Colleen C. Mitchell

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.

Seeking beauty is the pathway to seeking joy, and as women, we are endowed with unique gifts that allow us not only to long for that joy that is a reflection of our longing for heaven, but to create and birth things that are noble, good, and lovely in unique and creative ways. We see beyond the material pursuit of simple pleasure to the longing for joy that points our eyes and hearts toward the eternal.

I began to see that the intent of Christ was never to relegate redemption to the spiritual realm, leaving us to wait desperately to shed this cumbersome physical world. No, he is in all things and he holds everything together. He is in the bread we eat, he is in the touch of our neighbor, he is in the tears of our children, he is in the dirt we dig up, and he is in the voice of the poor. 

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.