Embracing the Ministry of Motherhood
“I’m thinking of volunteering for Afghan refugees,” my friend tells me over the phone. Like me, she spends most of her days at home with an eleven-month-old. We met almost ten years ago as newbie teachers at an international mission school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I recall the adventure of flying off to the mountains of Africa, tasting exotic flavors, holding the hands of those so beautifully different from me. On the mission field, it felt so satisfying and so Christian serving missionary kids and other rootless expats hungry for the grounding of the gospel. It felt like I was doing something, like I was really living out my faith every day.
After my friend and I hang up the phone, I make a mental note to check out our local refugee agency. Sometimes I feel this need to be involved, to be serving God in some kind of outreach. Sometimes the routines of motherhood don’t feel like enough. My heart sometimes aches to do ministry again.
For the past year or so, I’ve been meditating on the Old Testament prophets. Throughout these books, God calls out the sins of his people, pleading with them to turn from their wayward paths to receive divine mercy. Perhaps one of the most egregious signs of Israel’s fallenness is their lack of care for the vulnerable: the widow, the poor, the fatherless, the foreigner. Compassion for the vulnerable is central to God’s law. Again and again, God commanded his people to take special care of the needy in their midst.[1] But they forgot. Their hardheartedness is all the more tragic in light of God’s faithful, tender love for them:
“Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them” (Hosea 11:3-4).
Can you picture God himself spooning oatmeal into his beloved children’s mouths? Can you picture him laughing with delight at their first wobbly steps? This kind of compassion for the defenseless is essential to how God describes himself: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:17-18, emphases mine).
God has a huge heart for the vulnerable.
The other day it struck me: my baby is one of these vulnerable ones so close to the heart of God. My son needs me for everything. He cannot clothe, protect, nourish, bathe, or shelter himself. He cannot set his own boundaries. A friend once told me that caring for babies is exhausting partly because we are constantly keeping them from harm. My son is as needy as a shepherd-less lamb.
So when I wipe blueberry juice from my son’s cheeks, when I wrestle socks onto his feet, when I pull him away from electrical outlets (again), when I kiss his bumped forehead, when I comb his curls, when I offer him his plastic blue cup, when I change his dirty diaper, when I press warm blankets around him at night, when I tell him I love him—I am obeying God’s commandment to care for the needy and vulnerable.
Later in history, Christ puts skin and muscle on God’s divine heart of compassion. Jesus welcomes and delights in the little children[2]—playing with the folds of his robe, asking him a thousand questions, tugging at stray locks of his hair, nestling into him with utter trust. When describing the final judgment, Christ says that what will distinguish his people will be how they loved the vulnerable. He says, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The least of these: the strangers, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked, the imprisoned. My son doesn’t fit all these categories, but he certainly gets hungry, thirsty, sick, and (to his great delight!) naked.
Again, it strikes me: my baby is one of the “least of these” so close to the heart of God.
How different would my attitude be if I scrubbed my mud-splattered son as I would Christ? If I wrangled his wriggling body into his car seat as I would Christ? If I responded to his invitations to play as I would Christ? If I greeted him in the too-early morning as I would Christ? If I calmed him after a fall as I would Christ? If I responded to his needy cries and interruptions as I would Christ? How much more would my son see Christ in me! How much more might he experience divine love, incarnated within the walls of our ordinary home!
Though God may call me to serve Afghan refugees more hands-on in the future (and he may call other moms to ministries outside the home, like my friend), I realize that, for this season, he wants me to tend to the ministry before me, one embodied in little toes and unexpected smiles. When we love our children, we are obeying God’s commands to love the vulnerable. When we care for the little ones in our very home, we are loving those closest to God’s heart. If that is not ministry, I don’t know what is.
[1] Deuteronomy 14:28-29; 16:11; 24:17-22; 25:5; 26:12; 27:19, etc.
[2] Matthew 19:14
