God our heavenly mother.

How does that sit with you?

Think about it.

God is beyond our thoughts and God's ways are beyond ours.

Do you believe that God has a gender?

Jesus was a man.

The Spirit is a spirit.

And God?

God is God.

I believe that God is above gender distinctions.

And I believe that our minds limit us from fully understanding God because of God's glory, magnificence and holiness.

Ascribing a gender to God is helpful and I still believe that I have a heavenly father.

But I also am coming around to the idea that I have a heavenly mother as well.

As a mom living her life as a believer in Jesus I have often been led to believe that the "father" is the most important parental figure in my home.  Everything hinges on his ability (or inability) to lead a family in the ways God.

All a woman can do is dutifully pray.

But not once, in all my readings, was it ever put forth that the "mother", aka Me, had an important role in the spiritual upbringing of my children.

If you don't believe me, go look.

Try finding an article that supports a mother's role as important in the Christian upbringing of her children.

Everything I ever found has always pointed back to 

the importance of the "father".

The "father" is the main course and basically, the "mother" is the condiment on the side.

At a pivotal moment in my life, when all I was looking for was affirmation from my faith that my job as a mom was worthy and of importance, I could find nothing.

 And fathers? EVERYTHING rest's on them.

How terribly unfair to us both.

Ok.  So back to God our Mother.

I bought a liturgy from The Liturgists called God Our Mother

And I was instantly affirmed in the kingdom of God.

Who I am as a mom is important.

I have value as a mom.

Because I am created in the image of God.

Me.

A woman.

A mother.

Made in the image of God.

Shauna Niequist wrote a piece for the liturgy.

I will end this blog post with an excerpt from her contribution to the album.

We know all about God our Father, and the beautiful images that go along with that idea: the strong, faithful, unshakeable love of a father. But to only know God the Father would be like only knowing daytime but never night—to see the sunrise, but never the gentle, haunting rise of a harvest moon, low in the sky, blood red and beautiful. To know only the Father God would be like seeing the bright, dazzling sun, but never the stars spreading across the sky like so much fairy dust. God our Mother, reaching out to us with those hands—mother hands, strong and coursing with love, binding up wounds and soothing scrapes, holding us together, holding us safe. God our Mother, feeding us, nourishing us, giving us what we need to grow and thrive, taking care of us in big and small ways, seeing us, knitting us back together with love and grace when we've been broken. God our Mother, believing in us. That's what a mother does: she looks into your eyes and she says, I believe in you. I know you. I know you were made for great things. A mother says, you're not too small or too scared. You're not too frail or too flawed. You're mine. And that's all you need to know. God our Mother whispers to each one of us You're mine. And that's all you need to know.
found here