven corruption and decay.

Why does this doctrine matter?

OK, so if that’s the basic doctrine, the next question that needs asking is: Why does it matter? What difference does it make thinking of Christ’s reign over two kingdoms rather than one?

There are many good answers to this, but as I’m writing this primarily for and about the worried housewives of the United States of America, this will be my justification.

First, I have to address the privilege of being a homemaker in the “Christian West.” Unlike our sisters in the Middle East and in parts of Asia and Africa, Christians are not persecuted for their faith by either the government or radical parties within our borders—and no, Western Christianity or Christians being criticized or even maligned is not persecution. Instead, we live in relative safety, in a country with a largely reliable police force and a justice system that is better than most—imperfections aside.

We also have communities and resources readily available, unlike our Christian sisters who are living in refugee camps around the world, fleeing actual persecution from their governments. I can make fresh bread for my family, dinner from groceries I’m able to buy conveniently at a store, and everything can be kept safely in our little apartment in which we stay warm and dry. These ordinary blessings are a privilege we often take for granted—what a difference it makes in a day when we can’t get to the store as planned or the water heater breaks.

On top of it all, we live in a society shaped by Judeo-Christian principles, which means that even if the country isn’t largely Christian anymore, there are still traces of Christianity’s influence on our society’s values. This has no small impact on how women are treated. And yes, women have suffered countless abuses under “Christian” societal assumptions, but a quick global and historical comparison shows that Western women have been privileged more than most.

So the fact that this tension exists at all—that we can sit in the comfort of our own homes, safely raising our own children, while others sit instead with the immediate consequences of a cursed and corrupted world—is a testament to a unique place we occupy in history.

There is a tendency to want to keep it—an urge to hold safe this little microcosm of Christian-looking utopia. Maybe, we think, we can even make it better. Maybe the influence of Christianity can spread even further and right all the wrongs we feel so deeply in our kitchens on a given Wednesday morning. Maybe we can preserve our hot water, clean parks, uncensored internet access, and sourdough starters in this little piece of almost-Christendom by making it more Christian. Maybe political force or cultural pressure is the answer to the world’s ills—and the lockbox to our own comfortable way of living.

But here’s the thing. None of these blessings are lasting, and none of them will save you.

The importance of the Two Kingdoms doctrine is that it helps us categorize both our grief and our hope. We do live in this world and so it is right to grieve the world’s ills. We have responsibilities to the kingdoms of the earth in which we live—to be good citizens and neighbors, to seek the welfare of the city (Jer. 29:7, 1 Pet. 2:13–17). And yet, like Jeremiah’s audience, we are exiles (1 Pet. 2:11). We look to a greater kingdom to come, and therein we place our hope (Heb. 12:28; 13:14).

This means trusting that God will not save people through policies or politicians but through his Spirit. It means trusting that he will work all things—even the really, really terrible things—for the good of those who love him (Gen. 50:20). It means knowing that even when the pursuit of justice remains imperfect at best in the kingdom of this world, a final judgement awaits us all and Christ the Righteous will not let the wicked go unpunished (Isaiah 9:7). It means holding loosely to the privileges that come with the Judeo-Christian society we’ve inherited and investing deeply in sharing the gospel with this society, not just proselytizing a Christian-looking lifestyle or value system. Because when this age comes to an end at the footsteps of eternity, only one kingdom will matter.

How will this doctrine help me find peace?

It was the Files that finally did it. I couldn’t—can’t—process the unspeakably vile things I saw recounted, implied, photographed, and joked about. I got off Instagram and, largely, haven’t been back since.

Moriah Steiner concludes her poem this way:

And still mothers rock their babies to sleep
A quiet resistance
Laying aside our own comfort to care for others
The world is breaking
I am mothering
And I think it’s the mothers that will save us

What a wearying thought.

So—I’m writing this essay in case there’s a mom out there who needs to know that mothers won’t save the world. We can’t. Most days, I barely get dinner on. And the weight of this breaking world you feel is not your burden to restore—it’s Christ’s. I’m writing this essay in case there’s another mom who needs to know how the Two Kingdoms doctrine might bring peace into the swell as she sits on the living room floor, staring into the abyss, while her toddler plays with blocks.

First, we can find comfort in recognizing that the things that belong to the kingdom of this earth—the ordinary, secular things that are enjoyed by Christians and non-Christians alike—are good. They’re still God-given. Things don’t need to be “Christian” to be lovely or praiseworthy. Not everything needs to be baptized and redeemed to be considered of value. This world might be cursed, but God still made it good. No matter how twisted the world becomes, he is still sovereign over it, and we can grieve what is broken while looking to the final restoration.

Second, we can find peace in surrendering our dependence on the powers of this world. Yes, you should still vote. Yes, you should still call your local officials. Yes, you should still care about this kingdom you’re living in. But it should not be your final and ultimate hope. It should not be the ultimate hope of your children, either.

Really, it’s not the ultimate hope for anyone who has been victimized or terrorized or deeply wounded by the wicked people of this world (or even by the mostly-decent people who have blindly fallen into wicked ways). Their hope is the same as ours: the free offer of the gospel, extended to anyone who would profess and believe in the name of the Lord (Rom. 10:9). In that gospel awaits healing, restoration, comfort, peace, and joy.

Jeremiah’s promise from God to those in exile is richer and more beautiful than a plan for their lives—it’s one for their hearts. “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (Jer. 29:12–14). And though this is couched in language of flourishing and fortune, it’s a prophecy not meant to be fulfilled on earth, but in heaven.

This is not a silver lining. This is not a consolation prize. This is not something to try to help you sleep better at night. This, truly, is the hope. This is the promise. This is what God’s people have clung to for millennia of cursed living in a cursed world.

And it’s for you. It’s for you in your kitchen or in your toy-cluttered car or while you’re curled in a ball in your toddler’s crib as they struggle to fall asleep. It’s a promise for you in the ordinary moments and in the overwhelming ones. Christ is reigning over the kingdom of this earth, and one day he will come again to judge it and bring his people into the heavenly city, where there will be no more sorrow or pain or grief, and he himself will wipe away our tears (Rev. 21:1–4).

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In the softness of almost-total silence, I feel a kick. The nearly imperceptible flutters of the last week have been growing stronger, and this is unmistakable. I hold my breath, just for a moment.

The lamps are low in our living room, casting shadows on the pine garlands that trim our curtained windows and the wreaths on our walls. Our toddler is asleep in her room (though, it turns out, not for long), so this dark winter evening feels even quieter than usual. The lights on our Christmas tree are just bright enough that I can make out the ornaments that dangle from the branches—sparkly glass orbs that used to hang on my grandmother’s tree and the childhood collection my husband was gifted, year by year, from his grandmother. We’ve added more together. There are generations represented here—so much life.

Hanging on the wall across from our tree is a cluster of white velvet poinsettias tied with green satin ribbon—my wedding bouquet.

I feel another kick and reach for my husband’s hand, knowing he won’t mind the interruption to his work. I guide to the place where this little soul is being knitted inside of me so he can feel that small pronouncement of life.

His eyes fill with joy, and for a moment, we share the wonder of this season of miracles and merriment.

But it’s a complicated joy. It’s a “merry and bright” which is dimmed by the knowledge that we should have been welcoming a different little life into our home this month. And, although God in his goodness continues to fill us with undeserved blessings, it is hard to set aside the ache of the curse this Christmas.

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Perhaps you feel it, too. Is it there, in the marrow of your bones, when you reach for joy and find the bitterness of broken things, of things not as they should be, the dust of what has been lost or left behind?

Do you feel the curse in your body, as time draws age on your face and makes Christmas shopping or baking or tree-hunting harder to participate in—as you feel the descent into isolation from the activities of the young and healthy?

Do you feel the curse when a season filled with social invitations becomes a source of overstimulation for your frazzled mind or a reminder of unbearable hurts that are etched deep into your nervous system? Do you feel it in the loneliness? In the exhaustion? In the emptiness that seems deeper and more wearying when everyone else is singing carols?

Do you feel the curse in the phone that doesn’t ring or the cards that don’t come, in the once-precious relationships that have changed or been lost altogether?

When the ambulance sirens break through the Christmas Eve choir and fade unnervingly into the distance, can you hear creation groan to be remade? Do you hear it in the beeping of a hospital monitor? Or in the silence of a half-empty bed?

Do you see it in the missing pieces? Stockings taken off the mantle. Place settings removed from the table. Faces you only see in frames these days. A little Christmas onesie that was put away before it ever had a chance to be used. Surely, death touches even the good things.

Do you see the curse refracting out of your own heart? All the dark parts of yourself that tinsel and lights don’t brighten. Is the holly-jolly of your usual Christmas traditions shaken by thoughts of your own frailty or failings? When your silent nights are filled with thoughts of regret, shame, or despair, do you long for a redeemer?

Have you wept like Rachel, who grieved her lost children, or like Hannah, who grieved those that never came? Have you wept like David and Jonathan, with the sad parting of a friendship? Have you wept like Peter, betraying his savior, or like Jeremiah over the sin that devastates the world?

Do you find yourself sobbing at traffic lights while the radio blasts “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree?”

I do.

But, there is good news. It’s the good news. And it’s for the grieving.

Christ came to save the world because the world is broken, its people are lost and hurting. Joy to the world is for those who know its heartbreaks. The incarnation of the God-man, who then became our savior, our first-fruits elder brother, who lived as our righteousness and died as our sacrificial lamb, who was justified by his resurrection and now promises new life to us, too—this incarnation is only really good news to those who have felt the curse of sin and suffering.

They’re masked in triumphal music and voices raised in cheerful song, but beneath so many of our Christmas hymns are these themes of the grief:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make his blessings flow

Far as the curse is found.

Christmas might be celebrated by the merry and bright, but it’s for the grieving. Our Christ came to “taste our sadness,” and “that men no more may die.” With healing wings, he comes to his people, to redeem, to restore.

And he sends his spirit, to seal us for redemption and to conform us to his image.

And one day, he’ll come again to bring us home (Zeph. 3:20, NIV).

George Frideric Handel tuned this beautiful promise for orchestral performance—making some of the best Christmas music to exist—when he quotes Paul: “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51–52).

The first Advent of Christ is set in the context of Jeremiah’s prophecy of Rachel’s tears (Jer. 31:15; Matt. 2:18). Her weeping signals the beginning of the grand end—the savior coming for his people. And that savior wept, too. He knows the sting of death. He conquered it. And on that final day, when the New Jerusalem comes to Christ as a bride, he will wipe away our tears with his own hand (Rev. 21:4; Isa. 25:8).

That’s why I keep my wedding bouquet next to our Christmas tree. If the tree reminds us of Christ’s first coming, the bridal bouquet will remind us of his second.q

If you are brokenhearted this Christmas, or simply wrestling with the complicated space of this already-but not yet, in which the outcome is sure but the consummation is still coming, let this be your “peace on earth:” the Christ has come, and he is coming again. And he who is seated on the throne will say, “I am making all things new!”

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I looked at the text again, blood boiling. A surge of familiar—though now-distant—feelings welled up: anger, frustration, smallness?

A friend from seminary—a single woman—had reached out to me with a simple question: What do you think of the claim that motherhood is “the highest calling?”

This phrase, that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling, stalked me all through my twenties. As someone who desperately wanted children and who was raised in a community of mostly homeschooling families, I defended the sentiment frequently. From what I could see, motherhood required an incredible amount of sacrifice—especially for stay-at-home-moms—and society drastically undervalues the role of women as mothers. However, as a decade rolled by and I continued on as a single woman with the prospect of my own family nowhere in sight, the phrase began to leave a bitter taste. It carried with it promises unkept, as well as the nagging feeling that I was a second-class citizen within the Christian community. If motherhood is a woman’s highest calling, then as a woman not married and childless, I was both missing out on my life’s purpose as well as not serving the church in a role that was as important as the mothers around me were. Obviously, their needs, families, and time should be prioritized over mine—they had the highest calling.

It took a while to begin rethinking the paradigm I grew up with—some of which was communicated implicitly by the way people talked about marriage and motherhood, and some of which was taught explicitly, as articulated by Lori Alexander, The Transformed Wife, in this blog post, which misuses Scripture to devastating effect.

So, how should we think about motherhood, biblically and theologically? How should we think about callings? And how do we understand our identity as Christians in this world that is passing away?

The Bible Doesn’t Describe Motherhood as a “Women’s Highest Calling”

So much of this conversation stems from a misunderstanding of women’s creational purpose, but I’ve already written about that at length here, so I’ll limit my response to addressing the common misconceptions about what the Bible says about motherhood and mothers.

Lori Alexander leans heavily on Scripture verses that talk about children as a blessing and barrenness as a curse—not an uncommon argument for those who think motherhood is a woman’s highest calling. And it’s true: Old Testament Scriptures often return to the imagery of barrenness. The entry for “Barrenness” in The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery reads: “Barrenness in the Bible is an image of lifelessness, where God’s redemptive blessing is absent.”1 The barren wife, it explains, is one of the Bible’s strongest depictions of rejection, desolation, and God’s curse, and conversely, the joy the barren woman receives when she finds she is with child is some of the richest we see in Scripture.

Two things are critical in these depictions of barrenness.

The first is that infertility is indeed part of the broader curse on the world—when Adam and Eve sinned, the land and the humans in it would struggle to reproduce. The heartbreak of women who want children and are unable to have them (because of singleness, medical issues, or a host of other reasons) is real and deep. It is incredibly touching that God so often uses this pain as an analogy for deep grief, loss, or rejection in Scripture, because that is what it can feel like—and for women who know the invisibility of aching for something lost and yet never-had, this is another way in which we can know we serve a God who sees us.

But there is a special curse at work in some of these passages as well, and that is God’s curse against his covenant people for their faithlessness (Deut. 28:1–4, 15–18).

As God’s promise to his people unfolds, from his first hope-filled pronouncement to Eve that though there would be pain in childbearing, there would still be children,2 on through the issues of land and inheritance that play out in Joshua and Ruth, and into the Exilic and Post-Exilic periods of Israel’s history, biological offspring play an important role. To have children was to be able to pass down your inheritance in the Promised Land, to maintain your place in the promises of God. No children meant your lineage would disappear from among God’s people and your portion in the land would go to someone else. But more than even that, the people were waiting for the Messiah to come, and if women were still having children then there was still hope that the Seed of the Woman would appear and crush the Serpent’s head.

So, in this Redemptive Historical context, barrenness carried a special significance for God’s people, and there are places in the Old Testament where it is, indeed, a particular display of God’s curse. It is not, however, still a curse today.

The Messiah has come. The Promised Land awaits us in the better country (Heb. 11:16). And even the barren woman has many children in the family of Christ.

To use the curses of the Old Covenant—when a new and better one is now being mediated by Christ himself—to shame women who may already be grieving their childlessness, or to encourage women to place their boasting in their identity as mothers rather than in Christ, is a sad reflection of how little we invest in truly biblical views of women.

And for all the curses, wars, and waiting for a Messiah, the often-tortured stories of women in the Old Testament drip with the kindness of God and the dignity he bestows upon his daughters. He is tender and gentle with them, providing for them when they suffer both the curse of Genesis and the sins of others against them (e.g. Hagar, Leah, Hannah, Bathsheba). Women are both honored with the ability to bear children and they are used by God in non-reproductive capacities. Abigail exercises wisdom and bravery, standing down a king and going against her husband, and so saves the integrity of the House of David. Rahab—a prostitute by vocation—uses her cunning to save the Israelite spies, and her faith in God saves her family. Deborah is a prophetess and judge of Israel. Jael assassinates the commander of the Canaanite army. Esther saves her people from genocide. Hannah gives up her child in faithfulness and obedience to God, and that child becomes a great priest and judge over God’s people.

Some of these women were mothers, but if that were their highest calling, wouldn’t that be the highlight of their biblical accounts? Wouldn’t it at least be mentioned? Could it be instead that motherhood and children are a blessing, and that mothering is indeed a calling that often takes priority over many other things for a season, but it isn’t the highest calling of women?

Is there a highest calling for women?

Perhaps the root of the problem is not only our theology of motherhood, but our understanding of callings and the body of Christ.

What Does the Bible Actually Say About Callings?

My church used to go Christmas caroling in nursing homes. The congregation would assemble with sheets of Christmas music and a complete inability to sing on key (my father tried and failed every year to suggest that maybe we have a practice session first), pile into a few cars, and drive to the retirement homes and assisted living facilities of our older saints who couldn’t come to church. It was the only time I would ever get to see these older brothers and sisters who were no longer actively participating in the life of the church. “But they pray for us,” someone said.

They pray for us. In a season where their health was so diminished they could not even attend service, let alone volunteer in the nursery or bring a side dish to the church buffet, they prayed for us.

I have since kept an eye out for the prayer warriors in the body of Christ. Several in my current church have let me know that when I’m up at 4 a.m. with my sleepless baby, they’re also up—awake with age and using the time to bring me and my weary season of early motherhood before a God who loves me and my daughter.

What a high calling, to pray for the saints.

But therein, I think, is my point. Whatever we are called to do, in whatever season of life God has placed us in, is a good and worthy calling because it’s from God. There are no hierarchies of service in a church where God assigns the roles.

Paul describes this very principle in 1 Corinthians 12—we are a body of many members, and no part can claim to be more important than the other. “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body” (1 Cor. 12:18–20).

Yes, we need mothers—and mothers so often need a lot of support! But we also need single women, whose unique gifts and perspectives bless the church and the individuals in it. And you know what? The singles in our church often need support as well. Whether for a season or a lifetime, those called to be single in our churches have been called to it by God himself, and so their calling is good, worthy, and important—their needs, joys, and sufferings equally to be carried by the rest of the body.

The women who never have children are no less deserving of honor than any other member of the body. And this shouldn’t be applied only to mothers and non-mothers, but also for differently abled persons, children and the elderly, and those who are in seasons where they need to ask for more than they are able to give in return. Joni Eareckson Tada beautifully explains that her paraplegia has made it necessary for her to depend on others for even the most basic of life’s tasks, and what a comfort it was to realize that the humbling process of being so dependent on the body of Christ was allowing other brothers and sisters to “put jewels in their crown” (cf 1 Cor. 3; Rev. 4:10)—she summarizes that idea here.

What a beautiful understanding of the one-anothering Paul speaks of. And what a calling—to be the source of someone else’s sacrifice and service.

But we wouldn’t compare Joni’s calling to anyone else’s. We wouldn’t rank it. Why not?

Could it be that the way we speak about motherhood betrays a pharisaical tendency to self-aggrandize the ordinary, good, and faithful work that mothers do, while minimizing the ordinary, good, and faithful work of everyone else?

And this mindset doesn’t only minimize the callings of other women in the church; it’s also damaging to mothers who might believe this sentiment themselves. How easy it is for women to shape their identity entirely from this very intense and time-consuming season of life—to balance upon it their sense of purpose, their joy, their hopes. But should they? Is this really the highest vocation to which women are called? Is this the safest perch for their identity?

If Scripture does speak of one highest calling, it’s to be a disciple of Christ. Jesus himself explains this when he tells his disciples about the high cost of entering the kingdom of God—and its eternal rewards: “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:29). If motherhood were a woman’s highest calling, why would Jesus ask her to leave her children behind? Instead, we see eternity shaping our earthly priorities. And what a comfort this must be to every mother who has watched her children walk away from the faith—a heartbreak I can’t even bear to imagine—to know that her Jesus will repay a hundredfold what she has left behind in this world that is passing away. You cannot extend that hope to a woman whose highest calling is motherhood. You can extend it to someone who recognizes their calling as a disciple of Christ the King.

The Westminster Confession also speaks to the calling of disciplehood, though even more broadly, describing our design as humans and our ultimate purpose. Question One reads: What is the chief end of man? The answer is, “to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

Not to be a mother. Not to raise children, or get married, or serve the church, or do missions—though those may be included in God’s calling for your life. But before all those things, we are called to glorify God and enjoy him. You can feel the gospel even in that answer—the liberation from the checklists we make for ourselves and our lives.

Jen Oshman has written about this idea of disciplehood and glorifying God in several places, but this is a nice summary of her argument. She writes,

First and foremost, we are children of God. We are Christians, whether we’re man, woman, young, old, married, or unmarried. And so our highest calling is to know God and to make him known. Or you might say it’s to love God and to love others. It’s to glorify God. It’s to know him and to share him with others. That’s our highest calling, whether we are married or single, mothers or not.

I appreciate Jen’s perspective on this topic because she boldly affirms the goodness of marriage and motherhood while still cautioning against our tendency to turn good things into idols. “The church has rightly said we want to protect marriages, we want to protect families and children and motherhood, we want to lift those up and cherish them and preserve them. That’s good!” she writes. “But at the same time, maybe we shouldn’t swing the pendulum so far that we put motherhood on a pedestal that God himself did not design for it to be placed upon.”

I think that is where I would rest this case: let’s not put motherhood on a pedestal for which God didn’t design it. Let’s not push an idol at women when we can instead offer them the gospel.

Instead, let’s invest more deeply in the women of our churches—the tired mothers who are rocking little ones from the foyer of the church during worship, the widows who are feeling starved for fellowship, and the young single women who are trying to navigate a season of life for which there is often very little blueprint. Let’s one-another one another. Let’s make sure that all the women on our churches’ rolls are being fed sound theology, having their individual gifts fostered, and being discipled through their unique seasons of life with all the comfort of the gospel so that they can better follow Christ—their highest calling.

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A woman with long blonde hair sits with a sad smile, facing just slightly away from her camera, sipping a drink and ruffling through a bag. A piano cover of the chorus of Oceans plays over her video as these words scroll across the screen:

Our pastor didn’t even acknowledge Charlie Kirk today
Long story short… We are looking for a new church
Our nation just lost arguably the boldest Christian of our time
And not even a prayer for his family?
We need to do better

The video has almost 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 comments, many of which affirm the video’s sentiments.

“Our entire service was about Charlie Kirk,” one person writes, explaining that they prayed for his family and his impact on the country, they sang songs about heaven, and they listened to someone speak about the transformation of the nation. Another person says their pastor’s sermon was about “being bold in our faith like Charlie was.” And one of the top comments, with more than 11,000 likes, said: “If your pastor did not recognize Charlie Kirk today. Get out now. Trust your instincts.”

If you are at all present in the larger conversations happening in evangelical churches across the United States, you’ve probably heard similar feelings expressed.

In the broad wake of controversy and conflict that Charlie Kirk’s death has churned up, much of which can be summarized by this article from USA Today, it is this refrain that has been the most concerning to me.

So, let’s set aside, for the moment, differing opinions about Charlie Kirk himself (I hope we can all agree that his murder was morally reprehensible) and focus on a more fundamental question for the Christians in America: Why do we go to church?

The Church in America Has Forgotten the Purpose of Worship

People flocked to church on Sunday, September 14, many for the first time in years—some for the first time ever. There can be no doubt that Charlie Kirk’s assasination sparked what Fox News, at least, has called a revival. If the number of people cryptically Tweeting “the Devil overplayed his hand” is any indication of church returnees, I’d guess pews were pretty full.

But why? Why were they going to church? What were they looking for? And why have so many of them decided to find a different church if Charlie Kirk’s name went unmentioned during the service?

I rarely comment on Instagram reels of people I don’t know, but I couldn’t help this one. As I scrolled through the comments, no one was defending an appropriate view of worship. So, I broke my own rule and interjected:

I understand that many Christians are feeling deeply grieved by Kirk’s wrongful death, but church is not about Christians, it’s about Christ. We come to worship the Son of God, and to make his service about his servants instead (martyrs, missionaries, good samaritans) is not appropriate. If your pastor delivered a message today about the Gospel (which Charlie believed) then you are in a good church. Stay. ❤️

If I could go back and recraft or requalify some of those statements for more theological precision, I might, but the deluge of comments in response highlighted something key. Christians really have forgotten why we go to church.

Here’s how Oxford Dictionary defines worship: (verb) “show reverence and adoration for (a deity); honor with religious rites.” But that’s not often what we see in many mainstream evangelical church services in America anymore.

The Church in America has gotten lost in praise music and big screens and entertainment antics—like this megachurch’s Superbowl themed service that included a Bible kickoff. She has neglected the instructions given to us by God himself for how he asks to be worshipped (cf Exod 20:4–6; Lev 10:1–3; Deut 12:32; Matt 15:7–9). She has worked so hard to seek out the lost and get them into the pews that she has forgotten why they need to be there.

God commands that we worship him, and that we do it as he instructs us. In his article for Modern Reformation, “How the Regulative Principle Liberates,” D.G. Hart explains: “If we seek to please God in worship, since he is our audience, then we have no better guide to what pleases him or to what we should do in worship than the Bible. And the Bible, Presbyterians and Reformed believe, commands us to worship God in this way and no other” (emphasis added).

My fear is that the Church in America has replaced God as the audience with herself. We seek our own interests and passions, rather than offering to God confession, adoration, and praise—and in return, receiving his word and sacrament as comfort for our pilgrim-weary souls.

More than that—though we need no further reason to worship God than that he tells us to—the gathering of the saints should be a sweet picture of eternity. My pastor began our call to worship last week with this beautiful reminder:

It’s such a vital part of our life, of our Christian journey, to be in a rhythm—a sabbath rhythm, if we can call it that; a regular time to meet as a people. We’re not the only ones meeting; there are Christian churches gathering—God’s people—all over the world, and for a brief moment—an hour, and hour and a half… every Christian has exited the world to meet together as the people of God, so that we might be reminded of what we believe, that we might be reminded of our great Redeemer and King, that we might be reminded of our commission. And then we return to the world to bear witness to his grace to those around us.

We exit this world. What an incredible thought. The formal Sabbath worship of our God, the calling together of the saints by the elders of a church to praise the Lord, is a foretaste of the world to come.

The Church in America Has Forgotten Who We Worship

But perhaps not all churches are so lost. Perhaps they have not become stadiums of spiritually-shaped entertainment. Maybe they have simply conflated the adoration of God with the adoration of his people.

One of the most common responses to my comment was something along the lines of “Don’t you think the early church grieved Paul’s martyrdom?”

That’s an interesting premise—and I will not address the question of whether or not Charlie Kirk’s murder counts as martyrdom—so let’s consider it.

Would the early church have grieved Paul during their worship services?

I think it’s worthwhile to first clarify that Paul himself was in personal contact with many of the congregations of the early church. He was not a “public figure” in the sense that Charlie Kirk was. Paul wrote to, visited, and prayed for those churches. So his death might be better compared to the death of a missionary your church has supported, who has personally visited your congregation or written you updates about God’s work in their field. It would be appropriate to mention the loss, lift up their family in prayer, and grieve corporately together—and it still shouldn’t be the focal point of the worship service. In fact, Paul would have been horrified if it had been. He even wrote to the Corinthians: “For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor 3:4–7).

To God be the glory, not his servants.

The Church in America Has Forgotten Why We Don’t Worship Other Humans

But there is an even more practical reason why we should omit the adoration of other Christians from the corporate worship service.

Another video surfaced last week that captured the other side of the conversations surrounding Church and Charlie’s death. A young Black woman, sitting in her car after having just walked out of service, holding back tears, says to the camera: why are Christian leaders celebrating a man who said such terrible things about Black people? She questions her faith, she wonders if she’s misunderstood who God is if his undershepherds are so willing to celebrate someone who has publicly made racially discriminating comments (e.g. affirmative action takes “White people’s spots,” and Black pilots are immediately suspect of being underqualified), let alone the disparaging and controversial views he had of women (like denying statistics about sexual assault and accusing women of lying about them).

Whatever your views of Charlie Kirk are, if you are an orthodox Christian, you cannot claim he was sinless. He’s not the only Christian who has been lauded for their contributions to the church or the faith who has also been criticized for their shortcomings (e.g. J. Gresham Machen, Karl Barth, John MacArthur). Just like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joshua, and David—Christian men and women might serve the Lord and their work might point to Christ, but they are not Christ. They are not the savior. Theirs is not the adoration we should proffering on Sunday morning. When we try to replace the work of Christ—his perfect life and his sacrificial, redemptive death and resurrection—with anyone else’s, we only further the chasms of harm that emanate from the sinful lives of human beings.

Charlie Kirk’s life didn’t save us. His death doesn’t save us.

Maybe people came to church because of Charlie Kirk on September 14, but if they didn’t hear the gospel then they left just as lost as when they came.

That’s it, really. The early church wouldn’t have made Paul’s martyrdom the focal point of their worship because his death isn’t the one that gives forgiveness of sins and life eternal.

I know that Christ is head of his church, even now, even in this time when we seem to be drifting away from what is true worship—worship that should anchor us in the eternal and strengthen us for the week to come. I hope that Christians will reconsider why they go to church. Not for the coffee cart or the music or the messages that make you feel patriotic or seen or good, but instead because we are saved sinners who are called to go by a great and mighty God, who has redeemed us from death to life, and he tells us to give him the worship due his name.

I thumbed the steering wheel of my parked car and ran over my notes again. I had been asked to give the devotional for a baby shower for a woman at my church—a sort of last-minute request—and I was trying to figure out what on earth to talk about in a sort of last-minute prep session. The baby shower was in twenty minutes.

The verses I have studied the most closely on the topic of motherhood in the Bible are actually about barrenness, so, not quite what we’re looking for here. And many of the depictions of childbearing in the Bible are not exactly fit for the nursery. Scripture is full of the stories of women who have to give their children up, watch them die, or die themselves.

I suppose this is not wholly irrelevant—motherhood remains a venture undertaken in a cursed world. Mothers are sufferers.

But what do you read to a room full of women clutching boxes of baby bows and picture board books?

Sitting in the half-empty parking lot outside of a Sprouts, I let my wander through my favorite Bible passages, until at last my thoughts tripped across Psalm 139. I memorized this psalm as a young girl, when I took great comfort in the idea of riding the wings of the dawn and still being found by God. In the socially anxious years of high school, I repeated verse four to myself: “Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely” (that was back when I still used NIV). And in the lost years of my twenties, I would pray, “God, lead me in the way everlasting.”

But this once-cherished psalm that had brought me so much hope and comfort had—like many of the pages of my Bible—become a stranger.

I feel like motherhood brought the curse nearer to me. I feel like it dropped me on the far side of the sea as I watched my body and my mind unravel into threads only to be wound back up with anxiety and worry. So many times this year, I have felt like a foreigner in my own aching head and back and arms. I have heard my own voice in rooms of people and wondered where it came from. I have slept very little.

And motherhood has brought out my sin nature, too. I shudder to think of the words that have been on my tongue in the trembling hours of night with a baby who will not stop crying. I wonder, from my view, lying on the floor where my toddler insists I stay while she stacks blocks, if this is what the way everlasting looks like for everyone, or just for tired moms. This season of life has yanked me roughly by the arm and stood me in front of the mirror by which I can see full-well the ways I fall short of God’s standards of righteousness, which are unmoving—even for mothers.

And instead of turning to God’s word for conviction, comfort, and hope, I have often turned to scrolling on my phone or slumping into my pillows without even saying nightly prayers. I didn’t realize how hungry I was for a gospel promise that met me in this season of motherhood until I began scanning the verses of Psalm 139 in that parking lot. And when I rolled into the pastel-draped kitchen piled with tiny cakes and finger foods twenty minutes later, I had three things to say—to the ladies, and to myself.

Psalm 139 Is for the Children We Worry Over

From the moment I was confronted with uncontrovertible evidence that a new life was indeed growing inside me—which is still crazy to think about—I have worried over her. Will she be healthy? Will she be safe? Will she be saved?

What a tremendous relief, then, to know that I’m not the only one watching her grow! What a humbling thought, that the Almighty is holding her with his right hand (v 10), that he has knit her together himself, “intricately woven in the depths of the earth,” (v 13, 15), and that he will lead her in the way everlasting (v 24). And because I believe in the covenant nature of God’s promises, that the hope of the gospel is for us and our children (Deut. 6:6–7), I can tell my daughter that this psalm is for her. I can tell her that this is her God, too—that her God has hemmed her in, behind and before, and laid his hands upon her (v 5). And what better hands could she be in?

Psalm 139 Is for the Mothers Who Are Weary

In ways both that I expected and that have surprised me greatly, early motherhood has been a wearying season. God made this body. He made it capable of bringing life into the world, to be pushed to its limit and then to heal. He called it all very good (Gen. 1:31). Surely, I can say with the psalmist, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (v 14).

But that does not always feel true in seasons of early motherhood. If you’ve never yourself had a child, you might not know just how much the body changes during the year of growing, birthing, and sustaining an infant. It’s not just weight gain and loss—your organs rearrange, your joints go wacky, your hormones rage, and there is more hair loss involved than I could have ever imagined.

When you’re standing in front of your bathroom mirror wondering what happened to your body and your face and your hair, this psalm is for you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

For many of us, the years with littles are also isolating. Sometimes, I go a whole day without hearing an adult voice outside of my husband’s and the audiobook I’m listening to. Naptimes and flu season and the chaos that is raising a small person make planning playdates or social events unpredictable. Even at church, I spent the first few months postpartum tucked away in the cry room, nursing a baby who didn’t seem to be happy unless she was buried in my arms and away from the world. And yet, God was there, too. There is no place I could flee from his presence, and the psalmist’s descriptions of this fleeing, this hiding, this aloneness—they sound an awful lot like the someone recovering from childbirth: making one’s bed in Sheol, dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea, being covered up by darkness.

The fog of postpartum and the endless drip of nights cut short brought me through a low valley. With the psalmist, I found myself saying, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night” (v 11). And yet, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (v 12). This God is with me in the lowest, darkest, and loneliest places of motherhood. He is acquainted with all my ways—my rising up and my lying down (which doesn’t happen as much as I’d like it to right now). When the weary thoughts brim up, he knows them from afar.

And when you feel the weariness creep into your marrow, this psalm is for you, too.

Psalm 139 Is for the Moms Who Are Falling Short

It’s true—and maybe you’ve caught on by now—we’re not sleeping. It’s been an exhausting year. But, actually, the hardest thing about motherhood for me has been myself.

I’m constantly disappointed at the mother I’ve turned out to be. I thought I’d be so peaceful and happy and patient. I wanted kids for so long, and for many years I thought I might never be given any. So, imagine my surprise when I turned out to be the kind of mom who occasionally curses or cries when she gets overwhelmed, who passes her precious baby off to her husband the moment he comes home so I can just get a minute, and who still hasn’t figured out how to control the rage that sometimes courses through me for what seems like no reason at all.

Whether it's sin or simply my own finitude, this season of motherhood feels like I’m constantly falling short. Maybe that’s all of life and I’m only noticing it now.

The penultimate stanza of Psalm 139 used to confuse me. Nested in such beautiful verses about God-given life and the mystery of its making is a hate speech.

Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!

O men of blood, depart from me!

They speak against you with malicious intent;

your enemies take your name in vainDo I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?

And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

I hate them with complete hatred;

I count them my enemies.

(Psalm 139:19–22)

What is this imprecatory prayer doing in the middle of a psalm about the making of new life?

If you piecemeal apart this psalm (as I have done in this post), drawing out only the lines that apply neatly to your situation, you will miss the whole. And the whole is a psalm about vindication. It begins and ends with a call for God to search and know—to see if there has been any offense. God knowing us down to the moment of our conception is not just a source of comfort, but a reminder that no one is a better judge of our sin. And we are all born with it. David knows this; he sings about God’s desire for purity in our secret hearts but admits that even he was “brought forth in iniquity” (Ps 51:5).

There is, in fact, only one person of whom we can say this does not apply: Christ. Only he could stand before God and declare Psalm 139 on his own merits.

The imprecatory stanza in this psalm is meant to reinforce the credibility of this psalmist’s claim to righteousness: he hates those who are wicked, who are enemies of God. And the humbling truth is that such were you and I before the intervening mercy of our savior. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Rom. 5:10). We were enemies of God, and Christ, by his perfect life, reconciled us and made us children of God instead.

A psalm of new life, indeed.

So, if you feel the weight of your shortcomings in this season; if the accuser comes to you with his spindly lies and whispers in your ear, “You’re not enough, you’re a bad mom”... If you see your offenses against God and long for assurance of his pardon—this psalm is for you.

You can pray this psalm because Christ is your righteousness, because he has died that you might have life, and because he stands before the throne of God as your advocate before the Father, leading you in the way everlasting.

I’ll never forget seeing my first GFE in print. For journalists, few things are more humiliating. A GFE is a mistake—a misspelled name, the wrong number of attendees at a city hall meeting, a misreported batting average. But in journalism, we don’t call it a mistake. It’s a factual error. A Gross Factual Error.

I have several GFEs in my rap sheet. Some have been small and slipped by unnoticed by everyone but myself and my cringing copyeditor. Some have been horrifyingly large, like the time I misspelled someone’s name for an entire article, or when I went to review an Irish Pub for St. Patrick’s Day only to find out from the owner after the article was printed that they are a Scottish Pub. That one still makes me queasy to think about.

Still, to an outsider, the term Gross Factual Error may seem melodramatic. So you got the street name wrong, or the date mixed up—everyone makes mistakes!

But to a journalist, it’s not about the mistake—it’s about our responsibility to the public. Journalists have a platform that most people do not. They hold a public trust. And because of this, they are held to a higher standard of communication. Writing must be clear and accurate. The facts might provoke, but the writing should not.

Journalists get a lot of grief these days—not all of it without reason—but their internal code of ethics is admirable and it is worth noting the principles behind them when we consider alternative media platforms.

Is Provocative Apologetics an Appropriate Form of Rhetoric?

I recently wrote an article responding to Doug Wilson’s comments about women during his CNN interview and I have been quite surprised by the number of people who have defended his remarks, not because they agree—so they tell me—but because “he’s just not a good communicator.” Or, as someone suggested in my comment section (emphasis mine):

But underlying all of [the issues] is that Wilson’s speaking and writing style is that of a provocateur… people have for centuries — perhaps for thousands of years, if we include the Greeks and Romans — advocated blunt positions to “provoke” a response.

After providing nearly a full tome on the historical place of the provocateur, this commenter concluded:

Again, Doug Wilson knows that and also produces book-length works to defend and explain his ideas, leading to an accusation that he’s using a motte-and-bailey approach, i.e., advocating radical positions and then, when he attracts lots of attention, withdrawing to a better-defended position than his initial provocative statement.

I’m not sure the people who follow either Doug Wilson or the YRRs understand that provocative statements, without a strong foundation in facts, lead to major problems.

This commenter highlights a problem that is becoming quite common in Christian circles (especially on social media, but it is prevalent everywhere): shock value rhetoric.

Although I think that Doug Wilson said exactly what he meant during his interview (as it can be corroborated with his views on women from his blog and his other writings), let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he was intending to provoke the national audience into a deeper look at his theological views, as my commenter supposes. (As Wilson’s more completed arguments include his “book-length” works and titles from his publishing house, this tactic would seem indecorously self-serving.)

We could talk about the motives or rhetorical philosophy behind provocative posting (or interviewing), but as a Presbyterian, I’d rather start with the Westminster Larger Catechism, Question 145 of which expounds on how we may understand the Ninth Commandment. In its definition, it includes: “speaking the truth unseasonably, or maliciously to a wrong end, or perverting it to a wrong meaning.”

Perverting it to a wrong meaning.

If we understand the Ninth Commandment as the Westminster Divines did, we would agree that speaking in a provocational way that isn’t forthright, that changes the meaning of a thing, is a violation of how Scripture calls us to use our words.

But I also love the use of the term “unseasonably.” There is a time and place to speak truth. Doug Wilson’s response to a question about the value of women, that “It doesn’t take any talent to just reproduce biologically,” is unseasonable. It leads listeners astray from the topic at hand. We can talk about reproduction and women’s biological function, and I do here, but to introduce it into a conversation about the purpose and role of women is misleading. The Westminster Confession gives us very little room to wiggle around the Ninth Commandment—it would rightly condemn Wilson’s speech as a violation of it. And those who defend his answer on his merits as a provocateur are participating in the “hiding, excusing, or extenuating of sins, when called to a free confession” (WLC 145).

The Consequences of an Unbridled Tongue

Words are powerful. That’s why we have laws around libel and why journalists are legally allowed to protect the identity of their sources—words are the polebearers of truth and lies. They can be life-giving and they can be incredibly destructive.

I grew up in a community where having big families was a sign of Christian faithfulness, even sometimes a status symbol. And while I think that the parents of those large families were indeed richly blessed by their children, I can attest from my experience that many of the daughters grew up with a heavy burden: the implicit teaching that they must marry and have children—and lots of them—to fulfill their creational purpose. (For more on this, read Elena Cecilia Trueba’s piece on Doug Wilson’s Daughters and the impact this teaching has on young girls.)

When Doug Wilson is asked to speak about the biblical value of women on a national platform and his response is to say that “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” he is indeed doing great harm.

James talks about the power of speech extensively. He writes, “How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness” (James 3:5b–6a). Christians are called to bridle their tongues. They are called to let their speech be always full of grace and seasoned with salt (Col. 4:6). Christians are called to speak with purpose, according to the apostle Paul: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29). It is a positive command—not just don’t be vulgar, but be gracious, be edifying.

There is no excuse for Doug’s poor communication or his “provocation.” He was given a national platform and he had a responsibility to those listening to be clear—and as a Christian, much more so as a minister of the gospel, he had a responsibility to build up and speak with grace. He did not.

Moreover, he had an opportunity to be a witness to the true value that God ascribes to women to a world that so often objectifies, undermines, and abuses them. The positive command that Scripture gives us to build up and edify could have been used to great effect, but Wilson’s desire to “provoke” (if indeed, that was his purpose) only created confusion, frustration, and finger-pointing on a national scale. He not only put forward a damaging view of women, he failed as a witness of Christ and of the human dignity God gives his image bearers.

Would Wilson Get Away with This Kind of Provocation if He Was a Woman?

If you are still unconvinced, let’s do a litmus test. If Doug Wilson was a woman, would conservative Christians make such excuses for his lack of clarity? I truly think not. Women who have dared to step into the theological discourse have been sliced to pieces for far less.

Kaeley Triller Harms documents the war against women who have entered this discourse in the last decade in her article Women in Exile. She catalogs (more thoroughly than I can here) the aggressive (even slanderous) prosecution of their contributions to conversations around women and the church.

Why does Doug Wilson get a pass on sloppy communication but women who are actively trying to contribute articulate and thoughtful perspectives on what Scripture has to say about God’s daughters are given no margin for error?

What makes this more egregious is that Doug Wilson is supposed to be held to a higher standard than they are, as someone who holds himself to be an ordained minister. James is very clear about this, too: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1).

Precision in Theology Matters

The line between scriptural Trinitarian doctrine and any number of first and second century heresies is paper thin, and it took centuries of councils (and several exiles) for the church to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity precisely. You might say that theology has its own version of Gross Factual Errors.

The line between reducing women to their biological capacity and viewing them as co-laborers with men in God’s calling for us to be his image-bearers can be equally tight. And the consequences of getting the doctrine of creation and our theology about women wrong are devastating to your sisters in Christ.

It matters how we talk about these issues—the words we use. Theological mistakes are harmful to God’s people, and if provocation and shock value rhetoric lead to mistakes, we ought not use them.

Perhaps, though, Dough Wilson is not a provocateur. Perhaps he’s just a bad communicator, as others have said. But if he really is a poor communicator, he should not be communicating on a national platform. He should not have a blog or a publishing house. There shouldn’t be concern about whether or not he has a confessional view of justification or if he is adding works to what Christ alone has done. He should not be given the responsibility of stewarding words if he cannot do it well.

What Is Our Responsibility?

I know we’re all tired of talking about Doug, but this most recent conversation around his CNN interview should also be a wake-up call to the rest of professing believers who happen to be writers, speakers, teachers, and social media-users.

The sad truth is, I think many of us fall short of the high calling to tame the tongue quite regularly. It’s too easy on social media, our own little mini-platforms, to break the Ninth Commandment.

How many of us fall into big-traffic, easy-soundbite communication on our platform of choice, becoming unhelpful noise in a cacophony of echo chambers? It’s easier to share a meme than to write a full-length opinion that has nuance and reflection. It’s easier to drop a controversial take and then leave the comment section than it is to consider: is this the way to talk about this issue in a manner that befits the occasion, that gives grace to those who hear?

We should all be convicted of our speech.

I’m not a journalist anymore, but I still feel the weight of an audience, of people listening—on social media, yes, but also in my church and my work and my group chats. And, as a woman in the church who sometimes has to really get on her tiptoes to be heard in the din of theological conversation, I’m hyperaware of the consequences of misspeaking.

But, then, I wish we all were.

I sat on the concrete ledge next to the large campus sign proclaiming in brilliant white and blue lettering, Westminster Seminary California, and I let out a deep sigh. A sob? I had just left the classroom of my last final for the semester and was now waiting for my husband to walk out of those same doors. He always stays in an exam room until the last possible minute, leaving me to pace about anxiously until we could debrief the test together.

But there was no pacing this time. Just me sitting on the ledge, trying not to throw up.

Just before papers were due the fall semester of our last year of seminary, my husband and I found out we were expecting. We rejoiced in God’s provision, cried over our hopes for the future, and then I spent the next two weeks trying to finish essays and study for finals with the most crippling fatigue I have ever felt in my life.

As I waited for my husband to finish his exam, I thought back over the last hour: the nausea that had settled deep in my stomach about ten minutes in, the brain fog that made reading English nearly impossible—let alone the Greek and Hebrew Bibles we were allowed to bring with us—and the crushing weight of knowing that if I didn’t pass this final, I wouldn’t be able to get my degree.

I did pass. And despite heart burn, exhaustion, sleepless nights, and being constantly too hot, hungry, or tired in class, I passed all my classes in the spring as well, walking across stage to receive diplomas for my two masters degrees in a gown that barely fit over my eight-month bump.

We packed up and moved states when I was so large and peeing so frequently we barely made it through Utah. We unpacked and I felt myself being overtaken by an anxiety so poignant and painful I thought I was going crazy—it is delicately known as “nesting.”

And then I labored for twenty-one hours—during which I threw up, passed out, and watched helplessly as several nurses tried to get my blood pressure back to where it should be for nearly half an hour.

“What happens if you can’t get it back up?” I asked.

“We’ll get it back up,” she responded in a way that made me realize the weight of the alternative.

Birth, it’s almost a cliche to say, is a miracle. There is nothing quite like holding the human you’ve made yourself for the first time—not that I really got that experience either. I couldn’t feel a thing, physically or emotionally, at that point because of all the medication it took to have a safe delivery.

But I did feel the swell of hormones that flooded my system for the next three months, bringing me to lows I didn’t know existed, sweeping me through endless forests of my own fatigued emotions. I felt the fraying of my mind after months of sleepless nights piled unredemptively high, the ache of every muscle across my arms and spine each time I rocked my restless baby back to sleep, and the deeply-set self-loathing that creeps in with every moment of weakness, failure, or finitude and says, “You’re not a good mom.”

This is not extraordinary. It’s all quite common—normal, even. I would go so far as to say, I’ve had it pretty easy. I know women whose pregnancies left them bed-ridden for months or hospitalized, whose labor complications put their lives at risk, whose precious children have been born with health complications, and whose post-partum recoveries have been perilous.

So, imagine my reaction when I watched Doug Wilson summarize the purpose of woman’s existence and the female contribution to life on this planet by saying: “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” His further clarification that, “It doesn’t take any talent to just reproduce biologically,” certainly did not make things better.

In a feat of rhetoric, Doug—can I call him that?—has managed to both reduce women to their reproductive value and minimize the value of that reproduction. We could talk about women’s right to vote or whether a husband should make all the decisions in a family until we’re blue in the face (some of us have), but if we don’t address the theological root of these issues, we will never be able to stop up the dam of debasing ideologies. Doug Wilson is fundamentally misrepresenting our origins and misunderstanding eternity. Let’s discuss it.

Women’s role in childbearing is incredibly undervalued

Social media tends to give us a very sterilized concept of birth—the photoshoots focus on the bump announcements, ultrasound prints displayed next to tiny shoes, “one-month-old!” quilts, and perfectly orchestrated baby showers. They don’t show the months of vomiting, fatigue, headaches, backaches, callouses, weariness and worry. They don’t show the tearing, bleeding, and weeping, nor the year-long toll taken from a woman’s body in order to create a human life and the ways she will never be the same. Most of it is wildly unfit for public consumption.

And that’s if everything goes well.

Some historians think that Spartans reserved honored burials only for soldiers who died in battle and women who died in childbirth. Whether or not this is true, it is moving—especially if you have been in a room with a woman screaming for hours (sometimes days) to bring the life in her womb out into the world through her very own loins.

Perhaps Doug doesn’t see that childbearing inherently is not a matter of talent, but of service and selflessness. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t recognize its true value.

“Childbirth involves travail,” he writes, as if “painful or laborious effort” (according to Oxford Dictionary) comes close to describing the cost of human reproduction on a woman’s body, mind, and spirit.

Maybe if we described the experience of female reproduction in more male terms, it might be more rightly esteemed. Pregnancy, childbirth, and early childrearing requires endurance, steadfastness, self-control, resilience, and incredible physical strength and mental fortitude. Does that merit a better grade in Doug’s book? Or does he think women are capable of those?

I fear, however, that his inability to fathom this part of the female experience, is just another symptom of his damaging theology.

Women ought not be defined only by their reproductive capacity

In May of this year, he wrote a blog on Fertility and Dominion, in which he described a man’s careful stewardship of the earth in regards to Genesis 1:28, and compared replenishing fruit trees by not planting them three feet apart with “replenishing” one’s wife by not having as many children as possible. This puts into context Doug’s comments on women during his CNN interview. He thinks that bringing children into this world is part of man’s dominion—the way a man plants a vineyard and plans out how far to space his trees and when to prune them, etc. He thinks women are merely the vessel (and although he rejected that premise during the interview, he did nothing to prove his ideology reflects anything different).

The root of the issue is that, in Doug’s world, women don’t have agency over any of the family planning, and not just because men are the head of the household, etc., but because he misunderstands Genesis 1–2. He sees the creation narrative as an androcentric origin story, in which women are created to keep men company and help serve their needs. But Genesis 1:27–28 isn’t only talking about or addressing men. Both male and female are presented as image-bearers and both male and female are blessed and given dominion.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

Women aren’t the trees, they’re the gardeners.

Sola Media recently hosted a discussion between Michael S. Horton and Matthew Lee Anderson, in which they discussed the global fertility crisis. Anderson observes of the conversations surrounding this issue that: “One of the collateral effects of this is a kind of reduction of women to child-birthing people.” He goes on to explain that women are more than just mothers or potential mothers. They are—and I can’t believe this needs to be said—whole people with value outside of what they bring to a marriage or to family planning.

This is not an extreme idea or the manifestation of a “woke” Christianity. This is Genesis 1–2. This is what it means that both male and female are made in God’s image and are, therefore, called to dominion. They are equal rulers, both called to exercise wisdom and right judgment, both called to work and worship.

The woman, in Genesis 2, is created in the context of man’s call to guard and keep the garden and obey the Lord. God looks at man and says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18). He doesn’t say, “It’s not good that the man isn’t married, he needs someone to take care of him and have his children.” He declares, within the context of man’s creational purposes of work and worship, that man needs a strong helper (I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Hebrew argument here). And this strong helper’s role is to come alongside man in work and the worship of God—not to serve the man, but to serve with the man.

In the Bible, we see this in Abigail’s wisdom (which contradicts her husband’s foolish commands) and the leadership of Deborah and Miriam. It’s in Ruth’s service to Naomi which preserves the line of the Messiah, and Rahab’s faith-filled subterfuge, and Jael’s tent peg. We see it when Priscilla goes with her husband to instruct Apollos and when Mary sits at the feet of Jesus and he declares that she has claimed the better portion.

Women are not just for child-bearing.

The weight of eternity should shift our understanding of purpose in this age.

There is one point on which I agree with Doug. He references the eternal weight a mother carries for the souls of her children, and this is a heaviness I know well.

Though I take comfort in knowing my daughter’s salvation does not rest in my hands, I wear my worry for her soul like a pearl necklace, which I wring between anxious fingers throughout the day, praying, “Lord, let her name be written in Zion.”

The truth is, I pray that prayer for all the children in our little church. I recognize that in this age of God’s people, I’m not just a biological mother, but a spiritual one. I’ve been placed in a family ordained by Jesus in Matthew 12:48-50: “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

I took such comfort in this truth when I was single and longing for children—what a beautiful way to belong and be fulfilled. I take as much comfort in it now, and I’m so, so grateful for my daughter’s spiritual mothers—sweet sisters in Christ who love me and her like their own.

What Doug misunderstands about the weight of eternity is that it is a comfort—a hope that eases the impossible burdens of this age. If you understand the gospel, the good news that righteousness has been met on our behalf and the price of our sins has been paid and our resurrection has been proven through Christ, the firstborn of the dead, then eternity is a balm.

When the accusing voice in my weary mind says, “You’re not a good mom,” I can nod my head and say, “Yes, but I have a good savior, and he loves my daughter well.”

As women are created to be co-laborers with men, we are destined for rest as co-heirs. I can trust in God’s covenant promises to my daughter, and in the testimony of his Spirit to me, that eternity will come for us both—not as the kind of people who people come out of, but as heirs to an incredible promise, as co-laborers with our brothers in Christ, and as adopted children beloved by our Father.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (Romans 8:22–24a)