“When are you going back to work?”

Before our son came, people asked. After he arrived, they asked even more. It didn’t matter to whom I spoke: friend, stranger, student, retiree, believer, nonbeliever. No one wondered, “Will you go back to work?” People assumed I would. No need to ask about if, just when. A cultural assumption emerged: new moms keep old, pre-baby careers.

Why do we expect women to take maternity leave rather than stay home when their first child is born? Maybe cost of living is to blame. Maybe it’s the belief that two incomes are always better than one. Maybe only a closed-minded thinker would dare to ask, “Will you stay home now?” Whatever the reason, we tend to assume new moms will return to old jobs.

But I was a new mom who left an old job. When am I going back to work? How could I answer that question? I felt awkward, even embarrassed, as I responded, “Oh, I’m not going back to work.” Both in what I said and in how I felt as I said it, another underlying belief bubbled up. This time, it was personal: stay-at-home moms don’t have real, meaningful jobs.

Other stay-at-home moms in my church say they often feel the same. One told me that when people ask “what she does,” she starts by saying, “Well I would work, but . . .” Another, who works part-time from home while caring for two kids, said, “I find myself thinking that the only ‘productive’ parts of my day are the ones I spend engaging with my paid work.” Rather than “missus” teacher or “doctor” so and so, we have all chosen to be “mom” from nine to five (and 24/7). Even so, it’s hard for us to see the payoff. Do we really work? Is our work meaningful?

The God who spoke both women and work into existence answers with a resounding yes. He wrote Genesis 1–3 into the Bibles of new moms like me, in part, to convince us not only that we do work, but that it’s rich, rich work. Not salaried work, but valuable, vital work. I have only just begun this work, but already I have realized that there is no stay-at-home mom. There are only work-at-home moms.

Entrusted with His Image

After all, God gave the very first woman he created the job of being a mother. When God made Eve from Adam, he made her a woman (Genesis 2:21–23). He did not make her a mother. Rather, he entrusted her with the task of becoming a mother.

As soon as God finishes fashioning Adam and Eve “in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), he commands them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28). With what job would the Creator of every subatomic particle in a gargantuan universe employ the first creature in his image he ever made? Making more humans: “Adam and Eve, work together to fill the earth with my glorious likeness. I could form a hundred children for you with a single puff of my breath, but instead I want you to labor to become ‘mom’ and ‘dad,’ to the glory of my name.”

God employs all creation to display his glory, but the first project he charged to the first people was to become the first parents of the first babies — babies whose makeup would showcase God. Sure, they would look like Adam and Eve, but oh, how they would they image God!

“The first project God charged to the first people was to become the first parents of the first babies.”

So through the lens of Genesis, “my” childbearing becomes God’s image-furthering. When we embrace God’s call to love and care for even one child, we are saying to the Holy One, “I love and care for your matchless likeness. I want to see your goodness, beauty, and worth spread to the ends of the earth, and in some mysterious way, you showcase your glory in the five-inch face of this newborn baby. So I will tend to the needs of this little image you have entrusted to me, to the glory of your name.”

Labor Pains

Seen in this way, we can’t but conclude that motherhood is worthwhile work. Even so, if we read further in Genesis, we can better understand why moms, especially young ones, struggle to value motherhood as its Creator and Giver does.

When our first parents sinned, God justly cursed the good work he had given humanity to do. God said to Eve (and as a result to all women), “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). From infertility to miscarriage, from nauseating pregnancies to difficult deliveries, we feel the fall’s physical effects on motherhood. Many never become biological mothers. Some lose children. Where God does grant a child, knees tweak and backs strain under years of constant care for another’s well-being.

But sin ushered in an emotional struggle as well. Becoming a mother is painful; staying a mother is too. Raising children exhausts, frustrates, scares, and sometimes bores us. What we were made to embrace and enjoy — the God-given, precious responsibility to nurture life and so further his image — causes us to worry and sigh. We lose God’s grand vision for motherhood in the pile of dirty diapers we need to toss or (later on) the curfews keeping us awake until they’re home.

Mothers of the Living

We can find it again in the creation story. By God’s grace, we can be mothers who gladly continue the work of creation despite the fall’s effects. But at this point, we would do well to ask, “To what end? Why would God give me the job of nurturing humans made in his image first to biological life and then to physical, mental, and emotional well-being if ultimately the curse ensures everyone will die?”

God settles our angst in an unlikely place: Eve’s name. In Genesis 3:19, God delivers the final words of the curse: to dust you shall return. The first humans God created to enjoy eternal life in his presence — they will die. Any future humans entrusted to them — they will die too. With this news we would expect the garden to fall shamefully, despairingly silent. But it was not so. In the very next verse, we read, “The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).

The mother of all living? Why would Adam give Eve this name? Didn’t God just say that Eve’s body, and all the bodies that come from hers, and all the bodies that come from theirs, would dissolve into dust?

He did, but he also said something else. While cursing the serpent, God declared that one of Eve’s offspring would stamp out this patron saint of sin and death (Genesis 3:15). God would permit Satan to sow evil on earth — but the clock is ticking. The enemy’s time short. For one day, through Adam and Eve’s childbearing, Satan would be overthrown, sin conquered, death vanquished. God promised it, and there and then, Adam believed God’s promise. He believed God enough to name his wife “the mother of all living” in the face of pain and death.

“This side of a tiny manger, a bloody cross, and an empty tomb, no childbearing is an exercise in futility.”

Mothers, do we believe God’s promise? This side of a tiny manger, a bloody cross, and an empty tomb, no childbearing is an exercise in futility. Motherhood is not meaningless, but a mission from God. Jesus Christ, the promised seed, has overthrown Satan, conquered sin, and vanquished death. Because of him, we are not just nurturing little bodies that take in first and last breaths. We are caring for hearts and minds and souls capable of enjoying this Jesus forever — in real, perfect, resurrected bodies, with chests rising and falling in eternal praise.

Job as Old as Eve

When does a new mom go back to work? She never stopped. People will still ask, but by God’s grace she will see motherhood as a job as old as work itself. What is more, she will believe that a mother’s labor matters, eternally so. We are not just nurturing image-bearers who reflect a glorious God. We are nurturing potential Christ-enjoyers and Christ-exalters. We stay home, and we work to this end with all our motherly might.

When rightly captivated by the God-given task of motherhood, then, we will not dread a change in or the loss of career, hobbies, or leisure upon a baby’s birth. Rather, we accept the task as both gift and opportunity to shape life to the glory of God.

Nine-year-olds tell it straight. A boy in my morning class once asked me, “Miss, why do you look like you just woke up?” Another day he walked in sighing and clutching his chest. “I’m just so glad you aren’t wearing a wig again today!” The wig? My new bangs, hidden behind a headband.

Unlike adults, most kids don’t have a category for off-limit topics regarding appearance. While most adults would cry conversational foul play, bad haircuts, weight gain, and receding hairlines are all fair game for fourth graders. Why do kids feel free to describe beauty in both its presence and its absence?

At least in part, kids talk about appearance because, in their eyes, it’s just that. When students tell me how I look, that’s exactly what they’re doing — telling me how I look. They make no claims about who I am. If my ponytail looks “super weird today,” they say so — because my hairstyle does not undermine my identity as their beloved teacher.

Too often, however, we invest physical beauty with far more significance. We treat beauty as a means to self-worth: how we look is who we are. But if we would only gaze upon God’s word with the eyes of a child, we might unlatch beauty from its worldly contortions and fasten it instead to the God who is Beauty himself.

Beauty by the World

Left to our own devices, we define beauty a lot like the Evil Queen. We stand enraptured before the mirror, waiting for it to tell us how our appearance measures up to others across the land. In sin-twisted kingdoms, to be beautiful is to be attractive to as many human eyes as possible.

“We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).”

But beneath those eyes lie hearts whose visual appetite is insatiable. They flit from post to post, screen to screen, trend to trend — idol to idol — waiting to be satisfied. Nothing will do. That’s why an attractive-and-therefore-beautiful appearance, both as a personal possession and cultural definition, expires. We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).

While describing my teenage years to a group of girls, I mentioned how “thin and lanky” I was. They looked at me in horror. Cutting me off, one student exclaimed, “Miss, you are not thin! You’re perfect.” The other girls agreed. “Yeah, miss! Don’t say that. You are not thin. You’re beautiful.” Their words struck me silent. The teenage me had lived in a world where beauty required thinness; in their world, beauty required not thinness. I heard in their words not a compliment, but a truth claim: worldly beauty is fickle.

God warned us. Thousands of years ago, he said, “Beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) — or according to some translations, “fleeting” (NIV). The adjective’s literal meaning packs the greatest punch, as the Hebrew word heḇel denotes “breath.” From the perspective of an eternal God, beauty vanishes with the rise and fall of a chest. If we put our hope in beauty, it will betray us — and quickly.

Does that mean God wants Christian women to toss out the mascara and throw in the washcloth? No makeup, no dyed hair, no new clothes, no gym membership — nothing? Shall we consign ourselves to a life of bedhead, wigs, and super weird ponytails? These aren’t bad questions, but they are the wrong ones. Instead we should ask, How does God’s definition of beauty change our pursuit of beauty?

Beauty from God

In God’s economy, beauty does not fret over itself, or talk about itself, or make purchases for itself, or dawdle over pictures of itself. For God-defined beauty cannot be seen in a mirror. Rather, it pulses: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Beauty flows from a heart that beats with moral goodness — love for, delight in, and submission to God (Acts 13:22).

Unlike our pursuit of physical beauty, we cannot fret, talk, purchase, or edit our way to heart-level beauty. The Beauty — with a capital B — for which we ought to exert the most energy, the Beauty on which we ought to spend the most time and resources, is one we cannot powder onto our faces. It is a Person we must pursue.

This Person is Jesus, the only man whose heart sought God perfectly for a lifetime. In him we find, and from him we receive, true Beauty. And it is not the beauty of appearance:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by men,     a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;and as one from whom men hide their faces     he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:2–3)

Rather, it is the Beauty that loves and sacrifices itself for others, in which God delights:

He was pierced for our transgressions;     he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,     and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

This is the Beauty that does not perish upon makeup removal or spoil from one trend to the next. It is the Beauty that endures with laughter the aging process and the innocent comments of children (Proverbs 31:25). For regardless of appearance, its identity is secure: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Beauty as Possession and Pursuit

Dear women: If we call the beloved Son “Savior” and “Lord” (Romans 10:9), we possess this Beauty forevermore. For in God’s sight we have been clothed for all time with Christ’s sacrificial love (Galatians 2:20). There is no need to fuss over becoming and staying beautiful on this earth. Christ is eternal Beauty Himself — and our lives are hidden in him (Colossians 3:3).

We still labor for beauty — but not now for the beauty of appearance. If we possess Beauty in Christ, we will pursue the Beauty of Christ. We will strive, as those who are free from the world’s fickle fashions, to emulate an everlasting Beauty — to live as if God’s glory is real, precious, and worth pursuing, now and always.

Becoming more like-hearted to God’s beloved Son will never go out of vogue. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of Christ’s Beauty, sure that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). When the day ends, we will not crawl into bed with less money and more products. We will drift off radiating God’s Beauty in Christ, satisfied.

Beauty as a Means

As Beauty becomes ours ever more in Christ, beauty — with a lowercase b — will take its rightful place as a God-given, God-exalting gift. God cares about visual beauty because, well, he makes and sustains its every expression. He made us in his image, to image him. For our part, we humbly, happily use what he has made to exalt him who made it (Colossians 1:16).

“If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.”

As with any morally neutral hobby, we seek to use earthly beauty to illumine heavenly realities. As we dab at our faces in the morning hours, we can wonder at the way God paints the sky (Psalm 19:1). We can adopt new styles with hearts enthralled by the God who has provided us with an imperishable garment — the righteousness of Christ (Isaiah 61:10). We can enjoy beauty without self-obsession when we seek to enjoy its Fount.

I’m not saying we have to pair Scripture and meditation to all our beautifying. Many activities whirl past us unexamined. But we all can agree that beauty — like many other endeavors, such as athletics or a career — has great capacity to be self-centered. If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.

As my students discover lip gloss and T-shirt dresses, I pray they learn to use beauty as a means to enjoy and exalt God rather than self. I hope they know the beauty with which God already has created them and the Beauty to which he beckons them. Even so, they cannot learn what Christian women neither understand for themselves nor model for others. Let’s see beauty for what it is, as we lay hold of Beauty for who he is.