SISTER WISDOM : build a better life

Liberation is an iffy thing.

Church and Feminism

The women's liberation movement of the 1960's drew two rather extreme responses from the Church: either we jumped right on the equal rights bandwagon and set up church day schools and child-care centers to help the church women pursue careers, or we withdrew in shock and horror and deemed anything not concerned with home or children inappropriate, even unbiblical, for women's interest.

Extremes usually fall short of wisdom. These responses are no exception.

Go Ahead and Roar

Woman was created to be a help meet to man. Every liberated woman will roar (as women are said to do) at this statement, but it is simple truth. God's promise is that the truth will set us free, so accept this truth as something that leads to greater freedom, not less, for us as women.

A Help What?

God says woman is to be a help meet. He does not say, “I will make a homemaker for him...” or “I will make a domestic slave for him...” or “I will make an additional income provider for him....”

Yet, O Women, have we not identified ourselves in such roles before? Homemaking is not next to godliness; neither is having a career. Neither pursuit is our God-mandated work.

At different times we may be called upon to be homemakers or to be assistants in a different sphere. Let us not confuse the means with the mandate. The mandate is to be a help meet. The means will vary.

Wrong Priorities

When any work becomes more important than the work of helping our husbands, we have fallen away from God's mandate. Sister, your house may be clean, your meals may be perfect, your children may be excelling at everything you put before them; but what is the motive of your work?

What is your heart? Have you forgotten the mandate in your busy, efficient home management?

Sister, your work may be valuable, your income may be treasured, your contribution may be unquestioned; but what is the motive of your work?

What is your heart? Have you forgotten the mandate in your smart, diligent pursuit of a career?

A Place Beyond Boundaries

Neither the home nor the office can claim exclusive rights over “a woman's place.” God has defined that place as something beyond physical and social boundaries, something that can change as the seasons of life change without compromising its purpose.

To assist our husbands in ruling the earth is a broader and greater work than we have deemed ourselves capable of. Let us walk in faith, and not be so small-minded as to limit our lives to only one small part of this work.

I Want to Be Equal, Too!

The curse of feminism is the cry for equality: I can open my own doors, drive my own car, earn my own money, make my own way. This kind of equality leads to women trying to fulfill the instructions given to men and women, not just the ones given to women.

It isn't that women cannot do those things that men are instructed to do; in most cases, women are quite capable of them all. But ability does not equal responsibility; just being able to do something does not mean you should be doing it.

Inferior? I Think Not

Cultural feminism tells us that when we do only what we find ourselves particularly suited to do, we have made ourselves inferior to men. Frankly, I don't see the logic there. It seems smart to me to do what you're good at and what you enjoy, rather than kill yourself trying to prove some obscure agenda to a faceless mass of imaginary patriarchs.

Men certainly don't kill themselves trying to prove that they're just as good at being women as we are. It seems just a bit silly that we would work so hard trying to prove how good we are at being men.

Don't Be a Negative Nancy

The Bible is not legalistic about what women should and should not do; it gives very clear but also very flexible instructions as to what our primary occupation should be.

There is a lot of room for interpretation in how we carry out those instructions. The over-arching theme is that of assisting our husbands; under that umbrella, we have all sorts of freedom to do and be and grow and explore and work and play and produce and rest and develop and create.

Some of us, of course, ignore the freedom and focus on the umbrella. What's it doing there? Why can't I do without the umbrella? Well, sister, you can do without the umbrella. Step on out there and stand in that cold rain by yourself. As for me, I find I can sacrifice a little bit of the view in order to avoid getting the unforgiving lashes of the storm winds.

That's what umbrellas are for.

5-Minute Marriage Check

Let go of the need to prove you can do it all; that drive comes from the left-over message of feminism that has saturated our culture. You don't have to do more or be different to be exactly who God made you to be.

Are there things you would let go of if you knew you wouldn't be judged for it? Would you bow out of an activity, a sport, a class, an organization, a job?

Try this: pretend the only person whose opinion matters is your husband. What would your schedule look like if you were just trying to please him? (Okay, I know it might be “sex/cook/sex/cook....”).

How can you simplify your schedule so it is less about living up to other people's standards and more about helping your husband with the priorities he has set for your family?

More food and more sex might not be a bad thing...

5-Minute Action Point

I challenge you to do five things to shake off that leftover feminist agenda.

1. Ask your husband for advice about something that is “your area.” Don't make something up; bring a real problem, ask a question, and listen to his answer.
2. Act on the advice he gives you from #1.
3. Clear a night this week of any house work, computer stuff, activities, events, and the like. It's an at-home date night. Make your husband's favorite meal, hang out together, play a game with the kids or watch a movie. Relax. Don't try to control the agenda. Flow.
4. Ask your husband for one thing you can help him with this week.
5. Put that one thing from #4 on your calendar. Do it.

Learn to love your umbrella.

Image courtesy of wonderjunkie.

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This post is Day 9 of the Build a Better Marriage Challenge.

It's a 30-day challenge to be deliberate about building a better marriage. We'll talk about some of the common obstacles to a better marriage (marriage killers) and some of the important habits for a successful marriage (marriage keys). We'll also work through some of the misconceptions that affect our marriage, faulty thinking we've picked up from our culture, our pasts, and maybe even from the church. Each day's reading will end with a 5-minute marrige check and a 5-minute action point, so you can take it on home.

Join in via the Mr Linky on the challenge page. You can also just read along, but remember that all challenge participants will receive a free copy of the ebook at the end of the challenge.

Here's to better, stronger, happier marriages!

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This post is a condensed version of these 2 articles: A Woman's Place and A Woman's Place, Pt 2.

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Culture-speak and God-speak

are rarely the same thing.

Define Normal For Me

A couple of thousand years ago, sharing your husband with a concubine wasn't a big deal.

A few hundred years ago, having no legal rights except those granted by your husband was just the way things were.

Arranged marriages are normal, somewhere. Walking five feet behind your husband out of respect is normal, somewhere. Covering your hair and face to keep yourself modest for your husband is normal, somewhere. Working side-by-side with your husband to till up and plant a field by hand is normal, somewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

I'm just saying: it takes a talented guy to use a phrase like "the ooze of oil" in a poem about the grandeur of God and make it work. Read on, read on.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Read the rest of this entry »

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I need the van today, so I rode in with Joe. I was jumpy, ready to go, so I started radio-surfing for something fast and heavy. I found Miley Cyrus singing her little teenage heart out. Not heavy, okay, but the song has a great 80's beat and what woman among us didn't live through this at least ten times in adolescence: Read the rest of this entry »

Alex and Brett Harris wrote a book called "Do Hard Things" which I probably would know nothing about but for an excerpt in TPE, the magazine of my church's denomination. (Yep, I'm one of those crrrrazy Pentecostals. Are you scared? Are you making assumptions right now? You are, aren't you? That's okay. I love you anyway.)

I was impressed. The book is directed toward teenagers, which, strangely enough, is a group that no longer accepts me as one of their own. (I am still a little hurt by this.) The book's premise seems to be (understand, I have only read an excerpt, not the whole book, so I'm sailing a little blind here) that the "Myth of Adolescence" has turned a group that should be vibrant, energetic, unstoppable into a lethargic and rebellious one.

What a waste. As the book says, "We waste some of the best years of our lives and never reach our full God-given potential. We never attempt things that would stretch, grow and strengthen us. We end up weak and unprepared for the amazing future that could have been."

I'm 26. My husband is 25. We've both been working since we were about 14. Of course, it was part-time during the school year, and some of my earlier jobs were just baby-sitting. But at that tender, adolescent age, our parents expected us to begin to take responsibility, to pay for stuff we wanted, to contribute. We didn't have to put grocery money into the family pot or anything, but that probably wouldn't have been a bad idea.

We're not rich, by any means. But we have worked for and gained an independence that many of my peers seem unable to find. And we're not talking teenagers! It starts then, back at 13, or before, maybe at 10, or 6, when the whole world revolves around a child's happiness. At what point do you let the child know that the point of the world isn't to make him happy? It's a sad awakening, and I have friends who are still fighting that knowledge as hard as they can.

Some people manage to avoid acknowledging that truth their entire lives, and they are the ones who Alex and Brett describe on their blog as " Peter Pans who shave." (This article they wrote describes more about "adultescence.")

I see that in my generation, now in our mid-twenties. I see that in the one coming behind me, the teens with shiny laptops and enormous libraries of music on their iPods, but with no vision for the future, no library of skills or knowledge or character from which to draw.

We're going to be playing catch-up for a while. We better start getting over our own lies and pointing the way.

Flipping through a magazine the other day, I stopped on this ad: A woman is surrounded by happy looking children, all eating from colorful paper plates. The tag line is what gets me: "I deserve a paper plate that is as strong as I am."

Really? Do we think we deserve any kind of paper plate at all? How is this a question of merit? Where do you go to earn the Paper Plate Badge? And how do we end up with an attitude of entitlement about disposable serving pieces?

What else do we think we're entitled to? The answer: lots of things. Clean grocery stores. Smooth roads to drive on. Affordable gas. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What's that little P word doing in there? Who said anything about pursuing happiness? Don't we just get to have it doled out to us along with social security, strip malls, and no-down-payment mortgages?

The pursuit of happiness is something I can consider an inalienable right, but not happiness itself. Not material success, a fat paycheck, great health insurance, great car, great spouse, great kids, great vacations... Not a paper plate as strong as I am.

I am "entitled" to life: no one should take my life by force or violence.

I am "entitled" to liberty: no one should keep me from following the dictates of my conscience so long as they do not infringe upon the life and liberty of another.

And I am "entitled" to use my life and liberty to pursue happiness, however I define that elusive goal.

And really, people, that's it. We're not entitled to anything else our Western culture proffers so freely. We may be used to it. We may not want to live without it. But we don't get it because it's a right.

We can be thankful and enjoy abundance without being victims, and then, if we lose something, we can let it go without whining.

Here's to a whine-free America!

"A Christian, who realizes he has been made in the image of the Creator and is therefore meant to be creative on a finite level, should certainly have more understanding of his responsibility to treat God's creation with sensitivity..." Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and all they contain.

Then He planted a garden. Then He put man and woman into the garden and gave them a simple command: Take care of it. Multiply, be fruitful, have dominion, care for and cultivate this space. How much time passed before that man and woman failed to respect the one boundary He set? The garden was closed, the earth changed, but the commandment of stewardship was not removed. As they failed to respect the boundary, we have failed to respect the mandate for stewardship.

Christians, oh, poor, foolish, sad, pathetic misers of Creativity!

We tithe our churches faithfully, making contributions so we can build huge, ornate buildings for "church meetings." Then we use chemicals which poison our homes and waters; we create an amount of waste so great it cannot be consumed quickly enough by the natural processes of entropy and decay. What good are our beautiful church buildings when we have ravaged and destroyed the earth on which they stand?

What will the great Artist say of our treatment of this, His work?

What will we say when He asks us? Was it really more important to eat fast food, watch tv, buy cheap toys, look like our neighbors, have a bigger car, have more stuff than to take care of what He made? It wasn't worth it? It wasn't good enough to cherish? What will we say?

Now we enter a new time in our history.

Our neglect left the steward-care of God's earth open for anyone's dominion. So others who cared, not necessarily for God but for beauty and health, have become the voices of care for the earth. Many of them lack the understanding of dominion: dominion over the earth, but dominion under God, a position which provides the balance necessary to appreciate the earth without worshipping it. The mandate we ignored has been taken over by those who know only the art and not the Artist. They recognize the beauty and value we have despised. We are the guilty ones. While claiming to worship the Creator we have destroyed His creation: the dirt, the grass, the birds, the rivers, the small things and the great things.

Our right to govern the earth-garden is given to another,

taken over by those who have chosen to see the consequences of mistreatment. They will not do things as we would. Their perspective is not like ours. When there is a conflict in their mission (as there inevitably will be) between what is good for the earth and what is good for humanity, they will not know which to choose. We do. We are not afraid to recognize our human selves as the peak of God's creativity on the earth.

They will sometimes choose earth over humanity.

They will limit liberties we consider inalienable. We will squirm and scream because of our personal discomfort. We will cry out against tyranny by the earth-worshippers. It is by our own doing that others wield the influence we once had. Because of our apathy, the care and stewardship of the earth-garden will not be the expression of created man enjoying and appreciating his Creator's work. It will become instead a duty of preservation casting a shadow of fear. It will be a tool, this fear, to usher in many laws and economic regulations which will, in turn, further chagne government from a tool for the people to a controlling hand over the people.

What do we do, then?

Denounce efforts to save the environment? Protest at Earth Day rallies? Try to prove global warming is a myth? Global warming isn't the problem, Church Members. The problem is that for decade upon decade we have used resources without regard for replenishment. We have consumed without creating.

Our written instruction tells us to do all things decently and in order.

We have not been decent and orderly in how we have used and lived upon the earth-garden. What an insult to its Maker! What guilt upon our hearts! If we have utterly failed in so basic a responsibility, how is it that we can attempt anything greater? But we do. We ignore our other instructions: First plant your fields, then build your house.

We skipped the fields:

putting in place decent and orderly systems for our continued life on this earth. We skipped to the house, or rather, to the new fellowship hall, to the church bus, to the summer camp, to a hundred and one programs that have had negligible effect on our sin-immersed culture.

Now our culture sees us for what we have become:

isolated, out-of-touch, out-of-control, unwilling to change, entrenched in tradition, dogmatic, intolerant, and completely unconcerned with the very first instruction given to us by God. Because of our apathy and legalism, the stewardship mandate given to us by God has become something that concerns those who, largely, deny God's existence. We have forced it to become a battle. Now we, the ones who should be most concerned withcaring for this enormous, irreplaceable piece of art on which we live, mock, ridicule, and scorn those attempting to care for it.

O Christian, O little disciple! Quit concerning yourself with proving that you are on the right side

and simply admit that you, like all of us, have been wrong. In ignorance, perhaps, for a while; but that time has passed. We have done what the prophet said of Israel, taking our new wine and oil, gifts of our Maker, and giving them to other lovers. He gave us the earth, the renewable, sustainable, rich-with-resources earth, and we took the materials, abused the methods of production, and used them to feed our other lovers: money, powers, comfort, ease, security.

The problem is not with a green agenda, real or imagined.

The problem is not that the media exaggerates the issues. The problem is not with liberal motives or New Age beliefs. The problem is with us, Christian.

We need to change. We need to repent.

We need to come with broken hearts before our God and admit that we have failed to serve Him well. We have spent our time accumulating instead of appreciating. We have failed to trust God to provide for us, and in fear have used any means needed to hoard treasures. We have served ourselves instead of our God. We have isolated ourselves instead of finding common ground with others. We have been bringers of strife when we are meant to be messengers of peace.

It is time for us to put down our weapons and pick up a spade.

Plant a garden. Recycle a mound of trash. Get outside and appreciate the artistry of what God has made. Appreciate the fact that it was made for us. Understand that it doesn't matter if others are misguided, misinformed, wrongly motivated. What matters is that you, Follower of the Way, Little Christ, Saint, you can only show love to your God by obeying His commands. Do not fail in the very first one given.

Image courtesy of miyukiutada on Flickr.