An excerpt from Motherhood: How the gospel shapes our purpose and priorities by Jocelyn Loane
There is a gap of nearly six years between our third and fourth children (twins) and our fifth. Some of this time was a planned pause, during which some extended discussion about family size ensued. When I finally agreed with Ed that we might as well try and fill all the seats in the van, we found falling pregnant did not happen quite so easily. And then we suffered our first miscarriage. It utterly devastated me in a way I didn’t expect. Emotionally I was a mess and physically it wasn’t a straightforward miscarriage either. The medical appointments and procedures involved stretched out over six tearful weeks.
At one of these appointments, I was having an ultrasound to check that, as the doctor described, “all the tissue had passed”. The sonographer engaged me in conversation as she squirted on the cold gel and slid the transducer over my belly. She asked if I had any children.
I replied that I had four. At this she looked visibly shocked. “Oh”, she said, “they’re all boys, are they?” I told her no; we had two boys and two girls. “Why on earth would you be trying for another one?” she exclaimed, with some astonishment.
She may have been bolder than most, but I don’t think her surprise at our choice to have a larger than average family is unusual. The common assumption in our culture today is that when it comes to children, you can have too much of a good thing. And even if you stick to having one or two, the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that kids can make your life tiresome. They are hard work. They are more burdens than blessings. One month I decided to take a screenshot of every meme that popped up in my social media feeds about parenting.
Here are some of the ones I collected:
• I keep hearing it takes a village to raise a child. Do they just show up and get them, or is there a number to call?
• Where’s the unsubscribe button on a teenager?
• And then one day, we decided we were tired of sleeping in and doing whatever we wanted in a clean house, so we had kids.
• I think my favourite part of being a mother has been sacrificing my body, career, mental stability and physical appearance to wait on them hand and foot. Only to be met with “YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING FOR ME” when I ask them to pick up a fruit snack wrapper. It’s very rewarding.
There’s a relatability to these memes that means I often chuckle when reading them.
However, reading back over a whole month of them, I actually found it utterly depressing. The picture of parenting that these memes hold out is that it’s a lot of effort with very little reward. There’s an ‘us vs them’ mentality. The assumption is that kids set out by their very existence to make parents’ life difficult.
As we seek to be faithful Christian mothers, we don’t want to just absorb the world’s message of what it means to have children. We want to turn to the Bible and understand how God views children. And the picture painted there couldn’t be more different. The Bible paints an incredibly positive picture of what having kids means: they are a blessing. Children are good gifts given to us by our loving Father.
Children in the Bible
From the beginning of creation, humanity is purposed with being fruitful and multiplying: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground’” (Gen 1:28). Children were always a part of the plan in God’s perfect pre-Fall world. They are part of the goodness of creation. They are made in the image of God and so have an inherent dignity and worth.
In Deuteronomy we read that one of the blessings that will flow from keeping God’s covenant is that no woman shall be barren:
He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb, the crops of your land—your grain, new wine and olive oil—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks in the land he swore to your ancestors to give you. You will be blessed more than any other people; none of your men or women will be childless, nor will any of your livestock be without young. (Deut 7:13–14)
Indeed, we see the great sadness that infertility brings throughout the Old Testament to women like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah and others.
It’s important to note here that this side of the cross, infertility is not a curse from God for the Christian. God loves you and is for you. He is only acting for your good if you are in Christ. He is sovereign over the womb and he sees and cares about your pain. We don’t always know his purpose, but we do always know his character. But knowing this doesn’t change the fact that for many, there is enormous grief in being unable to conceive. And this grief is proper and right, as it acknowledges the goodness of the gift of children. We feel this grief because we know that children are a blessing.
In Psalm 127, perhaps the most famous psalm when it comes to thinking about children, we read these words:
Children are a heritage from the LORD,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court. (Ps 127:3–5)
And as we read the very next psalm, we again hear these ideas about children expressed:
Blessed are all who fear the LORD,
who walk in obedience to him.
You will eat the fruit of your labour;
blessings and prosperity will be yours.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Yes, this will be the blessing
for the man who fears the LORD. (Ps 128:1–4)
I’m pretty sure my sonographer did not have these psalms front of mind when she made her
comments to me. If she had, she would have expressed sorrow with me at the loss of our
precious little one and acknowledged that to have many children is a blessing worth desiring.
Even if they are all of one sex!
As we get to the New Testament, we again see a very positive picture of children. When my youngest daughter and I recently came to the story about Jesus welcoming children in her kids’ Bible, she squirmed with delight. “This one’s about me!” she said. I asked her to tell me why. “It’s about how Jesus just loves, loves, loves kids!” she replied.
How very accurate! In a move that was decidedly counter cultural, Jesus himself made a point of welcoming children and teaching that the kingdom of God was theirs (Matt 19:13–15; Mark 10:13–16). He even strongly asserted that “whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37).
He links the way we welcome children with the way we welcome God himself. Jesus loves, loves, loves children.
A gift from God
The Bible is unashamedly positive about children. Children are a good thing. And that’s because they are given to us by God. They come only as a gift from him. We see this in the description of children as a blessing in Psalm 127:3, which links their conception to God’s action to bless. We also see in multiple places that it is God who opens and closes the womb (Gen 29:31, 1 Sam 1:5–6). It is he who creates the life of a child.
Today, we can feel much more in control of the process of having children compared to any other point in history. Many of us spend some years using contraception to try and avoid pregnancy with extremely high success rates. Conception feels like something we have choice over. When we do decide to forgo contraception and attempt to fall pregnant, we have so much knowledge about the process. We understand the biology—we’re taught about it in school—and can access a vast number of tools that help us track our menstrual cycles and fertile windows.
If pregnancy doesn’t happen easily, there is a huge raft of medical interventions that we can try to assist the process. The temptation is to start to think we are the initiators and creators of life.
The Bible is very clear that, even today, that is not the case. God alone is the author of life.
He is the one who created and gave life to each of us. Consider Deuteronomy 32.6:
Is this the way you repay the LORD,
you foolish and unwise people?
Is he not your Father, your Creator,
who made you and formed you?
Or David’s famous words in Psalm 139:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well. (vv 13–14)
The apostle Paul expresses it this way:
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. (Acts 17:24–25)
Paul then goes on to describe us as God’s “offspring” (v 28). God is the one who created the life that comes from our wombs. They are his children before they are ours. It’s he who made them—we didn’t make them ourselves. He gifts our children to us, their earthly parents, as a blessing that comes from his hand and his alone.
Motherhood: How the gospel shapes our purpose and priorities, Jocelyn Loane, Matthias Media 2024.
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