Imago Dei in Motherhood - Part 5 - Eat

I love food. I mean, I really love it. I love planning it out, shopping for it, growing it, and cooking it. I’m that type of person who attempts things like homemade Cool Ranch Doritos just for the fun of it.

I jumped onto the sourdough bread train with enthusiasm during the initial Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 (praise be! my starter QuaranTina is somehow still alive and well). My most recent project has been learning the art of homemade pasta. I love almost nothing more than spending the better part of a day prepping an luxurious meal, just to sit down and try that first bite.

But it wasn’t always this way. When my husband and I first got married in 2007, here is a comprehensive list of what I knew how to cook:
-yogurt and granola
-grilled cheese
-peanut butter sandwiches

I mean, I literally didn’t know how to fry an egg.

Shortly after our honeymoon ended, I decided to experiment with “Try-It-Tuesday.” Each Tuesday, I’d cook something completely new to me, and I soon found that following a recipe was not only therapeutic for me, but also really fun. I discovered that food is absolutely one of my favorite things on earth.

(a common scene circa 2007…me, recipe in hand, brows furrowed in concentration)

There were ups: I can roast a chicken!
There were downs: Apparently, I’m allergic to fresh basil!

And then…there were children.

My oldest child will eat anything, and I patted myself on the back with my extra long spatula, congratulating myself for the months I spent preparing him homemade baby food.

Then, my other children came along, with the apparent sole purpose of teaching me humility. These two now take turns hating and loving bananas. One of them will not eat a bun with her hamburger; the other only likes cheese on Tuesdays. Their recurring requests for mac ‘n cheese and more mac ‘n cheese have all but sucked the joy out of cooking most nights, and then, of course, there is the ceaselessness of it all.

(my daughter, absolutely enraged that I would ask her to eat the sandwich she requested)

It started when I was feeding my newborn babies around the clock, and then there were the toddler and preschool years of snacks on snacks on snacks on snacks. Now, my husband and I regularly look at each other across the dinner table full of empty pizza boxes and wonder how we will pay for these animals’ feeding habits once they all actually hit puberty. Most days, I feel like I get the breakfast dishes cleaned up just in time to start lunch, and on and on it goes, in an endless loop of meal prep and clean-up.

I’ve always loved that some of God’s first recorded words to mankind were about food. He tells Adam: you can eat from any tree but one before he even says hello apparently (Genesis 1:29, 2:16). My toddlers were the same, waking up hangry from naps. I would walk in to retrieve them from their cribs, and offer them a sippy cup of milk before attempting any conversation with them. God knows our needs, so he took care of Adam’s hunger straight away.

His Chef habit continues throughout the Bible, as we follow him through the desert, handing out manna to the Israelites (Exodus 16).

And I cannot help but see a mother’s love in the way God cares for an exhausted, discouraged Elijah in I Kings 19, encouraging and strengthening him with a little something to eat and drink after a nap.

Jesus too was keenly aware of the physical needs of those he loved. He, of course, fed the 5,000 in spectacular fashion, but he also took care of his disciples in intimate ways that are reflected in a mother’s love. After he’d absolutely astonished his friends by causing the fishing catch of their lifetime, he remained calm on the beach, cooking fish to feed them for breakfast (John 21:10-13).

And when, in Isaiah 25:6, we read about the new reality God is preparing for us, we are given a picture of a feast, with rich food and wine, which calls to mind the mother excitedly preparing all her children’s favorite foods in anticipation of their visit home.

God the Father shows Himself as God the Feeder throughout the whole Bible, and it is there that we know his care for us. A mother’s care. He could care about only our minds and souls and emotions, but no - he makes it clear from the first day of creation, that he will feed all of these and our bodies too because no need is too small for his notice or care.

I see this aspect of God’s character imaged in mothers, who are most often in charge of the food and eating in their homes. It is mothers who are up on around the clock, nursing small babies. It is mothers cutting up grapes into tiny pieces. It is mothers who make grocery lists and who remember which child does and doesn’t like peppers; it is mothers who remember to pack the snacks. In feeding our people (and in doing dishes, day after day), we as mothers, bear the image of God.

So with each and every apple we slice, each carrot we peel, each puff fed one by one to our teething babies, each frozen pizza whipped into the oven at 6:45 p.m. when everyone is starving and melting down, we are doing this same work - bearing the image of a God who shows his children no need of theirs is too insignificant for his notice.

Let us rejoice in this feeding God. Let us know that we are known as we sit to plan out meals and write grocery lists. Let us feel his nearness when we feed our babies at midnight, and then again at 3:45 a.m. and again at 6:00 a.m. Let us recognize his care for us as we place the grilled cheese in front of our children, as we teach them to relish a ripe watermelon and wipe the drips from their chin on a hot summer day.

Let us know the vibrance of his creativity as we dive into chocolate cake with chocolate frosting; let us marvel at the intricacy of his care as we eat a carrot and learn that its very cellular makeup was designed to help our own cells, not to mention our bones, our eyes, our immunity. Let us revel in the fact that God sees fit to care for us in the most basic of ways - eating - and that no part of our need is beyond His care.

Let us wonder at how we can bear God’s extraordinary image in the everyday act of feeding our kids.