El Shaddai, Are You In The Kitchen?

I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. Psalm 131:2

When I was growing up, the kitchen was my least favorite place. It was the area of the house I ran through to get to my final destination—the backyard, the bus stop, a friend’s car— and not the room I lingered too long in outside of mealtimes. But my mother was often found here, stirring a large pot of homemade chicken noodle soup, or laying steaming lasagna noodles into rows on wax paper. I dreaded the moments when she would rope me into food prep. Nothing was more agonizing than slicing sweet corn off the cob.

When I got married, I managed this domestic expectation with quick sheet pan dinners, the crockpot, and (my personal favorite), the instant pot. But after having my son, it wasn’t just mealtimes that I dreaded, it was the domestic life. Home felt like a prison.

After family leave, my husband returned to his career and “real” accomplishments, while for me there was no shortcut out of the life I found to be lacking in purpose and importance. I thought the only answer to relieve my pain was to go back to work myself.

It was around this time that my aunt recommended the book The Forgotten Feminine by Denise Jordan. Denise and her husband are the founders of Fatherheart Ministries. They’ve made it their mission to help others discover “a Father that loves us with a love that reaches beyond all human expression of what love is… a love that surpasses knowledge.” But in her book, Denise argues “The deficit of mothering love and comfort needs to be addressed before the fathering can come in.”

The idea of seeing God with motherly qualities was foreign to me. Perhaps it came from being raised in a legalistic form of Christianity, being abandoned by my father in adolescence, or a combination of the two. God was a far-off tyrannical figure with an overabundance of masculine traits looking down on me with condemnation. And “when His love for us is just a masculine and dominant kind of love as has often been presented to us,” Denise says, “it is virtually impossible to open your heart to be loved by a lawgiver and judge.”

This was true in my case. While I had the outward signs of a life devoted to God, I did not have the inward reality. I constantly lived in a place of shame, grasping for a God that just shook His head at me. This smothered any kind of genuine love for Him from growing in my heart and it certainly prevented me from falling into His comforting and motherly embrace.

Through Denise’s words, I learned God is not more masculine than feminine—he is equally both. Man and female are made in His image. A perfect balance of masculinity and femininity.

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 1:26-28

“The Hebrew word ‘man’ here in verse 26 is a generic term adam meaning ‘mankind’ and is inclusive of both man and woman,” states Denise.

God is neither male nor female; He is spirit. But we do use human descriptions to relate to Him and to preach to others about Him. We call God Abba, Father because it is the name He instructed us to use and it is how His own Son spoke of Him and prayed to Him, but throughout scripture, Father has encouraged us to rely on Him as a mother too. Denise says, “God revealed Himself (Gen 17:1) as El Shaddai, the Many Breasted One,” and in Psalm 131 King David says:

“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

“He speaks here of himself as a child at the breast of its mother,” says Denise, “Israel’s greatest king sees himself in this way.”

When I was reading these powerful revelations, I was reminded of a movie I watched a few years ago called “The Shack” which was met with some criticism by members of the Christian community due to the writer’s “blasphemous” depiction of God the Father. The film is based on the novel of the same title by William Paul Young and tells the story of Mack, a husband, and father going through the motions of his Christian faith while concealing childhood trauma and resentment toward God. Then his youngest daughter Missy is abducted and killed, and Mack finds himself in a full-fledged dark night of the soul. A few months after the tragedy, he receives a letter signed by “Papa” (the name his devout wife has given to God) and in it, Mack is invited to return to the shack where his daughter’s life was taken:

“Mackenzie,

It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.”

Mack arrives at the snowy, mountainous location which has been transformed into a lakeside paradise and it’s against this backdrop that he encounters the triune God. The Holy Spirit is a gardener named Sarayu (which means “breath of wind”). Jesus is a young woodworker (no surprise there), but God the Father is not in the form you might expect. He appears to Mack as a middle-aged woman who cooks and bakes in the kitchen.

“I always pictured you with a white beard,” says Mack.

Papa replies, “After what you’ve been through, I didn’t think you could handle a father right now.”

When I finished Denise’s book I rewatched The Shack. One of my favorite scenes from the movie is when God is showing Mack how to press dough in the kitchen. Papa rubs flour into His hands and speaks of never abandoning His children. He holds out His arm and shows Mack the scar from the nail mark that pierced His own wrist when Jesus was staked to the cross. “Don’t you ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us both dearly.”

I don’t look at domestic life the same way anymore, because now I know God is the one putting bread in the oven and washing the servants’ feet. I see men’s and women’s roles as different, but also equal, and interchangeable, like when it comes to women working outside the home. God isn’t identifying me by a singular feminine trait that others have expected me to live out a certain way. “Remember also that all of us as individuals have a unique mix of masculinity and femininity within us, so many of us will recognize traits of both masculinity and femininity in our behaviour and way of relating,” Denise points out. God knows this. He created my unique imprint of feminine and masculine qualities and is aware of the degree to which they need to be lived out for me to feel fulfilled and for His will to be accomplished. Because I know this now, I am at peace with staying home with my son for this season.

God has shown me how to secure a sense of accomplishment throughout the day with little “jobs” and making time in my schedule for writing. If He ever calls me to live my traits in a more public way, I won’t be measuring it against the expressions and wishes of others, but instead looking to the mother heart of my God who knows me intimately and speaks words of comfort to me and not condemnation.

He's El Shaddai, the one who meets me in the kitchen.

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Denise Jordan’s book The Forgotten Feminine is available on Amazon. To learn more about James and Denise Jordan and their ministry, please visit www.fatherheart.net.