Want to dive deeper in exploring the Heart of God as Mother? Check out these resources:

• Become Good Soil Podcast: 109: Robust Well Being 2019 BGS Intensive, Part 3
• Become Good Soil Podcast: 104: Coming Home Part 1
• Become Good Soil Podcast: 105: Coming Home Part 2
• Become Good Soil Podcast: 106: Coming Home Part 3
• Become Good Soil podcast: 081: Maternal Deprivation
• Receiving the Mother Heart of God – video teaching
• Healing the Mother Wound (for men)
• Healing the Mother Wound (for women)
• Become Good Soil blog : Laying Roof Shingles in a G-String
• Become Good Soil podcast: 042: Intensive Series (Episode 3 of 8)
• Contemplative Prayer – BGS Podcast Series
• Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters
• Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love
• Character of God: Compassion

Reflection Questions

1. How have you learned “Mother”?
2. What was your mother’s story when you were being formed in her womb? What was her emotional, spiritual, relational, and practical reality?
3. What was the environment of your first year? What was the atmosphere around your mother’s world? Emotionally? Spiritually? Physically? 
4. What was offered and what was withheld in your childhood?
5. Did you have enough (enough touch, enough of Mom’s gaze, enough attention, enough protection…)?
6. What was the message from Mom? What was required of you, if anything, to receive love? 
7. Finish this sentence: I feel safe when…
8. How did you learn comfort?
9. Where do you find yourself looking for comfort at this stage of your life?
10. Where do you take your need to feel worthy of love and belonging?
11. In what ways has God been reaching out to you to offer mothering?
12. When do you “burst with joy and feel ten feet tall”? (Isaiah 66, The Message)
13. Reflect on these Scriptures and ask for a deeper revelation of the mothering heart of God.

• Psalm 91: 1-4
• Psalm 23:1
• Isaiah 40:1,10-11
• Isaiah 55:1-2
• Isaiah 25:6-8
• Isaiah 49:15-16
• 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8
• Isaiah 66:12-14 (The Message)

God’s Message:

“I’ll pour robust well-being into her like a river,

   the glory of nations like a river in flood.

You’ll nurse at her breasts,

   nestle in her bosom,

   and be bounced on her knees.

As a mother comforts her child,

   so I’ll comfort you.

   You will be comforted in Jerusalem.”

You’ll see all this and burst with joy

   —you’ll feel ten feet tall—

As it becomes apparent that God is on your side

   and against his enemies…

“I don’t recall being in the womb, but I have never considered the peace of that home as deeply and richly until I read [Diane Ackerman’s] sea-rhythm, heart-cadence, warm-lullaby words. I am mesmerized by the question: ‘Is that what I felt?’ I cannot know, but I can say that I want what Ackerman pens to be an experience of being so near to God that I can hear the cradlesong of God’s heart, the lapping resonance of her breathing, and the holding ground of her skin surrounding me in divine safety and warmth. To disparage sensuousness is to stand at arm’s length from the incarnation, allowing it to be objective and abstract.” –Sabbath, by Dan Allender

“But for a baby in the womb the mother’s heart-beat performs the ultimate cradlesong of peace and plenty; the surf like waves of her respiration lull and soothe. The womb is a snug, familiar landscape, an envelope of rhythmic warmth, and the mother’s heartbeat a steady clarion of safety.” Diane Ackerman