Both Halves of the Image

The visitor's chair on the maternity ward is plastic and slightly too low, and he sits in it with his coat still on, because he has never known what to do with himself in a hospital. His sister is in the bed. The baby is on her chest, under a blanket with yellow ducks on it, and the tea trolley is rattling somewhere down the corridor.

He watches her do a thing he has no word for. The baby stirs, makes a small furious noise, and his sister does not fix anything. She does not sit up, does not check, does not solve. She just gathers. One hand under, one hand over, her whole body curved round the child like a wall that is warm, and she makes a sound low in her throat that is not a word, and the baby goes quiet against her, and she carries on talking to him about the parking as if nothing has happened.

He has prayed to God as Father since he was seven. He means it. He believes it. Father is strong and Father is right and Father sees him and, on a good day, is pleased. And sitting in the plastic chair, watching his sister curve round a furious small thing until it goes still, he has a thought so unexpected that he actually looks away from it. It is this: I have never once expected Him to do that. Not correct me, not steady me. That. And underneath it, quieter, and worse: I did not know I was allowed to want it.

You know that chair. You were taught, faithfully and by people who loved you, that God is a Father, and you have never once been mothered by Him, and it has not occurred to you until now that the second thing might not be a rule. I want to sit in the low plastic chair beside you for a moment. I know that room from the inside. Then we are going to read one verse very slowly, and I am going to keep to what it says.

Where the mothering half came from

Let me put the verse in front of you first, and then say the boundary in the same breath, because I would rather you receive comfort with the fence around it than warmth with an anxiety installed underneath.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.Genesis 1:27

Male and female. Both, in the image. Not the man in the image and the woman as an afterthought, and not the woman as the tender half of a God who is otherwise stern. Both of them, together, carrying the likeness of the One who made them. So ask the plain question. If the man carries His image and the woman carries His image, where did the mothering come from? Where did your sister's curved back and the low sound in her throat come from? It came from Him. There is nowhere else for it to have come from. Everything good in the man and everything good in the woman was His before it was theirs.

And now the boundary, in the same paragraph, because I promised. God is not a man and He is not a woman. Numbers says it as plainly as anything in the Bible: God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind. He is not male. He is not female. He is God, and Scripture, when it wants to tell us what He is like, reaches for a father's traits and a mother's traits and uses both, exactly as far as it uses them and no further. The Bible calls Him He, and Jesus taught us to say Father, and I keep to that. I am not going to give Him a title He did not give Himself. What I am going to do is refuse to hide half of the image from you.

You were made in the image of a God who holds the whole of both, and the tenderness you have never expected from Him is in Him. I did not invent that to be kind. It is written in the first chapter of the first book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verse you could recite in your sleep and makes it a warm thing in a plastic chair.

Here is the pit, and I am going to be careful with it. Nobody told you that you were forbidden to be held. They told you God was a Father, and they were right, and somewhere in the telling the word Father narrowed until it meant only the strong things: the correcting, the steadying, the seeing, the being pleased. Everything soft went to the other side of the room and you assumed it belonged to somebody else. So you have carried yourself, for years, into the presence of a God you trusted to be firm and never once trusted to gather you. That is not unbelief. It is half a picture, and half a picture is heavier to hold than a whole one.

Look at what God says about Himself when He wants you to know how He comforts. In Isaiah He does not say, as a father steadies his son. He says, as one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you. In Deuteronomy He is the Rock who fathered Israel and, in the same verse, the God who gave them birth, and Moses saw no contradiction, because there is none. He is not two Gods. He is one God, and He chose both pictures. You have a Father who comforts the way a mother comforts, and He said so, out loud, about Himself. That is Scripture and not sentiment, and the Spirit who inspired those lines is not embarrassed by them and does not want you to be either.

Let me say one more thing carefully, because some of you were told this language was dangerous and I do not want to leave you afraid. In Hebrew, the word for the Spirit, ruach, is a feminine noun, and the Spirit in Genesis hovers over the deep the way a bird broods over a nest. That is grammar and it is a picture, and both are God's own. It does not make the Spirit a woman, and it does not make God a goddess, and I am not saying either. It makes God the one who chose to be known by the fiercest and gentlest things in both halves of the image, and kept every one of them.

You are not wandering into error by wanting to be held by God, and you are not lowering the Father by receiving it. The word says the same One is both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it safe to lean.

And now the part I owe you about your mouth. This half of the picture does not come back into the room by you thinking about it harder in a plastic chair. Jesus said faith the size of the smallest seed on the ward's window ledge can speak to a mountain and see it move. Speak. Your mountain has a shape and it sits between you and the bed: the settled assumption that the gathering was never for you. You have the standing to speak to that assumption and tell it what it is, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls you His child, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what you say further than a low voice under the sound of a tea trolley.