If you’ve been around here for long, or have read my book, you know that a primary way that God met me in my long post-Afghanistan journey through illness and loss of my medical career was through showing me his love in all the roles in the birth drama. As I wrote in Risking Rest, “God’s love is so big and His desire to draw us into it so great that no single metaphor is sufficient to communicate that love; God circles and doubles back, revealing Himself in all the different roles in the obstetrical drama: as mother, father, husband, midwife, even baby whom we, along with Mary, are graced to carry” (p. 12).

This week, I’ve been thrilled to discover a beautiful new book, Love Like a Mother, by Elizabeth Berget. While her primary intended readership is women in the messy middle of mothering, that hasn’t stopped me as a single woman from sensing myself drawn close and enabled to rest more deeply in God’s tender love as I’ve read the rich insights she has drawn out of Scripture and the history of the church.

God’s mother love matters for all sorts of reasons. One, which Berget points out after finding “in both the Old and New Testaments, many largely overlooked references to God’s maternal love,” is that “This widespread theological blind spot for divine maternal imagery should. . . weigh heavily on us as we seek to honor the fullness of God’s word” (p. 4). Both women and men are created in the image of God, each mirroring different but equally precious parts of who God is. To know God as fully as we can, we need all the metaphors that God offers us in Scripture: rock and vine, lion and lamb, mother and father. “Knowing God as both father and mother is like a splash of watercolor paint over a bold black line drawing. We need both the beautiful dark lines and colorful pastels for the picture to be complete” (Berget, p. 198).

And two, “There is something special and unique about the love of a mother that we are born wanting and needing, and we shortchange ourselves in viewing God only as father because this need, like all others, can only be perfectly met in God alone” (Berget, p. 5).

I sometimes wonder if our unthinkingly unbiblical perception of God as male might be part of the reason that some of us are so focused on productivity and efficiency, obedience and responsibility that we struggle to trust God’s gentle love towards us in our limitations and weaknesses. How might we navigate our lives differently if we lived the biblical truth that God is neither male nor female, but uses both masculine and feminine metaphors to reveal to us his fullness? Might we be more gentle with ourselves when we feel like we’re failing if our experienced image of God in that moment was that of a mother stooping to help her one-year-old learn to walk?

“Imagine a woman, bent in half at the waist, her arms stretched out toward the wobbly one-year-old in front of her, whose legs appear to be primarily made of jelly. Her forefingers are tightly clasped in his chubby fists as he takes one step, then an unsteady second, before collapsing into a puddle. She bends even lower and sweeps him upward before he hits the ground, bringing him close to her face to nuzzle his cheeks and cover him with a thousand kisses. They giggle together as he tries again and again, and before long, it is naptime. They sit in the rocking chair in the dark of his room, and she bends toward him again. His eyes grow heavy as he nurses, and she watches his long eyelashes flutter against his cheek before his breathing slows as he drifts off to sleep.

These are the images of God that we are given in Hosea 11:3-4:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;

I took them up in my arms,

But they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness,

With bands of love.

I was to them like those

Who lift infants to their cheeks.

I bent down to them and fed them.” (Berget, p. 89)

Perhaps you might like to join me in sitting with that image, imagining yourself the young one learning to walk, feeling the security of God’s mothering hands holding yours, strong arms sweeping you up into a hug when you stumble, holding you close and quieting you with gentle presence.

Whatever your day holds today, friend, may you know God being to you all that you need in it.

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Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash

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Want to explore God’s gentle love further? Here are a few links you might like:

Love Like A Mother, by Elizabeth Berget

Risking Rest, by me

https://hearingtheheartbeat.com/2026/01/27/when-you-need-comfort-in-lifes-messiness/

https://hearingtheheartbeat.com/2022/05/07/when-you-need-a-mothers-tender-care/