Women in God's Image, Number 13-November 2009

Women in God’s Image is a magazine focusing on Women’s theology and spirituality in South Africa. It is a forum for sharing, informing, supporting and stimulating the telling of our experiences. Send contributions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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Revd Ingrid Andersen wrote in the Editorial for this latest issue:

On a weekend at the end of March, an excitingly diverse group of 23 women gathered to begin a journey.... Throughout the weekend there was a powerful sense of personal growth and trust, a deep feeling of community and shared experience.

Women grieved as they shared stories of heartbreak and pain – women who had been exposed to life-shattering violence, abuse and betrayal: Women struggled with the ways in which society can define them.

There were stories of women caring for family members who died painful and lingering deaths and women told of struggling to survive and to raise their children, while they themselves were still children. There were also stories and poems about how we as women see ourselves and how God sees us.

The workshop was indeed a healing journey, from when we traced our life stories onto newsprint, moving on to explore those thoughts in paintings, drawings, poetry and stories.

A meaningful exercise for many was a guided meditation in the poetry session that called participants to imagine themselves in the cool quiet of their empty, darkened church, where they could sense themselves in the loving presence of God. They were asked to imagine discovering a full-length mirror, and were asked how they saw themselves in that mirror, standing there, simply, with God.

Always, we sought through our creativity to know ourselves as women made in the image of our Creator.

Women in God’s Image, Number 12– August 2007
What a beautiful journey we’ve all been on together. This issue of “Women in God’s Image” (WIGI) is different or new in that it has been part of a writing and learning process through which the writers told and shared their stories and discussed what they would like WIGI to look like. This issue is the result of that process.