Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: She Has the Whole World in Her Hands.

In an extract from her most personal book yet, popular speaker and bestselling author Sarah Bessey invites us into her long – and sometimes miraculous – road to recovery after a terrible car accident and shares how it changed everything she believed about God …

I had first been introduced to God as the good Father. I was introduced to God as Healer, God as Redeemer, God as Jesus, God as Holy Spirit. But as I began to choose life, as I began to see myself as healed even with chronic pain as a companion, I began to turn again and again to God as Mother too.

I couldn’t work as I used to work, but neither did I want to sink back into another round of Weeks of Wallowing as I had done after my book had been rejected. I knew that I needed to look after myself as part of God’s invitation to choose life, as much as it lay within my grasp, to believe that I would be met there with life. The times in my life when I have experienced transformation, it has been at the intersection of my choices and the divine, mystical stirring of the Holy Spirit. It’s the dance that changes me from the inside out—as I reach forward, I receive; as I step back, I surrender; I’m becoming who I was meant to be all along perhaps. In this turn of transformation now awaiting me, a transformation into the self that would be able to live in the tension of God’s Both/And instead of our human need for Either/Or, I needed to figure out how to embody shalom practically.

I lost count of how many women made jokes to me about “wine time!” or “binge watch for the weekend” as a form of self-care. It’s a quick laugh of solidarity, sure, but I knew that if I engaged in that version of self-care, I would self-care myself right into crisis or alcoholism or both. I already have a tendency to try to numb out in times of stress: I could use anything from food to wine to books to television to shopping. Ask my sister sometime about her second-hand anxiety from watching me in university: my final thesis was due and rather than tackle it, I read novel after novel (after novel) instead. As a steady, hard-working academic, Amanda has never recovered from watching me numb out on my looming stress. So I knew that for me, I had to envision self-care as more than a good book and a bath. Those things help in the moment; my life was more than a moment to me. I needed good paths to follow toward life, abundant life.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus heals a man born blind and the Pharisees investigate the healed man’s claim. Then Jesus turns to the Pharisees and tells them a parable about a shepherd and a thief. The thief is foiled because the sheep won’t follow him out of the gate—they know only the shepherd’s voice. The Pharisees don’t understand it, and so he tells them that he is both the gate and the shepherd. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (1)

This is perhaps my mother’s most beloved verse in the Bible. One translation (2) renders Jesus’ words as “I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

With the invitation to choose life still ringing in my ears, I found myself thinking of my mother’s love for this line of Scripture. It deeply frames how she views God – through the lens of life. If it brings flourishing and abundance, peace and life, justice and goodness, she leaned into that as the pasture of God.

The line just before that invitation to abundant life; the one where Jesus says, “I am the Gate,” strikes me now. “Anyone who goes through me will be cared for – will freely go in and out, and find pasture.” It paints God as the gate to home and the gate to the wilderness or the mountain or the field that lies beyond. God as shepherd on both sides of the gate means to me that God is at home both in me and outside of me – there is a danger and wildness to God, and a calm homecoming too.

In Christ, our coming and our going is held as one experience with the divine. The notion of movement with God, of the dance going in and out is like the waves on the shore. Perhaps this means God is ocean and God is sand but also the tide pulling us between them both, and we experience the safety of the land and the danger of the open holy water.

My friend Kelly (3) told me to pay attention to the difference between self-care and self-comfort. I had a natural bent toward indulging in self-comfort; what I needed now in this season of my life was radical self-care.

Self-comfort numbs us, weakens us, hides us; it can be a soporific. But self-care awakens us, strengthens us, and emboldens us to rise. Self-comfort wouldn’t heal or help me in this new path; only the path of true self-care would help me to create shalom within my own self. I needed to go to my doctor appointments. I had to take my medications and vitamins faithfully. I had to show up for follow-up visits, I had to go to therapists, I had to explore my habits and find the trigger points of pain, I had to exercise gently, I had to submit myself to the daily hard work of incremental healing, I had to adjust my work schedule and my expectations and my crippling belief that God loves me more when I’m working hard.

As I grappled with how to begin to engage in my new normal, I realised something that the women at the retreat on the weekend of the accident had given to me was going to be key. Just before I left them for that drive, together they sang the old song “She’s Got the Whole World in Her Hands.”

I remembered that song and something that had been missing in my understanding of healing became clear. Perhaps self-care is simply joining with God to care for ourselves as a mother would care for us. As I walked through the gate, I discovered God’s metaphor as a wise, capable, strong, patient, kind, no- nonsense, deeply loving mother. I knew so well how it felt to be mothered by my own mum. I remembered how her love made me feel grounded but also how she opened the doors for me and bade me to go further out into the world, secure in that love.

It is nice to be mothered. No wonder my own children like it so much. Whenever my children have a fall or catch a cold, I often bundle them up into my arms and say, “Oh, you poor wee lamb.” It was a joke at first – I did it with my big kids when I thought they needed an over-excess of sympathy. I always said it with a thick Scottish accent and grandiose affection, so they would laugh and cheer up. But by the time our youngest was born, it had evolved into a tender phrase (still in a terrible Scottish accent) whispered over them in times of pain or grief. While my hand smoothed their hair from a feverish forehead or when I bandaged up a knee or sat at their bedside while we debriefed a hard day, I saw how they melted and exhaled when I said, “poor wee lamb,” in recognition of their suffering, how they leaned in to receive my soft warmth before they could rise again.

One day, when she was only two, Maggie fell and scraped her knee quite badly when she was out with her babysitter. When I saw her that afternoon, she turned to me, bottom lip quivering, and lifting up her pudgy arms, she said, “Mummy, please call me a poor wee lamb.” There was something about the tender acknowledgment of her pain that she was craving. And in some ways, I still feel God as that mother-shepherd whispering acknowledgment of the pain just as well as the path to life.

And even so, my body sometimes requires a bit of “poor wee lamb” too. Sometimes, when I tuck my own children into bed for an evening of rest and popcorn and comic books, I sense God inviting me to that sort of rest, to remember that shalom isn’t about restoring me to constant Doing and Going and Accomplishing, it’s also a restoration and a healing and a reimagining of abundant life. This has taught me that we are worthy of love and care – not only for our own selves but for the sake of the world. This has been the question God has given to me as a practice of spiritual discernment during my life with chronic pain: How would God like to mother me today? If God was a strong, patient, wise, kind, no-nonsense, deeply loving mother, what would She want for me today? It’s a great question to ask in prayer when I feel scattered and exhausted and empty.

Sometimes the answer has been simply: Take a nap, child, I’ve got you.

I have always loved the imagery of God as a mother in Scripture, so it’s not completely out of left field for God to use a maternal image to break through in my life, to give me a path to follow toward choosing life. Most of us identify God in parental terms as a father—and that is deeply meaningful to me as well. And that has come easily to me perhaps because of my own father: his strength of character and conviction, his steadiness and masculine love, have been a foundation to my life. Knowing my own father made it easy for me to love God as father. He gave me a straight path to run on to see God as a good and loving father. But just as my own father gave me a glimpse of God’s good character, so did my mother. She could not be erased from the goodness of God’s expression. Her energy, her nurture, her fierce mama bear protectiveness, her joy and laughter, the ministry of her hands in my hair smoothing away the stress.

I find that the older I get, the more I care for the ones I love and for the world, the more I need both – I need both the energy of the mother and of the father. I need the fullness of the expression of God, not a lopsided caricature of either. And in times of suffering or loss or exhaustion, it has turned out that I needed a mother.

As Julian of Norwich wrote, “As verily as God is our Father, verily God is our Mother.” (4) So I began to picture that strong, wise, capable, patient, no-nonsense, deeply loving mother present in my choosing of life. After all, a peer might indulge my avoidance or self-neglect or selfishness, encourage me to do what feels good instead of what creates good.

But the sort of mother I envisioned – the way my own mum had mothered me when I was small – would make sure we ate well, drank water, went for walks, took our medication, read good books, challenged ourselves intellectually and spiritually, cared about others, managed our money responsibly, all of that good stuff. A mother who truly loved us would establish boundaries and offer wise counsel and tenderness of rest. Perhaps you picture Molly Weasley from the Harry Potter series. Or Sister Julienne from Call the Midwife or Marilla Cuthbert from Anne of Green Gables or Marmee from Little Women. Or maybe you’ll imagine Maya Angelou in your ear whispering that when you know better, you do better. Maybe you imagine your own mum or a Sunday-school teacher or the mother of your best friend—whoever makes you feel safe and secure and cared for in your mind—and then simply do what they say.

I began to experience God as mother in my life. She would say, “You’ve had eight cups of coffee today, you have been on the computer for too long, your whole body is crying – time to shut down the laptop and get some fresh air and eat a vegetable, child.”

If I was pitying and selfish, I could picture Her telling me to open my eyes to the world around me. If I was overwhelmed, She held me tenderly as I wept.

If I was cranky and exhausted, I could picture Her telling me to get to bed at a reasonable time.

If I was struggling to walk or was experiencing a week of pain, She would silently hand me the phone and raise Her eye-brows until I called my physiotherapist.

If I was working as if the world was mine to save, She would remind me She has the whole world in Her hands. As my spiritual director often has to remind me, “The Kingdom of God is not in trouble.”

And day by day, I strengthened. I wasn’t always doing what felt good – I still despise exercise and am allergic to admitting that I am not fine – but what I was doing was slowly creating good, making room for good to flourish, planting goodness in faith for a harvest of abundance.

This kind of care awakens us to our true selves. Rather than hiding under the blankets and retreating from life, being mothered by God gave me a path to reengaging with life from a place of strength and wisdom and wholeness. This metaphor for self-care has given me a way to parent myself through this season of grief, loss, pain, and recovery.

Mothering has been my primary altar for encountering not only God but my own weakness. So embracing even the word mothering to describe my relationship with and the nature of my role with my children has been transformative – mothering as a verb always feels more tender, more loving, more relational, more familial, more warm to me. I love mothering. I’m not always good at parenting or discipling or raising or disciplining – but mothering is something I can get into with my whole soul. (5) I am not always good at mothering, and it doesn’t come naturally all the time.

One part of mothering as I have experienced it, as both a receiver and as a provider, is that it isn’t private, no matter how personal it is to us. Our experience being mothered by God isn’t any different in that respect.

Shalom doesn’t end at the false boundary of our own business: we are part of the communal renewal of all things. I am always mothering my children with an eye on who they are right now in this moment but also with an eye on what or who is waiting up ahead.

I want to raise these amazing, beautiful, frustrating children to become wise and strong, kind and generous, loving and whole individuals who love God and love their neighbours well. And just as I mother my children with that endgame in mind, I do believe the Holy Spirit mothers us with an endgame. It’s not only our own wholeness, it is also for the wholeness of the world.

Because there is a lot of life on the other side of awakening. We are mothered for a purpose. We are awakened to empowerment. We are awakened to love one another as we love ourselves.

This is an extract from Miracles and Other Reasonable Things by Sarah Bessey. It is available now in paperback, priced £9.99.

(1) John 10:10, NIV.

(2) King James Version.

(3) Kelly Gordon is a good friend and for years now has modelled this to me. She eventually did record a podcast episode to discuss the concept with Meg Tietz of Sorta Awesome. It’s episode 162: “Self-Care, Self-Comfort, What’s Healthy, What’s Not” on September 14, 2018.

(4) Julian (of Norwich), Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (London: St. Clarke, 1843), 148. Originally published in 1670.

(5) Not everyone has this connection to the word mothering, and I recognize and honour that. It’s a tender word for me because I have been mothered well. But not everyone will feel that. This metaphor won’t be as meaningful for some—that’s the nature of life. Not everything is for everyone. There is room for God to speak to us in so many ways and relationships and moments and words. But perhaps the image of being mothered could be redeemed for you too. If not, I pray God may give you another, better, metaphor for this kind of care and love.