Two Women Raised a Man Paul Would Not Stop Bragging About

Somebody said it at a cookout last summer, holding a paper plate, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely.

"Well, you came up without a man in the house, so."

That was it. No follow-up. The person moved on to the potato salad and never thought about it again, and he has thought about it maybe two hundred times since.

What gets him is that he has heard some version of it his whole life. Teachers said it politely. A coach said it as if he were being kind. It always arrives the same way, as a diagnosis, and it is always delivered by somebody who has not asked one question about the woman who actually did the work.

So he has a choice he did not ask for. Either the house he came up in was defective, or the people saying that are wrong about something, and he has never been sure which.

Paul names the grandmother first

There is a letter in the New Testament written by an old man to a younger one he had trained. It is personal. He is not making a point about family structure.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Read the order. Grandmother, then mother, then Timothy.

Paul is naming the pipeline. He is saying, plainly, where this man's faith came from and who carried it to him, and he does not add a qualifier. He does not say it was a shame there was nobody else. He does not treat the household as a story about a gap.

And this is the same Timothy Paul sent to run churches on his own and called his own son in the faith.

You are the product of a line somebody would be proud to write down. 2 Timothy 1 names the two women in order and never once apologizes for the list, and it is His Spirit who makes an old man's letter feel like it was about somebody's actual house.

The boy who ran a country because of who hid him

There is a story in Kings that almost nobody hears, and it turns on one woman making a decision in a bad hour.

The royal family is being wiped out. One boy survives, because his aunt takes him.

But Jehosheba, the daughter of king Joram, sister of Ahaziah, took Joash the son of Ahaziah, and stole him from among the king's sons which were slain; and they hid him, even him and his nurse, in the bedchamber from Athaliah, so that he was not slain. (2 Kings 11:2)

Six years in hiding. Two women and a boy.

He comes out at seven and is crowned, and the book says he did what was right for as long as he was taught. The whole line runs through a room where there was no man in charge.

You have a history that God has run through houses like yours before. 2 Kings 11 keeps that room in the record instead of skipping to the coronation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old record feel like it is describing somebody the reader knows.

God says what He does about a house like that

There is a line in the Psalms that is usually read as being about lonely people in general. It is more specific than that.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6)

Setteth is a placing word. It is deliberate. Somebody decides where a person goes.

The verse right before it is the one about a father of the fatherless. They are next to each other on purpose. God names Himself for the gap and then, in the very next breath, says what He does about the household.

He does not describe a rescue that comes later. He describes a placement that has already happened.

You were placed, and not left over. Psalm 68 puts the setting and the naming in consecutive lines, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than anybody's opinion at a cookout who makes a placement feel like a decision somebody made about you.

He notices the woman doing it alone

There is a moment in Luke where Jesus is walking into a town and a funeral is walking out of it.

Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. (Luke 7:12)

Luke gives you three facts in a row. Only son. Mother. Widow.

He is telling you the arithmetic of that woman's life, because in that world it meant she now had nobody.

And he delivered him to his mother. (Luke 7:15)

Not to a crowd. Not to the disciples. He hands the boy back to the woman.

Whatever else is happening in that story, Jesus is paying close attention to a household everybody else in the procession had already written off.

You are watched closely by somebody who counts a household the way Luke counts it. Luke 7 gives the three facts before it gives the miracle, and it is His Spirit who makes that attention something a man can feel rather than merely read.

And the instruction names both

There is a line in Proverbs about who teaches a young man, and it is one of the few places the Bible puts two names side by side without ranking them.

My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother. (Proverbs 1:8)

Law of thy mother. That is a strong word and it is not softened anywhere.

Whoever assembled that book did not treat one of those as the real teaching and the other as the backup. They stand in the same sentence doing the same job.

You have been taught by somebody the Bible calls a lawgiver in her own house. Proverbs 1 sets the two side by side without ranking them, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old proverb land on a specific kitchen and a specific woman.