When I imagine the first Thanksgiving in the Plymouth Colony, I picture long benches laden with food. Dozens of faces, both European and Wampanoag, contentedly tucking in for a meal after such a difficult first year learning how to survive off the land and through the winter.
An interesting fact about this first Thanksgiving that I did not know until this year is that only four adult women remained in the entire Plymouth Colony to prepare that first meal of gratitude. They were Elizabeth Hopkins, Mary Brewster, Eleanor Billington, and Katherine Carver. What a powerful, hopeful, pious, and defiant act it was for these weary survivors to assemble venison, wildfowl, fish, cornbread, and porridge to feast on. These women had gone through suffering of a kind I cannot even imagine, and yet they were able to give thanks for the goodness of God despite the tragedy and isolation of life in a strange land.
Though the ranks of the settlers would swell through subsequent waves of immigration, these four women would lay a foundation of faith and tangible worship upon which the nation would be built. They would define the trajectory of a continent.
Such noble daughters of Eve brought strength and the unique glory of femininity into the broken garden of a new world!
It is a great example of the kind of Gospel pattern-bearing we studied on Sunday. In the fledgling colonies of the Americas, there was no room for the delicacy that would later characterize Victorian England. In this land of earth, blood, and struggle, men and women had to lean on one another for survival. They had to make the most of their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. Men clawed a framework of order from the wilderness, and women brought life, warmth, and homeliness.
At the end of 1 Timothy 2, I love the way in which Paul moves from speaking of Eve in verse 14 to speaking of all women in verse 15 without any transition (the word “women” usually added to verse 15 is supplied by translators and not in the original). It reminds me of a director starting with a closeup on a single face and zooming out rapidly to reveal an entire army. An army of faithful women who, like Eve, are called Life. Any army of women who continue to demonstrate that it was not the failure in the Garden that defines what it means to be feminine, but faithfulness in bringing life in their wake through faith, love, and sanctity.
From Eden, to the believing wives of the Patriarchs, to the women who followed Jesus as disciples, to those four brave women at the first Thanksgiving feast, to the thousands of godly women bearing life in a myriad different ways – today I am thankful for God’s good design and for the women who embody that design in ways great and small.