In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Elizabeth Berget, author of Love Like a Mother, for a conversation about what happens when we take maternal metaphors for God as seriously as paternal ones—and why the church’s exclusion of feminine language for God isn’t just theologically incomplete but leaves women spiritually homeless in motherhood.

Topics Covered

* What gets quietly excluded when “God the Father” is our only or primary image

* How the Hebrew word for God’s compassion (rachum) in Exodus 34:6—God’s first self-description—is tied to the word for womb (rechem)

* How motherhood becomes a spiritual desert when your brain changes more than any other point in life (including puberty) but nobody tells you to expect your faith to change, and churches assume laziness instead of recognizing you’re doing a lot

* The disconnect between how motherhood is emphasized in church circles but under-resourced spiritually

* What’s at stake if we keep handing people a God who can only be described in paternal terms

Timestamps:

01:00 What We Describe and Exclude with “God the Father”

06:00 All God Language Is Metaphor (We Forgot That)

10:00 Why Motherhood Feels Like a Spiritual Desert

16:00 Rachum: God’s Maternal Compassion Lost in Translation

23:00 Embodied Verbs and the Incarnational God

29:00 What Spiritual Formation Actually Looks Like for Mothers

35:00 What’s at Stake When We Exclude Feminine Language

37:00 Finding the Book and Elizabeth’s Work