My God has a mother’s heart?

As one whom his mother comforts,

so I will comfort you;

Isaiah 66:13a

I awoke this morning to Isaiah 66:13 in “The King James Version" on my daily scripture calendar. It has been six days since my mother passed away and the grief is still painfully raw. Last night I laid my head in my wife’s lap and wept inconsolably.

It seems there is something in the feminine wherein a man finds a deep needed comfort that I believe he could never find in the presence of another man.
This week my wife talked to some of her friends who are scattered across the planet, finding solace in the comforting empathy of old friends. Afterwards she mentioned that perhaps I should call Terri. This is one of the most impressive Christians we know. Her husband Jim is the man that I model my life after. He is the man I want to be most like when I “grow" up. But it is his wife Terri that I’ll probably call when I’m finally ready to talk about the desolation my mother’s death has caused in my soul.

My father has always been the epitome of what strength means to me. The great men who came into my life in later years merely took a place by his side as models of manhood. When I need to find the courage to endure hardship, or the power to overcome obstacles, or the guts to simply be a man and get the job done, then I reach out to memories of my “fathers" to inspire me to be the man my world needs me to be.

But it was my mother who stood at the bedroom window all night waiting for her teenage boys to come home from the dangerous bars and streets that they frequented far too often during those wild years of our late adolescence. It was my mother who kept a host of trinkets and memorabilia from her children’s past.

My sister has been organizing my mother’s things and she discovered a treasure trove of pictures, papers, trinkets and trivia cataloging our childhood. We had no idea this large bag existed or that our mother had kept it so carefully.

In my thirties I visited the church where my parents had been members when we were children. I was a missionary in Germany by then and was back in my hometown sharing with the local churches on the progress of the ministry they supported. One of the older ladies came up after the service and told me that she had been in the same small group as my mother 20 years earlier when I was a young teenager. Back then I was a menace to society, perpetually stoned beyond feeling, I carried a knife in my back pocket and a destructive chip on my shoulder. This dear old lady explained that my mother had once shared with her small group that she believed I would one day become a missionary and a great man of God. I can well imagine the shocked disbelief such a fantastical dream would provoke in a men’s small group and shudder at the reaction it would have provoked in men who would feel the need to ruthlessly correct this outrageously delusional statement. But I can imagine in that women’s group the other mothers simply nodded encouragement and quietly hugged equally powerful dreams for their own little boys who were also wreaking havoc on the streets outside in the ghetto where this church represented an oasis where these poor mothers huddled in desperate hope that perhaps God would rescue their sons from the social horror that comes with systemic poverty and systemic violence.

In my grief it is a woman’s heart I seek to ease the agony, a woman’s heart to share the loss, and a woman’s heart to nurture my boyish spirit that is so crushed at the moment. So it was a great comfort this morning when I read Isaiah 66:13 and felt my God’s heart revealed as a tender mother’s heart.

I remember the firestorm that The Shack provoked when the author depicted God the Father as a middle aged black woman. I was in Germany at the time and I wondered at the depth of outrage that so many theologians felt over the author having infamously given the Almighty a “feminine gender” role in an allegorical tale of the loss and unimaginable grief of a fictional father whose daughter is abducted, tortured and then murdered by a depraved stranger.

Oddly, I have never encountered a woman who felt as dismayed or confused by Mr Young’s depiction of God as a Mother. There are enough passages in Scripture where God uses the feminine gender to express a part of His character or interaction with His creation to support such an allegorical tale depicting loss and grief. I think there is perhaps some virulent strain of misogyny within Christianity that constantly infects many men in each generation with a need to debase the other gender in God’s creation.

But let me add this caveat in what may be a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable firestorm of theological “coals” to be heaped upon my head from some of my fellow masculine protectors of Orthodoxy. Let me assure you all that I understand fully and agree passionately with the profound differences in the Genders that God has ordained, and I fully submit to the reasons why God chose to predominantly reveal “Himself” in the masculine gender and the importance of not blurring that distinctive theological point by speaking too frequently or carelessly about our God being revealed in the Feminine gender.

But this morning I am consoled by my God having a “mother’s heart" as I grief the loss of my earthly mother.