Noonday Notes, Vol. 2 Issue 1

Noonday Notes
Volume 2, Issue 1

May 15th, 2026

A year ago, when I first started writing these notes, I began in Genesis. Specifically, 2:15 when man is put in the garden to “work it and keep it”. Seems fitting to return to Genesis in Volume 2, Issue 1. Because that’s nature, full of circles. Webs. Nests. Trees. Tomatoes. You know I have like 20 more examples, but, I digress. Mother’s Day got me thinking about Eve. The one sent to be a “helper” with a name that literally means “life-giver” (Gen. 2:18).

I wondered who she was before everything changed. Before pain entered the story. Before rupture, striving, and grief became things women would carry in their bodies. What did womanhood feel like for her? What was it like to be a mother and lose a child? What gifts did Eve bring to the garden? Why does the garden still feel healing to women even now? Just a few of the questions I have.

I also was thinking about how women are introduced in scripture. How they enter the scene. Tamar on the side of the road ensuring her promise of motherhood (Gen. 38). Shiprah and Puah refusing to take life in a birthing room (Exo. 1). Ruth redeemed in the barley fields of Bethlehem. All of them integral to the story of Life.

Women belong in the garden. Your social media algorithm is probably telling you as much. Of course we feel restored in the garden, we remember it in our bodies. Women are cultivators. Not just of plants and children. We bring life into spaces. We tend what has been entrusted to us. We hold things together in ways that may go unnoticed.

But back to pain. The rupture. I don’t know a single woman who can say 100% Mother’s Day is just the best day ever. It’s not. It holds both joy and grief. For all of us. Our Brother Paul told the Romans this, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” (Romans 8:22-23). Per usual this is symbolic and real.

The whole creation. Not just people. Not just women. The earth itself. Creation is groaning. But it is not groaning because of death. It is groaning because of labor. Grumbling against this broken world like those before us. But also laboring us towards the next Garden, the one with the tree that has 12 kinds of fruit, yielding them each month. Epic. And it’s the next Garden that gives me hope and the ability to work and keep this current garden...while also groaning and grumbling on Mother’s Day and remembering “it’s all vapor”.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.