Please tell your daughters God is not a man.
Please tell them that God believes they are precious and beloved and important.
Please tell your daughters they are created in God’s very image and are perfect and beautiful as they are in this moment, and that they have inherent dignity.
It is our daughters that I am worried about as the chaos explodes in the Senate. Our daughters, many of whom have been sexually assaulted themselves, many of whom statistically will be in their lifetime, are hearing that a woman’s violation and pain do not matter, are not politically expedient. And this will damage them.
So I don’t want them to lose God. I don’t want them to mix God up with politics or power or old white men. I don’t want them to think even for a moment that God thinks it is OK for them to be hurt, demeaned or publicly humiliated. I don’t want them to think that God in any way has made them less.
It is a tragedy that they have to witness their government doing that. Hopefully that will make our daughters determined to vote, to change things, to be the powerful people that they are. I hope they are furious enough to demand better.
But to do that, they will need the unconditional and eternal love that God offers them. They will need a community who will stand with them, lift them up, pray for them and cheer them on. They will need a community that will not always agree with them, and so teach them how to reconcile. They will need a community that understands that investment of passion and compassion is never a failure.
Our image of God is critical. It forms and informs us. So please teach your daughters that God is love, which isn’t as easy to conjure up a picture for as a human being, but is a force that cannot be stopped or thwarted. Teach them to fill themselves up with that love, which God offers us every second. Teach them to use that love as fuel to work for justice and the dignity of every human being.
After this week it should be clear that we need our daughters to change the world. So let’s give them what they need to do it. And stand with them as well.