The Healing Power of Woman
“We cannot heal the world with the same weapon that wounded us.”
In church, we hear a great deal about God the Father.
We hear about the protector, the provider, the authority, and the One who disciplines. We are taught to look toward the masculine nature of God for strength, direction, order, and security.
We rarely speak about the mothering nature of Yahweh.
We rarely speak about the softness gathers us, the tenderness which nurtures us, the wisdom that senses what cannot yet be seen, or carries life inside itself before anyone else knows something new is being formed.
Somewhere along the way, I think we became deeply disconnected from this part of the Creator.
Scripture tells us humanity was created in the image of God, male and female. Together, man and woman reveal something about the nature of the Creator of the universe. Neither one carries the fullness alone. Yet our language, our churches, our homes, and even our understanding of leadership have often emphasized the masculine while neglecting the feminine.
We have celebrated power but overlooked nurture.
We have honored authority but dismissed intuition.
We have praised strength but misunderstood softness.
Perhaps, disconnection has contributed to some of our deepest wounds. Many of us carry wounds connected to our mothers. Some of us were not nurtured in the ways we needed. Some had mothers who were wounded themselves and did not know how to give what they had never received. Some learned femininity meant weakness, silence, submission, or disappearing.
We live in a culture that has not fully embraced the significance of a woman. For generations, the value of a woman has been reduced to what she can do or give for others, raise the children, prepare the meals, rub the tired shoulders, maintain the home, and quietly support everyone else’s dreams. Her wisdom may be welcomed when it is convenient, but dismissed when it challenges the direction of the room.
Instead of teaching men to trust the wisdom, discernment, and intuition of women, we have often taught them to tolerate it, minimize it, or explain it away. Instead of teaching women to stand confidently in their God-given nature, we have often taught them to make themselves smaller.
A Conversation in Paraguay
Years ago, I traveled to Paraguay with John Maxwell to participate in leadership training for some of the country’s leaders. One day, as I was coming down the elevator, a man noticed the Hebrew word tattooed on my arm.
“Teshuvah,” he said. “What do you know about teshuvah?”
My immediate thought was, I am sure I do not know what you know. I briefly shared what I had learned and why I had chosen to have the word permanently written on my body. Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but it carries a much deeper meaning. It is the act of returning, returning to God, returning to truth, and returning to the person we were created to become.
Then I looked at him and said, “I am sure I do not understand this word from the place that you understand it. Would you have coffee with me? I would love to learn from you.” He agreed.
As we sat with our coffee, I asked him a question had been stirring inside me. “Christianity was born from Judaism. Hebrew thought, Hebrew Scripture, and the Hebrew people are the foundational roots from which our faith grew. Yet somehow, I feel as though Christianity has become deeply disconnected from those roots. From your perspective, where have we gone off the rails?”
In my mind, I anticipated his answer. I thought he would say, “Jesus.” I assumed he would speak about the Christian belief, Jesus - Yeshua - is the promised Messiah, while many Jewish people believe Jesus was a teacher or a good man, but not the Messiah spoken of in the Scriptures.
Without taking a breath, he answered with one word “Women.” His answer stopped me. “Women?” I asked. He began to explain immediately, as if he thought the answer was coming. He answered it so quickly I was astonished that that's what he thought, and the first thing on his mind.
“In my household, I view my wife as the closest reflection of Yahweh that I will ever encounter. She possesses the ability to create life, carry life, sustain life, nourish life, and nurture life. She has an intuition that allows her to know when something is wrong with me or anything else before I can even see it myself.” He continued, “She knows when I am not thinking clearly. She offers guidance to help me become a better man. She can sense when people are hurting, when someone is heartbroken, when someone is hungry, or when something is wrong in the home. I do not naturally possess those abilities in the same way that she does.” Then he said something I have never forgotten.
“She is closer to being made in the image of God than I will ever be, and I honor her that way in my home.”
He was not saying that women are more valuable than men or that men do not carry the image of God. He was describing the reverence with which he regarded the particular gifts his wife carried.
He saw her intuition as wisdom.
He saw her nurturing as power.
He saw her ability to create and sustain life as sacred.
He did not view her sensitivity as an inconvenience. He viewed it as a gift from the Creator. He spoke about what he had observed in Western Christian homes.“I do not see the same reverence,” he said. “I do not see your culture value what a woman brings to the table. You do not recognize her gifts or encourage the power God has placed within her. Instead, you teach her to become small. You dismiss her. You do not listen to her.” He explained sometimes a woman cries, raises her voice, or fights to be heard, not because she needs to be right and someone else needs to be wrong, but because something deep inside her recognizes the family, the relationship, or the situation is moving out of alignment. She feels what others have not yet seen in order for it to be acknowledged. She sees what others have not yet been willing to face. Her body, her heart, and her spirit have been designed to respond to life and to have a deep distain for anything that relates to death. Within the body of a woman is the capacity to hold, nourish, and protect life before life can be seen by the rest of the world.
Not every woman will physically give birth. Womanhood is not measured by biological motherhood. Yet women carry the power to create life in countless ways.
A woman can give birth to vision.
She can nurture courage.
She can create safety.
She can cultivate community.
She can recognize potential in another human being before the person can see it in themselves.
She can walk into a room and sense what is broken beneath the surface.
She can feed the hungry without being asked.
She can sit beside the grieving without needing to fix them.
She can bring warmth into cold places.
She can make something barren begin to bloom again.
This is not weakness.
This is holy power.
The man shared another perspective with me. He spoke about the traditions in which men sat toward the front of the synagogue while women were separated or seated elsewhere. Many Christians have interpreted this only as evidence of women being considered less valuable or were silenced. He said, “You see it differently than I do. I believe the men were seated in the front because men have to be taught and the women already possessed a deep understanding of the things the men needed to learn.”
Whether his interpretation was historical, symbolic, or simply the wisdom of his own experience, it opened something inside me. He laughed and said, “Every husband eventually looks at his wife and says, ‘Please, just tell me what you want me to do. Give me a list and I will do it.’” Men carry their own sacred gifts. They often bring structure, protection, focus, courage, action, and the ability to build, but within healthy relationships, those gifts were never meant to silence the gifts of women. They are meant to call it forward in a stronger way because her presence and our gift are needed. They were meant to stand beside them.
The masculine and feminine were created to bring balance not competition.
Structure needs intuition.
Protection needs nurture.
Action needs discernment.
Strength needs tenderness.
Truth needs mercy.
A house may be built with strong walls, but it becomes a home through the presence of nurture.
I wonder how different our families, churches, and communities, world would become if the nature of woman were treated as holy. What would happen if men were taught to listen when a woman says, “Something does not feel right”? What would happen if her intuition were not immediately labeled emotional, dramatic, controlling, irrational or completely dismissed?
What would happen if women were no longer required to become hard in order to survive? Because that is what many of us have done. We have become angry. We have become brittle. We have armored ourselves. We have learned to function like the image of power we have most often been shown. We have suppressed tenderness because tenderness was taken advantage of. We have silenced our intuition because we were told we were overreacting or creating an issue. We have withheld our nurturing nature because we grew exhausted from pouring into people who did not value what we carried. Some women have become so accustomed to surviving they no longer know how to soften. softness is not surrendering ourselves to mistreatment. Nurture is not carrying everyone else’s responsibilities. Compassion is not allowing people to continually wound us. Being life-giving does not mean destroying ourselves so others can remain comfortable.
The mothering nature of Yahweh is not weak. It is fierce.
It is the strength of a mother who protects her child.
It is the courage that stands between life and danger.
It is the wisdom knowing when to gather close and when to release. It is the voice saying , “You are loved,” while also saying, “You cannot continue living this way.” True nurture does not enable destruction. It creates an environment where transformation becomes possible.
The world is crying out for this kind of love.
People are starving for a love that sees beyond their behavior and recognizes the wound underneath it. They are longing for a safe place to grieve, to confess, to unravel, and to begin again. We often say the world needs the love of the Father, and it does. But perhaps, the world is also desperate for the mothering love of God, a love that gathers the broken beneath its wings, comforts the grieving, feeds the hungry, searches for the lost, and labors until new life is born. This part of Yahweh has been neglected, yet it may be one of the very things most needed for the healing and transformation of the world. Women, what have you done with the nature God placed inside you?
Have you hidden it?
Have you hardened it?
Have you apologized for it?
Have you allowed others to convince your intuition is foolish, your emotions are inconvenient, or your nurturing spirit is insignificant? Or have you learned to express it with wisdom, boundaries, courage, and truth?
You do not need to become smaller to make others comfortable. You do not need to become harder to prove that you are strong. You do not need to imitate masculinity to be powerful.
There is power in your tenderness.
There is power in your discernment.
There is power in your ability to feel deeply and still remain standing.
There is power in creating spaces where people feel safe enough to become honest.
There is power in recognizing life before anyone else can see it.
There is power in nurturing what God has planted until it is strong enough to stand on its own.
Because the sacred nature of woman has been dismissed, silenced, and made small for generations, many women have not simply become hard we have picked up a baseball bat. We picked it up to protect ourselves. We picked it up after our wisdom was ignored, our intuition was mocked, our bodies were objectified, and our tenderness was treated as weakness. We picked it up when the men who were supposed to protect us became the very people from whom we needed protection.
At first, the bat may have helped us survive. It made us feel powerful after years of powerlessness. It gave us a voice after years of being silenced. It created distance between us and anyone who might attempt to diminish us again. But somewhere along the way, some of us began using the bat not only to defend ourselves, but to bring men to their knees.
We used our words to shame them.
We used our anger to punish them.
We used our independence to prove we did not need them.
We withheld tenderness because we believed tenderness would make us vulnerable. We guarded our energy, our wisdom, our bodies, and our spirits so fiercely no one could enter, not even those who came with love.
Without realizing it, we began doing to men what had been done to us. We make them small. We dismiss their gifts. We mocked their weaknesses. We punished the men in front of us for the wounds created by the men behind us.
This is not healing.
This is pain changing hands.
The answer is not for women to return to silence, submission, or self-abandonment. Putting down the bat does not mean surrendering our boundaries. It does not mean allowing disrespect, betrayal, abuse, or domination to return. It means recognizing there is a difference between protection and punishment. Boundaries protect life.
Bitterness punishes it. Discernment tells us when something is unsafe. Fear tells us everything is unsafe. Wisdom knows when to close a door. Unhealed pain seals every entrance and then wonders why love cannot find its way inside. We cannot heal the world with the same weapon that wounded us.
At some point, women and men must both decide to stop fighting for superiority and begin honoring the image of Yahweh within one another.
Women must forgive men for the ways they have failed to recognize what is sacred within us. Men must repent for the ways they have silenced, controlled, diminished, or abandoned women. Women must also acknowledge the ways our unresolved pain has sometimes become a weapon against men. Forgiveness does not excuse what happened. It releases us from continuing to live in reaction to it.
The healing power of woman is not found in proving we are stronger than men. Healing is found in becoming secure enough in our sacred strength we no longer need to bring anyone else to their knees.
We can put down the bat.
We can stop protecting our energy through anger and begin stewarding it through wisdom.
We can stop guarding our spirits with walls and begin protecting them with boundaries.
We can stop living as the constant protector of our energy and spirit, as though every relationship is a threat and every act of softness will cost us something sacred. We can remain discerning without becoming suspicious of everyone.We can be powerful without being punishing.
We can be soft without becoming unsafe. We can forgive without returning to what harmed us, allow healthy men to stand beside us without forcing them to pay the debts of those who came before them.
The nature of woman was never intended to dominate man, just as the nature of man was never intended to dominate woman.
We were created to recognize, strengthen, protect, and call forth the image of Yahweh in one another. Maybe this is where restoration begins. A woman lowers the weapon she needed in another season. A man releases the need to control what he does not understand. Both acknowledge the harm that has been done accepting responsibility for the harm they have caused. Both can choose forgiveness returning, tshuvah, to the Creator’s original intention, not competition, not domination, not fear, but sacred partnership.
The bat may have helped us survive But we cannot carry it into the home we are trying to build. To find our way home, we must eventually put it down.
Finding our way home requires women to return to the sacred nature that has always lived inside them.
Not a diminished womanhood.
Not a womanhood defined by service, silence, or self-abandonment.
A healed womanhood, soft without being powerless, discerning without being controlling, nurturing without enabling, and strong without becoming hard.
The world does not need women to disappear.
The world needs women who know who they are.
Women who listen to Yahweh.
Women who trust the wisdom placed within them.
Women who create life wherever they go.
Women who nurture truth.
Women who carry mercy.
Women who know when to speak, when to remain still, when to protect, and when to release.
Women who no longer apologize for reflecting the nature of the Creator.
• What part of your God-given nature have you been taught to suppress?
• Have you mistaken hardness for strength?
• Have you dismissed your intuition because someone else refused to listen?
• Where is Yahweh inviting you to become soft again, not unprotected, but healed?
• Are you protecting your spirit with healthy boundaries, or guarding it with a weapon?
• Who are you making pay for wounds they did not create?
• What might begin to live if you forgave, put down the bat, your swords, your armor and stopped making yourself small?
Yahweh, awaken the sacred nature You have placed within women. Heal the places where we became hard because softness was not safe. Restore the intuition we were taught to distrust, the wisdom we were told to silence, and the tenderness we buried beneath survival. Forgive us for the times we used our pain as a weapon. Give us the courage to put down the bat, the swords and to release the men we have punished for wounds they did not create, and to stop guarding our energy and spirit as though love itself were the enemy.
Teach us to nurture without losing ourselves, to love without enabling, to speak truth without becoming cruel, and to remain soft without surrendering our boundaries.
May women rise in the fullness of who You created them to be, life-giving, discerning, courageous, compassionate, wise, and free. Teach men to recognize Your image within women. Teach our homes, churches, and communities to honor what women carry. Teach women to honor the sacred gifts within men, and lead us back to partnership instead of competition. Through healed women, show us what Your nurturing love truly looks like. May we create life wherever we go. May we bring warmth to cold places, hope to barren places, and healing to wounded places and may every woman find her way home to the sacred power You placed within her from the beginning.
