Creation? That's Women's Work!

As someone who’s spending a lot of today cleaning and tidying in preparation for a visitation from his mother-in-law, I found Paula Gooder’s words here particularly inspiring:

The other reason I love both Psalm 139[:13-16] and Job 10[:8-12] is that the metaphors used here to describe God’s creation of the world refer to tasks that would normally be left to women. They are the menial, simple tasks of everyday existence, often unheralded and unsung. It is intriguing that in using metaphors of God’s creation the Psalmist and author of Job felt comfortable using images associated with women’s roles to describe what God did. The effect of this for me is to elevate these ‘menial’ tasks into something altogether more significant and to give them a status that otherwise they would not have. Using such metaphors of God’s creation implies that those who weave, who knit and sew, who cook and bake are not engaged in lowly, unimportant, insignificant tasks but are joining with God in the very act of creation.

Paula Gooder, Everyday God: The Spirit of the Ordinary (London: Canterbury Press, 2012), p. 73

I’m guessing we spend so much time looking for God’s active presence in more noteworthy events – such as this week’s US presidential elections – that we forget God is also the God of the ordinary, and that making a sandwich for our kids’ packed lunches is just as much part of God’s design for human life as one nation’s election of a new leader. May God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – bless your life, in all its ordinariness, today.