Why the Apostle Paul Compared Himself to a Nursing Mother

My husband and I worked in local church ministry for over ten years before moving abroad to serve for the last five and a half. There’s something I want you to know about this life: you’re going to need a lot of fortitude for the journey. Working with people, in any time and any place, is hard. It doesn’t matter if it’s in your home country or a host country. Working with people is heart-wrenching and soul-filling, and you need endurance.

This is something else I want you to know: in the years ahead, never hesitate to serve out of your feminine strength. A lot of teaching models are filled with masculine metaphors. There’s battle this, and army that. There’s fighting here and soldiering on there. The Bible itself is filled with battle-speak. We are to put on the full armor of God so that we can take our stand against the devil’s schemes. But the same Paul who told us in Ephesians 6 that our battle is not against flesh and blood and that we were to arm ourselves and stay alert and be persistent and stand firm, that very same Paul was not ashamed in his first letter to the Thessalonians to compare himself to a woman.


Elizabeth Trotter
Elizabeth Trotterhttps://trotters41.com/
After a military childhood, a teenaged Elizabeth crash landed into American civilian life. When she married her high school sweetheart, her life plan was to be a chemical engineer while he practiced law. Instead, they both fell headlong into youth ministry and spent the next ten years serving the local church. When her husband later decided he wanted to move overseas, Elizabeth didn’t want to join him. But now, after four years of life in Cambodia with him and their four children, she can’t imagine doing anything else. Elizabeth loves math, science, and all things Jane Austen. Days find her homeschooling her children, while nights find her eating hummus by the spoonful. Follow her blog at The Trotter Family (https://trotters41.com/) and visit her corner of Facebook (www.facebook.com/trotters41).

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