Colleen C. Mitchell

The most important aspects of our faith, the ones that touch the greatest mysteries of how we unite ourselves to God, must be bodily experiences as much as they are spiritual ones.

I can’t escape the million proofs of a Creator’s delight in creation nor his determination to use it to woo me on earth.

We are God’s children whom he wants to heal and feed, then lift into service as evidence of his great love and delight in us.

The God of the heavens and the earth wants you too to remember who it is that he says that you are. Very likely, I do not know your story. Yours may read a lot like mine, or it may be altogether different. But I do know this: wherever you are in that story, God desires to draw near to you and remind you who you are. In the midst of your cracks and suffering and hard places and pain, he has a love letter to offer you.

When I was younger, it bothered me when Jesus addressed his Mother as “Woman” in the Gospels. This was long before I had grown into my own womanhood, or knew what it meant to be a woman. Now I hear that word in a new light. “Woman,” he calls her. Archetypal, she is not just one woman among many, but the Woman, just as Eve was “woman” at creation. In her very being, Mary embodies all of womanhood’s beauty, goodness, and grace. She is as woman was created to be. She first embarked on the journey of walking with the Savior so the rest of us might follow.