As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.
--Isaiah 66:13
I’ve long loved this tender image of the mother-like love of God. But I thought of the love it describes only in terms of volitional love—the love a mother chooses for her child, the love God chooses for his people.
But now, as I find myself overflowing with milk in the wee hours of the morning, it occurs to me: a nursing mother’s love is more than an act of sentimentality. In fact, it’s hardly a choice at all. She has milk to give, milk that must come forth. It’s part of her very nature, and it will pain her not to give what she has.
And so it is with God. Love pours out of him; it is part of his very nature. He must give love.
According to scholars, the Hebrew word for love used in [Isaiah] also means womb. God is not distant or aloof; he pulses with love—the kind of mysterious, unbreakable bond that forms between a mother and her child as the child rests beneath her own pulsing heart.
God is committed to you with an irrepressible love—a love that flows out like a life-giving force. He loves you with a womb-love that defies explanation. He is tethered to you, by choice and by nature.
He could no more stop loving you than he could stop being God.
--Stephanie Rische
Image source: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, A Woman Nursing a Child (1894), https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5354
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