Imago Dei in Motherhood - Part 1 - Breathe

This was part 1 of my 4-part Mother’s Day Devotional series that subscribers received.

I think it’s fair to assume that every mother since the dawn of time has, at some point, hovered over her newborn’s bassinet like the Spirit of God over the waters of creation, watching her baby’s chest rise and fall like ocean waves. 

In the breath, there is life. 

And we as mothers, who get the unique privilege of being co-creators and co-sustainers of life alongside God, deeply understand the importance of breath: from the hard and focused, olympic-medalist breathing of labor, to the tense moments as we await our newborn baby’s first cry signaling breath entering lungs, to the breathless mother who is awaiting the call from the surrogate that it’s time, or to the mother who is sitting on the floor of the hallway with phone in hand, barely able to breathe as she yells to her family that the adoption is final.

All of life starts with the breath. 

In the Beginning was the Word (John 1:1), but I like to think about the inhale that preceded that earliest quickening: an inhale, then the Word exhaled, stirring the first ocean waves and bending the treetops of Creation. We can follow that breath right down into the dust of the ground, where we find God stooped down, breathing life into the man He had shaped from the dirt (Genesis 2) because “By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth, all their host” (Psalm 33:6).

Breath. 

Our breath provides the cadence to our lives, the inhale and exhale, the rising and falling,  a thread God is mending up and down through the fabric of our days. But breathing, so natural and innate, is not always intuitive. It’s not all poetry. I remember trying to teach my oldest son to blow his nose...he was maybe two and was so stuffed up, he sounded like Donald Duck. Over and over again, I modeled for him how to copy me by inhaling with his mouth, then exhaling with his nose...but then, when push came to shove, when breathe came to blow, he would always suck in with his nose. This went on for weeks while I became besties with the Nose Frida, sucking the mucous away for him in one of motherhood’s most sacrificial acts, all because I wanted him to be able to breathe. 

With each wipe of the nose, with each humidifier purchased, each hour we’ve spent sitting in a steamy bathroom with our congested children, each gray hair we’ve earned trying to keep a nebulizer over our baby’s faces, we have worked for our children’s ability to breathe, just as God, who knows our every thought and numbers our hairs and our days (Acts 17:25), gives us breath.

But there are the times where the list overwhelms you, when the needs of your children outnumber your capacity, when the laundry pile itself might fall on top of you and suffocate you; in those moments of anxiety, the tightness of your chest makes a deep breath feel like an impossibility. And then there are the moments that take your breath away...the call from the doctor with the diagnosis, the news tragedy that you can’t escape from, the moment you wonder when you last felt the baby move. In those moments, I’ve found solace in Psalm 34:18 (the Message), “If your heart is broken, you’ll find God right there; if you’re kicked in the gut, He’ll help you catch your breath.”

My dear friend experienced one of those breathless moments when she got the call that her dad had died suddenly and abruptly, without warning. As she mourned, she also found a way to rejoice that her dad, plagued by disease on earth, was with Jesus - birthed to a new body. 

Imagining her dad’s new life gave me new eyes for this life. I began to see this life as a womb, a preparation. Now and then on this earth, we catch these glimpses of true beauty - the way the sun hits the wood floor in the afternoon just right, or when our baby looks up and meets our gaze just so, or when the scent of the lilacs floats in from outside and stops you in your tracks, and then and there, you catch the scent of it; you glimpse the New Earth, but you cannot enter into it. Just as before our babies are born, they can sense light and hear our muffled voices singing You are My Sunshine, they cannot know life fully until they are pushed into this world, squinting and screaming. Suddenly the light and the sound are everywhere around them, and they are overwhelmed until they find safety in our arms. 

I picture death that way, our last breath here on earth an entrance into new life where suddenly, we will be overcome with the beauty and vibrancy of our surroundings, squinting at the light shining from the throne of God, and we will search and stretch and cry out for our place of safety, and Jesus will pull us into his arms, cradle us close to his chest, and exclaim, “She’s here! My baby girl is here!” And we will breathe anew. 

Links to other posts in this series:

Part 1: Breathe
Part 2: Rest
Part 3: Need
Part 4: Mourn & Rejoice