I’ve noticed that this season,
especially just after Christmas, many of us feel a kind of quiet relief. We’ve
spent weeks celebrating the Savior's birth by singing about the manger, peace, and
angels… then everything suddenly falls still again. The decorations come down.
The calendar opens. And we’re left alone with our thoughts.
For me, that quiet has often
brought questions I didn’t know how to ask out loud.
For a very, very long time, I
wrestled with something deeply personal: how could Jesus Christ, born as a man,
living as a man, truly know me? How could He understand my experience as a
woman? My body, my sacrifices, pain, grief, and love? I believed in Him. I
trusted His Atonement. But I still ached for something familiar, for a woman’s
face, a mother’s voice, a sister's comforting words, someone who could
understand what it means to give yourself away in ways that leave your body and
heart changed forever.
I longed for a woman to pray to, a
divine feminine presence who could hold what felt too embodied, too tender, too
uniquely female to place anywhere else. I didn’t feel rebellious. It felt natural
and necessary. And instead of pushing those questions away, I sat with them. I
prayed with them, I cried, and I cried, and I cried over them. I carried them
in my heart, hoping the Lord wouldn’t be offended by my wondering.
What I found was not rejection or
anger but peace.
As I poured into the topic, I began
to understand why that peace came. And as I studied, I realized how deeply I
needed to hear from women themselves… not just commentary about women's
experience, but the lived witness of women who have carried these questions in
their own bodies and hearts. I learned the Atonement isn’t just something to be
understood in theory, but something we are meant to enter into. That mattered
to me because relationships aren’t abstract. They’re lived. They’re entered
with the heart and the body together.
I learned the Atonement is an
Individual experience…
Because as I began to look more
closely at the Savior, I noticed something I hadn’t before. I noticed the way
He speaks. The images He chooses when He tries to explain His love.
At one point, Jesus says, “How oft
would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her
chickens under her wings.” Not as a king gathering subjects. Not as a warrior
defending territory. But as a mother gathering her young…..covering them with
her own body, absorbing danger so they can be safe.
After His resurrection, in the Book
of Mormon, Christ repeats this same image again and again. He says He would
gather His people “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings” if they
would come unto Him. That repetition matters. Christ wants us to understand
something about the nature of His care. It is protective. It is sheltering. It
is willing to bear pain in order to preserve life.
I began to realize that the Savior
does not shy away from women's pain. He does not minimize it, nor does He stand at a distance from it. In fact, the more I studied His Atonement, the
more I realized something deeper. Something I had always heard and been taught,
even as a little girl, but never truly grasped: Christ didn’t just observe
suffering. He entered it. Fully and completely.
Alma teaches that Christ would “go
forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind… that He
may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their
infirmities.” The phrase **according to the flesh** stops me. Because it tells
us that Christ didn’t gain theoretical knowledge of pain. He gained embodied
knowledge.
And suddenly, the comparison that
once felt strange to me began to feel sacred.
Childbirth.
There is a moment I still remember
clearly from one of my labors. Everything had narrowed… all time, sound, and
thought. I remember thinking that I have nothing left. My body was shaking. I
wasn’t calm or brave or glowing. I was raw. I remember gripping the edge of the
bed and saying out loud, “I can’t do this.” And then, almost immediately,
realizing that I already was. There was no exit. No shortcut. Only staying.
Only breathing. Only trusting that somehow, life would come through the pain
instead of around it.
Later, when I held my baby, I
remember thinking how wonderful it was that love could come wrapped in
exhaustion, blood, and tears…..and still be holy. That moment changed the way I
understood suffering. It wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t failure. It was
transformation. It was love doing its hardest work.
Former counselor in the General
Relief Society presidency, Sister Chieko Okazaki, taught that there is nothing
we experience as women that Christ does not also know and recognize. She taught
that on a profound level, He understands the hunger to hold your baby that
sustains you through pregnancy, and that He understands both the physical pain
of giving birth and the immense joy. He understands miscarriage and infertility,
not because He lived those experiences
in a womans body, but because the Atonement is profoundly personal and
embodied. In Gethsemane and on the cross, He entered into the real pains,
losses, hopes, and heartbreaks of every one of us.
When I return to the scriptures,
Gethsemane no longer feels abstract. Isaiah’s words took on new meaning: “He
shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” Travail is not a
gentle word. It is the word we use for labor. For bringing forth life through
pain.
Luke tells us that in Gethsemane,
Christ’s “sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
His body knew strain. It knew collapse. It knew what it meant to be pushed
beyond its limits for the sake of love. Christ did not suffer to prove
something. He suffered to bring forth life.
Again and again, the Lord uses
mother-language to describe His love. Through Isaiah, He asks, “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her
womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” God chooses the
strongest bond we know **a nursing mother** to explain His covenant
faithfulness.
Later, He promises, “As one whom
his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” Not with distance. Not with
instruction alone. But with presence…. With gentleness…With attunement.
Sister Okazaki also said, “Jesus
did not come to explain away our pain, but to be with us in it.” I think that
matters. Because it means Christ does not rush us through suffering. He stays
because the Atonement is Individual …
At Christmas, we often talk about
Mary, but we sometimes rush past her courage. Luke tells us that she “kept all
these things, and pondered them in her heart.” She carried mystery. She carried
fear. She carried a child whose mission would pierce her soul. Simeon
prophesied to her, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Mary
knew grief not as an abstraction, but as a mother watching her son suffer. And
Christ knew grief not as a distant observer, but as the Son who chose to suffer
anyway.
Mother and Son both knew sorrow.
Both bound by love. Both participants in a plan that required bodies,
endurance, and unimaginable trust in God.
As women, many of us know what it
means to be asked to give more than we feel possible. To nurture when empty. To
endure quietly. To trust that our sacrifices matter. The Savior does not ask
this of us from a place of ignorance. He asks it as One who has already borne
weight, carried sorrow, and chosen love at great personal cost.
So when I no longer know how to
pray **when words fail me** I remember that Christ’s body already knows the
language of my pain. I remember that He gathers, bears, feeds, and comforts
like a mother. And I let that be enough.
After Christmas, when the world
grows quiet again, I feel Him closer. Not just as a baby in a manger, but as a
Redeemer who labored, bled, and breathed His last so that none of us, women
included…..would ever be alone in our suffering.
I testify that Jesus Christ knows
us completely. Not despite our bodies, but through them. Not in theory, but in
flesh. And because of that, there is no pain He cannot heal, no grief He cannot
hold, and no woman He does not see.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
