The Song of the Barren Woman

Monday Devotional

He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap;

he seats them with princes,

with the princes of their people.

He settles the barren woman in her home

as a happy mother of children.

Psalm 113:7–9

In his novel Harvard Yard, William Martin describes a prosperous seventeenth-century Puritan who faces one of life’s greatest poverties: childlessness.

John needed only to look out his window to see the Lord’s bounty upon him. He could gaze across his vegetable garden and down to the Great Cove, to his ships—half a dozen by his wife’s inheritance, half a dozen his by his own intelligence. . . . But his piety and faith had not been great enough, because the richest of the Lord’s blessings—a house filled with happy noise—had not come to John Wedge. His morning sounds were always the same—the humming of the slave woman who stirred his porridge, the whisk of a broom worked by an indentured servant, and the quiet coughing of his wife. He heard no childish bickering, no mothering voice rising to calm a dispute, and for those, he would have surrendered everything else.1

It’s not often I’m compelled to stop when reading a novel, but I certainly did with this last powerful turn of phrase: and for those, he would have surrendered everything else. Parenting is a lot of very hard and very tiring work. In the midst of the grind, we can forget the song of the barren couple that opens up for us entirely new horizons of insight and thanksgiving.