Breaking Ground:
What are the thoughts that you have when you think of mom? Did your mom “fit” into a traditional mom definition?
Going Deeper
This Sunday we started a new series called Liminal. A liminal space is a place or state of transition, representing the “in-between” threshold between “what was” and “what’s next”. Often described as eerie, nostalgic, or surreal, these spaces are physically or metaphorically empty, such as abandoned hallways or transitional times like adolescence. They evoke a sense of uncanny familiarity and suspended reality, representing places that are “betwixt and between”.
In the Bible, motherhood was traditionally a space of having honor and favor, or of not. Besides Ruth, motherhood was the sign of favor from God. Read 1 Samuel 1:8-18.
What emotions do you read from Hannah? What values does she place in her liminal space of not being a mom?
Scripture only gives one verse to the change of going from not being a mother to motherhood: 20 So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”
Read her song in 1 Samuel 2.
What emotions and thoughts do you read in her new space?
Obviously life is not portrayed in two acts, but a series of choices going from the beginning of a life to the end. In effect, God uses both motherhood and not being a mother to describe a life that is either pointed towards Jesus or pointed towards something else. Yet our Biblical narrative and culture today we tend to get sectioned off into two groups, two liminal spaces.
What happens when we look at motherhood as a series of liminal moments, going through spaces of existence in succession? (ex. 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, & 15-16) as a mother of a child?
What happens when we consider our entire lives and testimonies in this way and not just a “before and after” liminal way of thinking?
Verses like this employ our Centered-Set approach for this non-liminal type of thinking and reframes ideas like motherhood in general:
2 Corinthians 3:18 (ESV)
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
Getting out of the hole:
Where and in what labels do you have this liminal thinking that binds you to a role that is “before and after”?
What reframing do you need to think about this sort of liminality?
What new ways can you think about motherhood in specifics, especially the various seasons of motherhood?
Additional Resources*
Centered Set Church by Mark D. Baker
Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer
TheBibleProject.com
Coming Up This Week:*
Join us on 5.17.26 for Graduation Sunday!