Kavannah

Gloriously Female

2008-12-23T10:09:00.006-05:00

At the halfway point of your mother’s uterine life, she had all the eggs nestling and jostling about in her little ovaries that she would ever have. At twenty weeks she had 6 to 7 million proud eggs within her, fresh heirlooms of genetic brilliance all. A woman’s egg, her offering in the formation of a new human soul, is yet another example of nature’s lavish abundance. For “the millions of eggs that we women begin with are cleanly destroyed through an innate cell program called apoptosis. The eggs do not simply die— they commit suicide. Their membranes ruffle up like petticoats whipped by the wind and they break into pieces, thence to be absorbed bit by bit into the hearts of neighboring cells. By graciously if melodramatically getting out of the way, the sacrificial eggs leave their sisters plenty of hatching room.” (1) The eggs that survived the sweeping rejection of apoptosis now await their chance to slide down the fallopian tube to the uterus. Here, many years later, the egg that formed you was one of the few who were surprised to be eagerly met by thousands of sperm whipping and racing towards it. One sperm penetrated the luminous egg and formed you— a statistical miracle.

Though you were either genetically male (XY) or female (XX) at fertilization, your sex was otherwise indistinguishable for the next several weeks. The male and female gonads plod along without committing to either sex into the sixth week of gestation before converting into either ovaries or testes. Little boys immediately go about egging on their prized gonads, whose job is to pump out the testosterone that affects the remainder of their development. Girls are a bit shyer; they set about primping their müllerian duct into the appropriate internal organs a few weeks later. By birth, you came into the world a fully female baby with your chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormone levels, and brain processing all intricately synchronized like a master Russian ballet.

“Except when you don’t. Because, sometimes, you won’t. I'm sorry to say so but, sadly it's true that bang-ups and hang-ups can happen to you.”(2) This timeless wisdom from Dr Seuss aids me in warning that at every step of the sexual differentiation, something can, and often does go wrong. The four defining sex characteristics include a person’s chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormone levels, and brain processing and a discrepancy between these puts someone into the category of being an intersexed person; that is, not fully male or female. Milton Diamond commented on intersexed development saying it is “biologically understandable while statistically uncommon” (3). “Ironically since the advancements in surgery have made it possible for intersex conditions to be concealed, many people are not aware of how frequently intersex conditions arise in human beings or that they occur at all” (4). How commonly is a person born who can’t be clearly defined as ‘male’ or ‘female’? A study that surveyed medical literature from 1955 to the present found that as many as 2% of live births do not conform to the ideal male or female (5).

The list of possible deviations is long. Some people have ambiguous genetic material with some XY cells and others XX. A common condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome occurs when chromosomal ‘males’ are androgen insensitive resulting in the body developing female genitals and hormone levels. Distinctively feminine to the eye and often in their gendered identity, AIS women often do not discover their condition until puberty or when they seek infertility treatments and a doctor informs them they are infertile due to the fact that they are— partially men. Likewise, genetic females can be prenatally overdosed with androgens resulting in partial male development. Any mis-measure of the hormonal cocktail produces a person whose sex cannot be confirmed by a quick diaper change. Not only is the amount of necessary uterine hormones precise, the timing is as well. The timing of hormonal exposure can result, for example, in a person who is a fully functional male on the outside, but partially female on the inside with most of the piping for female reproduction. “Sometimes a person isn’t found to have intersex anatomy until she or he reaches the age of puberty, or finds himself an infertile adult, or dies of old age and is autopsied. Some people live and die with intersex anatomy without anyone (including themselves) ever knowing” (6).

Unfortunately this is a reality that most people are unaware of, and of which I myself didn’t even stumble upon until three years into the research of this book when I had a hard time finding an answer to the basic question: ‘what does it mean to be female?’ Surprisingly, the common notion that females have XX chromosomes and boys the XY, is not even close to being true. The New York Times, in the excellent article “What If It's (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?” notes: “even the International Olympic Committee acknowledged this when it suspended its practice of mandatory chromosomal testing for female athletes in 2000, reflecting current medical understanding that a female who tests positive for a Y chromosome can still be a woman” (7).

To be Continued...

Angier, Natalie. Women: An Intimate Geography. New York; Peter Davison Publishing with Houghton Mifflin Company. 1999 P 3
Diamond, Milton, H. Keith Sigmundson. “Management of Intersexuality: Guidelines for Dealing with Individuals with Ambiguous Genitalia.” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. (1997)
Dr. Seuss. Oh The Places You’ll Go.
Domurat Dreger, Alice. “‘Ambiguous Sex’ –Or Ambivalent Medicine?” The Hastings Center Report May/Jun 1998, Volume 28, Issue 3 P24-35.
Blackless, Melanie, Anthony Charuvastra, Amanda Derryck, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Karl Lauzanne, Ellen Lee. How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and Synthesis. American Journal of Human Biology Volume 12 Issue 2, P 151 – 166
Intersex Society of North America. “Does Having a Y Chromosome Make Someone A Man?” May 2006.
Weil, Elizabeth. “What If It's (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?” The New York Times. September 24, 2006

An Inferior Love

2007-11-27T00:58:00.003-05:00

Shopping season has started again. I live at Herald square where the streets are lined with festive stores and on the corner, the famous Christmas windows of the world’s largest store. This year Macy's is playing ‘O Christmas Tree’ nearly 24 hours a day which you can hear with the windows shut on the top floor of my building. Christmas season alone probably accounts for why this street corner is deemed the fourth loudes-on the planet. The sidewalks outside my shop-lined street slow like traffic at rush hour. Never again will I complain about sitting in a climate controlled, adjusted seat car with music and cup holders; standing in traffic is immeasurably worst. Today while I was waiting to cross a street I glanced into a store’s windows at the purses. I know their price tags are well over what I make in a week, but I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t want one even if my income easily allowed for one. (Somehow I escaped from a family of four daughters without a purse or shoe fetish, which is a rare phenomenon in this corner of the world.)

Augustine, genius of the patristic era, wrote of how “some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used.” Purses and shoes seem to me to be things I merely use— not things that I find great joy in when I get dressed in the morning. Now, I am not at all implying that luxury items are inherently unnecessary; if your first love is fashion and you live for designer purses, then by all means, delight in high craftsmanship. If your hobby is cars, get one with a good engine and leather interior. Fill your life with things that bring you joy which Augustine noted that we “cling to with love for its own sake.”

A strange trend is happening in America. I sense it in the air at Christmas time and read about it in the newspapers. I feel it surge up in me more often than I admit. All around us are people who have blurred the lines between belongings ‘to be enjoyed,’ and those meant ‘to be used.’ We seek gratification in common useful possessions, such as cars, houses, technology, and clothing. The point at which enjoyment becomes consumerism is when there is no differentiation between items of use and enjoyment. While there is nothing wrong with investing in aesthetics and good things, confusing the useful and the enjoyable goes to extremes very quickly. As though humans were not insatiable enough, this blurring deceives us into thinking that useful items must be upgraded in order to give us increasing satisfaction. There are three compelling reasons why life is more fulfilling when people are aware of the difference between useful material things and those which actually improve their quality of life.

The first is that few people have incomes that allow them to buy everything they can think of to buy. For the rest of the world who have to decide between purchases, being able to identify the option that will bring more pleasure will raise the value of every dollar spent. Material possessions that genuinely raise a person’s quality of life are few, because a person can have but a few passions in life unless they condition themselves to find joy in indiscriminate acquisition. For example, a person who will only be satisfied with a big house, fast car, flashy wardrobe, and extravagant vacations is most likely not an interior designer, car enthusiast, trend-setter, and a lover of new cultures. They have merely conditioned themselves to need the best of everything without really enjoying the possesions. But if you can condition yourself to need things, you can learn to go without them. If a person can learn to only spend their extra money on things that give them genuine delight, they will have more money and enjoyment.

The second reason to differentiate between the good and the useful, is because those things which have the power to give you joy also have the power to take it away. No one needs a life where they are flooded everyday with disappointment over their purse collection or vinyl seat coverings. Walk through the avenues of Manhattan and you may find yourself suddenly very discontented with everything in your possession, right down to your toothbrush holder. There are better thoughts to think than these. This leads into the third reason. The third and most important reason to grow in an awareness of this distinction is because, as Augustine notes, that when we “wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love.” As Americans, we have trained ourselves to value things that once obtained, do not increase our actual quality of life in any way. Why do this, when there are so many more worthy pursuits to strive after? I will leave these crosswalk musings with one final warning from Augustine: “between temporal and eternal things there is this difference: a temporal thing is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul whose true and certain rest is eternity; but the eternal is more ardently loved when it is acquired than when it is merely desired.”

Mere Christianity

2007-11-15T12:47:00.001-05:00

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, "People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed." The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see...
The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political program for applying "Do as you would be done by" to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity Page 74

The Sky Is White

2007-11-11T14:18:00.001-05:00

There’s this verse in Hosea that talks about rain—it begins: “sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness. Break up your fallow ground,” which may mean, don’t be like the unreceptive soil in Jesus’ parable of the sower which cannot receive good into it. Fallow ground is a poetic reference to the places in our lives where we are refusing grace. Fallow ground is the unfruitful part of your soul that is “choked with the worries and riches and pleasures of this life” (Luke 8:14). Hosea says, break up the unfertile areas of your life and the last clause says why: “break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord until He comes to rain righteousness on you.” The thought that causes me to pause when I read this verse, is when it describes the righteousness that comes into a person’s life when they pursue wisdom. It rains on them.

It rains in Manhattan. It rains on streets where there is nothing growing. When I walk down the grey streets in the rain I think that somewhere there is a flower unfolding into the rain—nourished. Rain is indiscriminate. It falls on the just and on the unjust. I wonder if when I receive good into my life if that righteousness doesn’t just nourish my soul, but also those around me. Now when it rains, it reminds me how connected we all are, how my actions affect those around me and the world and how I too am touched by them.

It rains in on the streets of Manhattan.
It rains where nothing is growing and I think that somewhere there is a flower unfolding into the rain—nourished.

Thoughts on Identity III: There Are No Children Who Live Here

2007-10-28T14:38:00.001-04:00

The second reason to pursue a sense of self that is separate from achievement is because this way of thinking naturally leads to a balanced life. This understanding of self will result in a heightened awareness of yourself as an organic person: one who has a context, a family or community they are a necessary part of, a person who has time to play with children and listen to the stories of those who have lived long and good years. Identify a place that places a high value on productivity and you will find a place where isolation is prominent, suicide rates are higher, and a population that has imbalanced age distributions. Manhattan is just such an example. There are no children who live here.

An awareness of how belonging shapes us will lead to a life that balances productivity with rest. And not just the type of rest that aims at maintaining functionality, but a rest that acknowledges worth which transcends productivity. Rest steps out of the working world to experience nourishment and the seldom transcendence that speaks to our souls. To balance our modern concept of identity with the meaningfulness that comes from belonging provides for the season when tragedy or old age will strip us all of our vitality. So, who are you, really, as a person? How you answer that question, shapes the world more than you would think.

Thoughts on Identity II: Beef, It's What's For Dinner

2007-10-19T21:44:00.001-04:00

The first reason to pursue a sense of self that is separate from achievement is because valuing self only for production’s sake leads to destructive trends in society. The world has been permeated with evolutionary social-science for the past 150 years, which has lead to a world where unwanted children and ethnic groups, the poor, elderly, and handicapped have been exterminated in the name of the survival of the fittest. This atheistic worldview has no rational basis for ethics or logically consistent motives to help the weak in the society. While other nations have followed evolutionary thought to its logical conclusions, America, which is also influenced by Greco-Roman law and Judeo-Christian ethics, has been slower in moving toward this end.

A Judeo-Christian understanding of the world promotes the idea that human life is inherently valuable. This was particularly heinous to Nietzsche, who listed the intolerable Christians as the primary detriment to mankind’s evolutionary progress—they wouldn’t let elderly people just die or the plague-infested towns to be quarantined and starved. Buddhism is the only other religion that has regard for life, qua life, but it regards plant, animal, and human life to be equal which both elevates plant and animal life to the level of human dignity, and reduces human life to that of a plant’s. (The effects of these beliefs are exactly what you would think they would be, such as children starving while cows roam the streets, among other problems.) The top three sociologist in the world agree that people groups who agree that life is inherently valuable, will naturally emerge as the greatest force for justice, the quickest responders to disaster, and the most concerned for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Being someone who believes they have more value than just what they can contribute to society creates a world that has a place for those who do not contribute to the national GDP.

Thoughts on Identity I: Actually, It's Just Conan

2007-10-14T12:43:00.001-04:00

Who are you, really, as a person? Ancient cultures knew a person according to who they belonged to. If you had just met a person at the village well, you would ask them who their father was, and in that collectivist, backwardly-focused culture, you would know who the person was. This type of culture would be concerned with who you were as an individual only to the extent that you brought honor or shame to your family, and it was out of this framework that the entrenched casts of the aristocrats began. Today, the majority of cultures, including America, are individualistic, forwardly-focused societies. When you meet someone at the office water cooler, you ask them what they ‘do’—what their job is, where they are going in life, or what their ambitions are. Conan, son of Thor, has now become just Conan. Democracies have an even stronger tendency toward individualistic thinking because our society has no aristocratic tendencies of latent casts; you could easily become the President of the nation even if you were born into the log cabin of a backwoods farmer. Far from knowing a person by who their father is, modern cultures know a person according to what they do.

Today people marry later in life (only to divorce later), move farther from home, and participate less in social and religious communities than they did even fifty years ago. Many social trends have cultivated an increasingly isolated population in America. Many people work in professional (i.e. sterile) environments only to pull into their driveways and enclave themselves within their house for the night after the garage door seals with the cement. In our driven, individualistic pursuits, it may be worthwhile to rediscover the simple joys that come with an ancient understanding of finding self by belonging rather than achieving. This way of thinking is beneficial for two reasons.

Margin Room II

2007-10-10T16:46:00.001-04:00

In America we live at such a fast pace and it can be hard to imagine a society could operate differently. It’s not just our imagination: Americans work longer hours than the rest of the world. Lawrence Jeff Johnson, a chief labor market economist, has proven “workers in the United States are putting in more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world.” However Johnson adds that “we're not the most efficient, when you compare it per hour.” It can be difficult to imagine a place where shops open at ten, close at six, and lunch breaks are long enough for social gatherings and naps. That’s right— naps. Not errands. Naps. In some Africa cultures social obligation to a visiting neighbor has priority over work (wrap your mind around the implications of that) and it is unthinkable to stop and ask a stranger any question, such as for directions or for the time, without inquiring after their family and life.

A life ordered in a way to allow margin space emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially and socially is a life that creates reserve tanks for when they are most needed. However the fact that I am arguing for our need of rest, by citing that it increases the functionality and fullness of life shows that I have not yet understood the role that rest and margin space should have. The point of rest is not to keep ourselves functional. Real rest is an acknowledgment that our worth does not lie in functionality. We do not merely rest from work and for work, but it is rather through rest that a person can step out of the working world to experience nourishment and transcendence. Leisure is the basis for culture, and as the author of that title wrote: “Leisure, it must be remembered, is not a Sunday afternoon idyll, but the preserve of freedom, of education and culture, and of that undiminished humanity which views the world as whole.”

It is in the margin space of life that relationships and thought, and art have space to unfold. I don’t know how to realistically seek rest within the culture I am immersed in, but I think that perhaps it may start by me giving permission to myself to have an identity based not in doing, but in being. This certainly needs to happen before I can invite others to slow down and simplify their lives. Since all that has ever been asked of us is who we will be today, for my part—today— I plan to live a life where neighbors and art matter, and the music drifting out of coffee shops is worth pausing to listen to. My hope for us all is that we would find margin space. May we learn to gather the daily manna of beauty without hoarding. And when we learn to release busyness, may we find in the end the life it promised but never reached.

Margin Room I

2007-10-06T16:50:00.001-04:00

High risk living captivates us. It’s the feeling of breathing thin air the first time you hike past 8,000 feet— the cold that rushes past your Gore-Tex when your kayak lifts off the edge of a waterfall and you hope the whole freefall that you raised the bow enough— it’s a rock climber whose silhouette suspends from Red Dihedral in the High Sierras. The saying, ‘living on the edge’, immures this idea of pushing yourself to a level where the difference between defeat or even danger is separated from glory by a single breath. This way of living has always appealed to me. I open my eyes every morning eager to analyze all the good I can compress into one day; I analyze my budget to see how many adventures I can pull from the bottom line, and love diverse experiences. The things we fill our free time with are always worthy pursuits: I never regret the great literature when I make time to read, the dynamic people I have intentional time with, or the classes and walks and community gatherings. As Thomas Aquinas said, “in the pursuit of the end, no limits should be set.” Living at maximum capacity is a life full. Or so it would seem.

A few months ago, my life began to change, slowly at first, but small changes soon became a way of living. I started skipping social obligations and avoiding people on the way to appointments. No longer was there time to savor the simple joys of sleep and food, coffee and periods of relaxation; these became a means to further productivity. Instead of providing my body with nutrients it could sustain itself with, I found myself inhaling caffeine (or worse, energy drinks) to artificially push it through fatigue. It is common that people who deeply appreciate the simple goodness of life can go wrong when they gather too much of it. Just as manna hoarded into baskets goes bad, so too worthy pursuits crammed into day-timers ironically decomposes into a life un-lived. Living at full capacity will inevitably replace enjoyment with duty, and restful awareness with rushed narrowness. There is no margin space in which relationship or quiet learning can be cultivated. Life on the edge has no margin for wonder.

Besides being unfulfilling, living at full capacity is not sustainable. The problem with trying to live continually at a maximum capacity is that when a person is operating at their highest emotional, physical, spiritual, and social abilities, one unforeseen event (also known as life) can effortlessly present a small demand which pushes them over the limit of what they are capable of dealing with. I found this to be true when my schedule would have melt-downs if I got lost reading Emerson even by fifteen extra minutes. Any random serendipity had the potential to thwart all punctuality for the remainder of the day. One slight disagreement became more than I could emotionally deal with. Life on the edge has no margin for error.

Soul Vs. Spirit

2007-09-23T23:22:00.001-04:00

Some consider a person as divided into two parts, the body and soul-spirit. The other camp holds to a triune division of body, soul, and spirit. Good and godly scholars hold both views. I take a triune position mostly because there are multiple verses in both testaments that speak of the soul and spirit in the same sentence as though they are different. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 lists the division plainly: “may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless...” The other key verse in this debate is the well known Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit...” Watchman Nee agrees “the Bible never confuses the spirit and soul as though they were the same. Not only are they different in terms; their very natures differ from each other.”

Genesis 2:7 says that God formed man from dust “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” This word soul is nephesh in Hebrew. The nephesh is what gives life to the formed body, just as Aristotle observed, “the body apart from the spirit is dead” (James 2: 26). Aquinas talked about this life-giving soul as the “first principle of life in those things in our world which live...life is shown principally by knowledge and movement.” Leviticus 17:11, and 13-14 addresses this idea that unlike plants which only have a physical ‘body’, animals and humans have nephesh—an animating life which was why the blood of flesh was not kosher. It is clear that animals and humans have a life that is unlike the life of plants, but the Bible teaches that only human beings are fully in the image of God for they alone have a spirit.

So while our spirits are alike, our souls and bodies are different. I use the word soul as that which animates the body, and as the seating place of where the differences in how we think, feel, and act are. Nee writes of the soul that it “is the site of personality. The will, intellect and emotions of man are there.” There are liberal camps which recoil from suggestions that women could have a tendency towards a different kind of temperament or personality than men do, or can have a different way of thinking, but outside the academic world of political correctness, this idea is considered self-evident. Women also may experience emotions differently than men, and often have different intellectual processes. Clearly, our bodies are also beautifully, wonderfully different. There are other parts of the person that can be isolated and discussed such as how the heart, mind, will, or intellect, are different, but that goes much deeper into philosophy than I am able to present for your consideration, and is not relevant for our needs.

And That Was All There Was To It

2007-09-15T19:07:00.001-04:00

I was first made aware of how I could be celebrating and cultivating the part of me that was feminine only perhaps a year or two ago. My aunt Rachel (whom you’ll hear a lot about in this blog) wakes up every morning aware of and thankful for her womanhood. She has two children, a boy and a little girl, and she actively celebrates and cultivates both of their genders. That could not have been more foreign to me. I wondered, was that too feminist? Could you love the fact that you were a woman without feeling negatively about men?

Though the idea of a woman loving her gender was new, I began to embrace it more when I thought of how I desire for my fiancé Matt to be responsive to my womanhood and inspired by it. It occurred to me that I can’t help him to fall in love that part of me if I don’t fully understand or appreciate it. Similarly, if I don’t know how grow in being a woman, I can’t teach my (future) daughters to live fully in their femininity either. But I want my daughters to be glad and rejoice in what will set them apart in childhood as girls, and in their later years, as mature and beautiful women.

Just as the enjoyment of God overflows into spontaneous praise, so too my growing enjoyment of those qualities in women we call femininity has overflowed with ideas and conversations. C. S. Lewis’s well loved quote on praise is always worth reading again: “All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.... The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside... Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?’”

Someone once said that “painters understand nature and love her, and teach us to see her”. What a beautiful and concise reason for us all to pursue our artistic expression. Van Gogh is my foremost inspiration of what it means to behold beauty— to internalize it— and then to desire to share it. “If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”

Naturally

2007-09-14T21:55:00.001-04:00

"The holier a woman is, the more she is a woman." -Leon Bloy

Some have established the position that womanhood happens naturally; they consider gender to be so tailored into the fabric of our being, which makes it unnecessary to reflect on at length. I agree that part of what gives womanhood its charm is the way it springs up inherently in little girls and shines out of old women who pin their hair every morning—for beauty. I agree that part of the process does unfold naturally, like a flower that leans into the sun or opens to the rain. And it seems like it should be that way.

I was supposed to be a boy according to the ultrasound, but sonar imaging was poor quality in the eighties, and it turned out that I was a girl— the second-born of four actually. I’m just as ‘female’ as I was twenty years ago, but I like to think that I am becoming more feminine. That is one of the foundational ideas in this book on womanhood: that there is a difference in being a female genetically, and growing in feminine qualities. I will always have the feminine chromosomes sketched into every cell of my body, but there is something deeper that I can grow in specifically as a woman. It is an amazing moment when you believe, perhaps for the first time, that God was glorified, and the world, somehow bettered, because you were born a little girl. Considering gender as something to be celebrated— everyday— not just on the first day, of a person’s life, is meaningful because it is a testimony that the depths of God are deep and wide and that His image was diverse enough to spill from Adam’s ribcage and into Eve.

Evidences of Grace

2007-09-10T15:21:00.000-04:00

I was reading this morning in 2 Kings, and also in Romans 11, and Paul was talking about a moment in the prophet Elijah’s life when he was heartbroken because he couldn’t see any men standing up for God in his nation. (Like how I am sometimes). Check out the verse:

“Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? "Lord, THEY HAVE KILLED YOUR PROPHETS, THEY HAVE TORN DOWN YOUR ALTARS, AND I ALONE AM LEFT, AND THEY ARE SEEKING MY LIFE." But what is the divine response to him? "I HAVE KEPT for Myself SEVEN THOUSAND MEN WHO HAVE NOT BOWED THE KNEE TO BAAL." In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God's gracious choice. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.”

This verse gave me the encouragement that there is righteousness in people that I don’t have eyes of faith to see yet. In this passage, Elijah was not aware of even one man who was righteous, and yet God had preserved seven thousand! This inspires me to look for evidences of grace in people instead of sin. Any person can see the sin in people and talk about their problems. What a responsibility we have Christians to walk by faith and not by sight, training ourselves to see who this person was created to be and who they still could become through the grace of God.
And if we can see what God sees in them, we can encourage them to become who God desires for them to be. This verse on the role of an encourager inspires me, and I'll end with it. Notice in it what roles God plays, and what role the encourager has as you read:

The Lord God has given me the tongue of disciples, that I may know how to sustain the weary one with a word. He awakens me morning by morning, He awakens my ear to listen as a disciple. The Lord God has opened my ear; and I was not disobedient nor did I turn back.
Isaiah 50: 4-5

A Letter To A Friend; April 3rd 2007

2007-08-31T01:57:00.003-04:00

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

It is finally warming up in Manhattan- and just in time. I’m taking a Sabbatical from homework, and spend time in the tea shop ‘SubtleTea’ on Madison, and at in Central Park. When spring grows leaves, the skyline will be less dominating. It’s strange how the early spring days here are windless. I was lying on the boulders that cover the park and as I was looking into the sky I thought about how far I was actually looking. Ten feet up? A mile? Could I look farther if I tried to? Annie Dillard said “the naked eye can see 2 million light years to the Andromeda galaxy.” It’s like looking into water; when you focus differently, you can see at different levels. If I look at my reflection I completely miss the minnows, if I see only those at the bottom, I don’t see the air that can’t make up its mind to be in the water or air so it travels as a bubble down the stream.

I’ve been wondering recently if my perspectives on my life are too narrow and limiting. I’ve been struggling through life it seems—and the last few weeks have been progressively worse—challenging my passions and my theology. I’ve stopped writing my book. And I’ve been wondering a lot about if everything I’ve believed about suffering and brokenness has been right. This was certainly a time of un-sought trial. Oriah speaks of this: “Sometimes we go out and seek the first that will burn away what is dross in our lives. More often, we awaken suddenly to find ourselves encircled by fire.”

I know that we suffer just as Christ did- Luke asks: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26) Jesus was such an example of sorrow in prayer—He was the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3) To quote a professor at my school, Peter Kreeft, from his incredible book, Making Sense Out of Suffering, “That God should take alienation away from man by inserting alienation into the heart of God; that he should conquer evil by allowing it its supreme, unthinkable triumph, decide, the introduction of death into the life of God, the God of life, the Immortal One; that he should destroy the power of evil by allowing it to destroy him—this is ‘the foolishness of God [that] is wiser than men, and the weakness of God [that] is stronger than men”’(1 Corinthians 1:24). God reminds me of these concepts through other authors and in prayer. When I think of Christ in the garden sweating blood because he was in so much emotional turmoil, I normally forget that he was praying. Luke 22:44 says “And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” Many of the times Jesus’ sorrow is recorded is during his frequent times of prayer—this could be because it was natural for him to pray when he was sorrowful but maybe it was because much of prayer for him was mourning before God. Hebrews 5:7 tells us “Jesus offered by both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death...” Jesus allowed his soul to be “deeply grieved to the point of death” (Mark 14:33) Henri Nouwen wrote in his wonderful book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, “There are so few mourners left in the world... I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving”

If only I had time for quiet and prayer and thinking! I hate constantly having to think other thoughts and write other things (because of homework). Which was why I am taking a break. I came across this thought in The Invitation- it describes just how I’ve been feeling: “Beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.” (Oriah, 5)

I keep holding on to the truth that we are made powerful for the kingdom in the same way a vine bears fruit- by unclogging itself so that the sap from the root flows into it. (John 15:5) Lon Solomon has said in his book Brokenness that “If we are ever going to be of any useful service to God as Christ-followers, all of us must come to grips with this eternal truth (speaking of brokenness). No matter how many people we can impress with out cleverness or attract with our personality or influence by our persuasive words or motivate with our natural abilities—spiritually, the results come to nothing! It’s all the flesh.” He believes that “brokenness and usefulness are directly proportional.” P47

God is prying my fingers off of my self-produced resources. I just keep coming back to the fact that a great foundation needs to be built quietly, and without much progress above ground before great buildings can be built. It is true that “we are impatient with anything that is not immediately understandable and obviously practical” (Buchanan, 58). I just pray for the time to think and reflect so that this period of difficultly counts for something. Only three weeks of school left. Hopefully I will make it with my dreams, and hope, and spirit intact. I am glad I have a whole summer to recharge, and to decide if I can do this all again next year. Pray for me,

-Steph

Mountain Dreamer, Oriah. The Invitation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. P102

Nouwen, Henri. “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Doubleday Dell Publishing. New York, New York. 1994

Buchanan, Mark. Your God is too Safe. Sisters, Oregon, Multnomah Publishers; 2001 P58

To Walk Among The Beautiful

2007-08-26T23:49:00.001-04:00

Since I am writing full time, I have no money. I have never not had money for this long, and I have found it to be...surprisingly nice. Instead of meeting for coffee, I meet friends for walks. Preferably at night, and sometimes in the rain. We drive into the mountains and hike. I jump into quarries with my sisters. My consumerism is wearing off, and that is good. I am glad to be cultivating a taste for the simple and quiet things of life. This summer has been full of walking among the beautiful things of the world and then continuing on and leaving them behind. George Santayana was this amazing philosopher/poet type who wrote a lot on aesthetics, and he once wrote this: “I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions because they would take away my liberty.”

A Softer Offering

2007-08-20T22:03:00.001-04:00

Dusk takes Manhattan over in turn, street by street, and if you leave at the right time, and travel the right avenue, you can sometimes walk just ahead of the shadows that quickly lengthen. Last evening I headed towards Times Square as I weaved in and out of shadow. The remains of the day spilled down the streets from the Hudson turning everything gold. It’s my favorite time of day. Times Square is oddly named, because the advertisement lights take over the lesser sun, and cast their own shadows where birds come and perch at midnight, unnerved at the length of the never-ending days. Times Square observes no passage of time— save that of New Years Eve— which is celebrated with enough enthusiasm to forgive the Square for assaulting the great circadian rhythms of the earth with neon the rest of the year.

Weary artists pack up their displays as evening lowers over the city and move from Central Park to Times Square where people pass by all hours of the night. They paint charactures of tourists for five dollars and somehow make a living, even though the sketches I see people carrying around of themselves are never very good. I passed a characture artist who had in his seat a beautiful girl, no older than three, sitting for her portrait. She had a fountain of curls that flopped into her eyes when she reached forward to touch the artist’s round spectacles. The mother, whom I had not noticed before this, harshly pulled the girl back and told her to sit still. The little girl did. After examining her nails and swinging her feet for a moment, she began to sing. It was the most precious sight to see her unabashedly sing; people would pause to smile at her and she would wave, singing. People waved back. A little crowd gathered—enchanted. Still frustrated, the mother reprimanded her child again. No singing, no waving. What, I wondered, did she expect the little girl to do? Her child was being still enough for a portrait, and certainly couldn’t be expected to be entirely still for so long.

As I turned to continue on my way, it seemed to me that in that moment, every passerby on the street was enjoying that beautiful little girl more than her own mother. I know there could have been many factors I was unaware of that went into the situation, but still, I began to think under the neon glow of Times Square about how I don’t want to be so easily out-done in my enjoyment of the people I am supposed to love; especially my family. I don’t want my husband to always feel more respected at work than he does at home, or for my kids to constantly be convinced that their friends think that they are more funny, talented, or brilliant than their parents do. So many wives are less kind to their husbands than they ever would be to a waitress. Today, the husband whose wife values and respects him, and helps him believe in what he can do also, is the envy of the majority of men whose wives belittle and nag them. I was inspired to be irreplaceable to my husband in the respect and kindness that I gave him.

Just like the neon of Times Square takes over the softer offerings of sunset, it is easy in Manhattan to forget the simple but important things in life and relationships amidst the culture, fashion, materialism, and noise. As I headed away from the Square with its’ advertisements and glamour, I thought of how it’s the quiet strengths of beauty that prove timeless. As the poet said: in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of simple pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

God Is Green

2007-08-14T13:48:00.001-04:00

Well, I’ve gone green.
My receipt from Whole Foods says so.
I got a 20 cents credit because I stuffed my kale and five-pound bag of carrots into my business portfolio case. My whole life has been quite transformed since listening to Rob Bell’s series God Is Green (you can get the podcasts at iTunes). He talks about how sustainability was key to the Israeli law of agriculture Sabbath. I’ve always thought, you know, let’s work on saving babies before we start working on seals and redwoods, but this sermon series really convicted me that the effects of what we’re doing to the earth is causing serious problems as our bodies break down from what we’re pumping into the environment.

More importantly, what does it say about Christians when we’re equals with the rest of the culture in our mass consumption. Saint Augustine writes of how “some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used.” Things we enjoy of course, are the things we “cling to with love for its own sake.” The other things in life are things we use in order to help us get the things we want to enjoy. As Americans, we have trained ourselves to value things that once obtained, do not increase our actual quality of life. Why do this, when there is so many more worthy pursuits to strive after?

Besides consumption, I’ve also become very aware of trash production. I weight my trash now. Did you know that I personally, produce like my body weight in trash a month? That’s obscene. My kitchen’s floor space is 3 foot by seven. (And I just cooked for 17 people last night. We also ran out of forks. This is completely not related.) The reason I mention my floor space is because I have started to recycle and the bags take up like one third of my floor space. I have to move them every time I do anything. But I am glad to do it because I really want to start to be more aware of my consumerism and how I am treating this planet that I am fundamentally connected to.

If you think about, identity and purpose are the two biggest questions a person will wrestle with in their lifetime. Our identity is rooted in the earth—we come from earth, we will return to dust, we walk upon its’ surface every day and gather our sustenance from it. But earth is also tied to our purpose. Genesis 1:26 is called the creation or cultural mandate. Genesis teaches that we bare God’s image as we shape the earth in all forms: in music, art, education, government, law, economics, agriculture, family, and academic pursuits. Any activity that takes raw nature, and orders it, or shapes it to create something new, is what dominion is about. “We are God’s royal stewards, put here to develop the hidden potentials in God’s creation so that the whole of it might celebrate his glory.” (Bartholomew, 37) So disregarding what our life-styles are doing to the earth is really violating the deep connection we have with earth in both our purpose and identity which I had never thought about before. And it doesn’t take that much effort to do something about it.
Get the sermon series.
Listen to it.

Go Green.

Rain Part One: To Think It Falls Free From The Sky

2007-08-12T20:03:00.001-04:00

I was reading a book I found in my sister’s room this week that was written by a man who had a vision of hell. Though I had initially asked Erica if she trusted the validity of the claim, as I began reading, whether I believed his account or not didn’t seem relevant because it was so thought-provoking just in its' imagery. In this account, he described how a demon tortured him by ripping open his chest with its caws. He wrote: “My flesh hung from my body like ribbons as I fell again to the cell floor…” He realized as he was being tortured that no blood flowed from his body. The ground too was barren, it was unlike any vision man had ever seen of earth; for even earth, when it is stripped bare and furrowed, still holds in its nakedness the hope of harvest. George Henry Lewes wrote: “remember that every drop of rain that falls bears into the bosom of the earth a quality of beautiful fertility.” There was no water in hell at all, for water and blood are symbols of life. There is no life in hell.

The author wrote of the how the desperate need for water overcame him. In Luke 16, Jesus describes the after-life in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. In this description the rich man in hell calls up to Abraham and pleads with him to send Lazarus even to just dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off his tongue, for he was in agony (Luke 16: 24). The torture of dehydration is hard for many of us to imagine. The brief periods that I have endured on wilderness hikes cannot even compare with experiences like Terri Schiavo’s. Kate Adamson was a stroke victim whose nourishment was terminated, but she unbelievably was able to regain bodily control in order to communicate. She barely escaped death by dehydration. Her description of that experience is horrifying. People say you can feel your organs drying; that it is one of the slowest most horrific deaths man can endure. After hearing stories like this, an eternity without water is nearly impossible to imagine.

And to think on earth that it falls free from the sky.

This weekend I left Manhattan and spent some time in Connecticut. Last night I was lying in bed between two girlfriends and as we were praying, I could feel the Spirit over me, inviting me to release areas in my life over to Him. As I did, I began to cry, and as water just streamed— uninvited and unstoppably from my eyes— I thought of what a bizarre phenomena tears are. Humans have water stream from their eyes when their souls are moved. Our tears are like a baptism of the soul. My aunt Rachel told me years ago at how she felt connection to the ocean, how she felt the salt of it in her sweat and tears. Just as we are connected with the earth, the earth’s water is one cycle of renewal. Rain is gathered in the skies as the oceans evaporate. Soon it falls and follows rivers and streams on its return to the sea. Our tears renew us; the Psalms talk about tears as seeds we plant into order to reap a harvest of sheaves, which are the answers to our labor of prayer.

“Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful shouting. He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him" (Psalm 126:5-6).

Part of that harvest is an energy or power for living life well. 2 Corinthians 12:9 is well known and quoted: “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then am I strong.” The cross holds space for me to be broken and empty. Every other religion from Catholicism to Hinduism is a list of rules, a path that its followers must walk. Christianity is the only voice that cries out in this wilderness of ‘doing’ that our God has already done. Buddha’s last words were: “Never stop striving.” Christ’s last words on the cross were: “It is finished.”

The Reason Why I'm Broke

2007-08-10T13:50:00.001-04:00

I have taken some time off from posting, because as my book progressed and I went deeper into the marital imagery of Scripture, I realized that I was too passionate about the topic to keep a discussion of it limited to what was relevant for a book on femininity. So I chucked it all. It was all I had worked on the whole summer. Maybe it will be a good second project. Anyway, in the meantime I have learning about different things while I’ve been restructuring 76,000 words on my 12 inch-screened computer. The next few posts will be a series on unrelated issues.

*Matt and Miranda at the beach

Eyes to See

2007-07-21T05:48:00.001-04:00

The reason I included this study on the two symbolic women in Proverbs, is because they have something deep to teach us about the spiritual dimension of our choices in this world. Their message is needed because it is so easy for the effects of our choices to become unreal to us. Just as Jesus told some of the most important truths about the kingdom in story form, the descriptions of Lady Wisdom and the Harlot are a way for us to realize truths about the power of our choice to love or rebel against God. Sometimes it seems that there are not so many differences between those who love God and the people who hate Him; many writers in Scripture struggled with not having the eyes to see the reality of the mark God leaves on the people who choose Him. They asked why it rained on the righteous and the unrighteous, and prosperity and health came to enemies of God.

Earth is not the place where the full compensation for our choices manifests, but a time is coming when all men will die their appointed death and after that comes the judgment. The effects of our love of God on earth will consume our awareness as His Spirit finishes His work in raising us up into eternal life, and grants the souls who hated God the fruit of their rebellion: self-inflicted separation from Him.

The Bible says that the Harlot, who represents sin, rebellion, and hatred of God, leads to death. Wisdom is a fountain of life, and all who seek her find honor and strength. How you choose life everyday in practical ways, is what this picture in Proverbs can teach you. So realize as we look at these archetypes that their message is not only one for us to speak to the world through who we are, but also a picture of what each of us can become.

Quite Freeing, Actually

2007-07-21T05:46:00.001-04:00

Besides not realizing that the archetype of Lady Wisdom is relevant to women, the second mistake made when looking at Proverbs is concluding that the highest aim of women is not the archetype of Wisdom, but of the Wife/Mother role. Augustine’s pairing of the harlot with the ‘godly’ archetype of wife and mother 1,500 years ago has significantly shaped modern women’s idea of what it means to be godly. It still seems foreign to us that the type of wisdom is directly relevant to us as women doesn’t it? It was actually quite freeing for me to realize that the Bible doesn’t say that the chief achievement of women is her role in the family. (The Catholic Church still officially maintains that motherhood is the pinnacle of womanhood, and many Christians still either believe or are influenced by this misconception.)

It is important to understand that this idea is one that has been passed down from a respected philosopher/theologian and not a strong message that you naturally get from just reading the Bible. It is true that Augustine was a good theologian, and that this idea has been embraced by the church for over a thousand years. But just because someone is wise dos not mean they are infallible, and just because an idea is old does not mean that it is true; there were ancient sects that crept into Christianity before the Bible was even finished, so antiquity cannot be a reason to believe anything.

Essential to all conversations is the ‘so what’ question. Why would it matter that a woman’s pinnacle of meaning isn’t motherhood, but rather the archetypes of the Bride of Christ and of Lady Wisdom? The most obvious reason, is that if woman was primarily made for man, than her identity, purpose, and worth would be intrinsically tied to the male figures in her life. Because of poverty and cultural reasons, this has been the case through most of history, though it is neither Biblical, nor ideal. Women bring glory and joy to the heart of God first- for all things have been created for His glory and renown. Surely if the whole of nature was made for this purpose then women would not be the only excluded creation. Isaiah 43:6-7 says: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, and whom I have created for my glory.” And God has said in the chapter before: “I am the LORD, that is my name; I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to graven images.” (Isaiah 42:8)

Just Throw on Another Gender

2007-07-14T00:00:00.001-04:00

Unfortunately, though the dangers of being a worthless, deceptive, and seductive woman have traditionally been seen as literal threats to what a woman can become, the corresponding Biblical archetype has been often treated in two ways. Firstly, it is deemed merely figurative and irrelevant to what God desires women to be. Wisdom being portrayed in the Bible as a woman is thought of as being about as applicable to a woman’s everyday life as the fact that freedom and fidelity are depicted as women. The images are nice, we put them on coins and make nice statues, but this tendency doesn’t really matter, actually, at all.

But I believe it is also significant that wisdom is personified as a woman; she is a model for women also. Just as the gender of the Harlot would be impossible to disregard without distorting the message, so too Lady Wisdom is intentionally spoken of as a woman. You cannot simply throw on another gender to the literary character. It is not fair to say that the seductress is a warning to women specifically but that Lady Wisdom is only feminine in a figurative sense and is not an example to women. Both are figurative, but they are also a picture the polar opposites of what women can become. No one argues whether the Proverbs 31 woman is a literal woman or not; she is applied to women as a woman. In the same way, the Harlot and Lady Wisdom can be applied as model women, for women.

Plato to Rousseau on the Harlot

2007-07-13T23:59:00.001-04:00

The sinful response to God’s pursuit of us being embodied by a seductive female is familiar to our western culture because the defining writing on women for the last millennium has often depicted women this way. A twisted understanding of the Genesis account was used to endorse the view that all women were temptresses. Many cultures have legends of a tempting seductress who brought evil upon the world at its beginning. Paul’s commands to women, when not rightly contextualized by the culture and the heart of the new covenant also were used to demean women. Though Plato argued for an inclusion of women as equals in The Republic, his student Aristotle rejected these views by the 300’s BC, and argued that a woman is a mutilated and incomplete man. Aristotle believed women to have a lesser and ‘colder’ soul, making them inferior in intelligence, morality, and stature. There are traces of these ideas in Augustine’s The City of God (published in 413 AD) in which he wrote that a woman could be a either a temptress as a part of earthly cities, or a mother and wife in the divine city of God.

By the time Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologica in the 1200’s, the church had already established a low view of women. Aquinas, who was influenced by Aristotle, solidified the idea that women were base and inferior; his demeaning views on the nature and function of women were foundational in the western church’s opinions. The tradition of women being unfortunately necessary to procreation, and a hindrance to the genius of men continued with Francis Bacon’s 1612 article “Of Marriage and Single Life,” and Rousseau’s A Discourse on Political Economy. Because of these writers, the archetypes of the harlot/seductress were widely applied to the feminine species. So it is commonly understood that the warnings of Scripture against harlotry are literally for women.

Literal and Figurative

2007-07-12T11:39:00.000-04:00

When it comes to the archetypes of the Harlot and Lady Wisdom, it is important to understand their example in a literal and a figurative sense. Archetypes are, of course, figuratively relevant to the collective human race. As Rob Bell says, “This is often about that.” The example of the harlot we will be speaking of is not only a terrible tendency in women, but something that is true of every human heart. The connection between spiritual idolatry and spiritual adultery makes it clear that every heart rebels against the love of God. Lady Wisdom represents the life we desire to have and the love we grow into as we see God’s worth.

Wisdom’s example is often interpreted in a figurative sense, and because she is applied to mankind in general, we don’t think of her as being a relevant model to women specifically. On the other hand, the harlot is often thought of as a literal warning for women, and the broader warning for all of mankind is missed. But both the Harlot and Lady Wisdom are relevant archetypes for mankind as well as an example of a woman for women. The next several posts will look at each of these tendencies briefly.

I Will Not Be Posting For Some Time

2007-07-12T01:20:00.001-04:00

I will not be posting for a while since I am in Ireland,
And away from a computer.
Happy summer!
-Stephanie

Spiritual Idolatry Part One: From Joy

2007-07-12T01:13:00.001-04:00

My favorite Bible verse is just a one-line parable that Jesus told. He said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44).

Knowing God is such a worthy pursuit and prize, that once we experience but a little of Him, we are willing to give up anything that hinders us from finding more.

The well-known words of Paul on this subject could never be quoted enough: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3: 7-14).

The truth is, the human heart was made with an insatiable, addictive nature. We were meant to worship and be satisfied by an infinite God. Therefore anything less we find a greater pleasure in than Him will not fulfill us on a fundamental level. One of my favorite authors, Blaise Pascal, was one of the first philosophers to put words to this now well known idea: “There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”

These are simple but vague concepts that are easy to misunderstand and mis-apply. In order to understand what it means to find fulfillment in God in a healthy way that isn’t legalistic or Gnostic, it is helpful to examine the language God uses most frequently when He speaks about our idolatry. The Old and New Testament writers use the analogy of adultery, something that prevalent in our world and easy to understand, as a way of explaining what idolatry is. The Bible uses the language of sexual unfaithfulness to explain the gravity of the offense when we turn to created things instead of the Creator for our purpose, fulfillment, comfort, or identity. One of the common themes the writers used to describe our response to God is the duel archetypes of the harlot, and lady wisdom. And we’ll look at these characters in Scripture in the next post.

Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensees, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 113

Why You Cannot Be Spiritual Switzerland Part Three

2007-07-11T17:49:00.001-04:00

On the other hand, there is something about passionate abandon that resounds in the human heart. We long for transcendence, and living for something we know is worthy of giving our lives away for. Now, Christianity claims that it is universally worth living and dying for, and that it gives meaning to all people’s lives. This declaration alone is worth an investigation.

Consider the most inspiring and noble pursuits of the human race; the highest achievements that people sweat and bleed and die for. There are many pinnacles of man’s hard-earned achievements: we excel in the arts, in economical freedom that sets the masses free from poverty, in literature, in just law, in athletic ability, in academics, and religious devotion, to name a few. But take any one of these noble pursuits and you couldn’t honestly make the declaration: this is what your heart was made for, and if you give yourself with total abandon, it will really set you free and transform you into something the world will stand in awe of. Could you image the most talented composer, or chef, or humanitarian saying: this passion is worth the total devotion of every man, woman, and child on the planet, no matter what their age, culture, or race. It would be ridiculous; they couldn’t say that, no one would claim that.

But Christians do.

Christians claim that there is transforming power in knowing God; that it sets your whole life on fire, never to be the same again. Christians say the passion you can have will only grow with time, since you can give yourself completely to it, knowing truly that you were meant to be defined by it. Many people live a life they could never begin to convince someone else was worth living. Other people live disciplined, passionate lives that they maybe could argue is worth their time and zeal, and small numbers might agree and applaud them. And then there are the religious people. The religions of the world, Christianity just being one, assert that the knowledge and love of God is the highest, deepest, prize that the whole reality of who you are should bend around. I live it everyday and I could say with absolute integrity to anyone that it is worth all of your time, money, pain, joy, dreams, your very sweat and blood. We don’t claim to be right for some people, or something to be done in moderation. Christians claim that what they have found is worth dying to tell other people about, and many spend their lives igniting the flame in other people’s hearts. Something to think about.

Why You Cannot Be Spiritual Switzerland Part Two

2007-07-10T19:41:00.000-04:00

What is it about Jesus that makes us so disdainful of His presence in our lives? Notice what the people at the crucifixion mocked Him for: His claim to be king. I think this is really the core of why we resist Him in our lives as well. Jesus comes as one who has given all that He could give to you, and invites you to a relationship in which He claims your total allegiance. The level of intimacy He invites you to, will naturally affect every area of your life. Just like marriage, Jesus calls us to an all or nothing relationship. What you do with your life, your money, sexuality, time, thought life, how to raise your children, Jesus says “that all needs to be decided by what’s best for our relationship.”

And part of us hates that. Because what is really going on in our hearts is a power play. We resent any threat to our autonomy, or the claims that someone else would know how we should live our lives. After all, I know best what will make me happy; who is this Jesus who is going to box me in and make me all religious? Who is He to have claim over my life? “I’ll maybe give you Sunday”, we say, “if you don’t push it.” And so we resist His saturation into our lives. You see, at the root of all sin and distance between us and God, is a deep resentment of His authority over us, and this claim of kingship. It’s rebellion. Insurrection. Revolution. As David Bisgrove put it, “Jesus says: ‘I am the center of all reality, and every part of you belongs to me.’ When we are confronted with that Jesus we hate it.” What makes you politely indifferent or even angry? We all “join the chorus of mark 15: crucify him. Get him out of here. In our nice polite way, we make Jesus dead.”

As long as religion stays nice and compartmentalized, we don’t mind it; it makes for nice neighbors and good charity work. But compartmentalized religiousness doesn’t acknowledge the reality of who God is or what He asks from you. The reality of God’s demands over a Christian are over the entirety of who you are, what you have, every thought, every hope, and every moment that you breathe because He both created you, and bought you back from His arc-enemy when you sold your soul away. “He {has} purchased {you} with His own blood” (Acts 20:28), “a people for His own possession” (Titus 2:14).

If you read the Bible, even briefly, there is no getting around this. God wants to not only possess all of who you are, He’s also not bashful about letting you know before you sign on the dotted line that He plans on completely re-structuring everything you’ve worked for and become. He uses phrases like ‘slave to righteousness’, and ‘the old is gone and the new has come’. There is no place for just being ‘kind of a nice person, most of the time, but only according to my belief system’ when confronted with the immense sacrifice and demand of Christ. He draws a line in the sand that divides people into the passionate followers, or the mocking insurrectionists. You can ignore the fact that He has created you and bought you back at a price; but the line in the sand is still drawn. And if you aren’t on His side, there’s only one place left to be.

Note: Many of these thoughts are indebted to a sermon preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church by David Bisgrove entitled Mocking Jesus.

Why You Cannot Be Spiritual Switzerland Part One

2007-07-10T18:35:00.000-04:00

The scene of the crucifixion according to Mark best illustrates the way that the reality of who Christ is polarizes us into two reactionary groups. The theme, you will notice, if you read Mark 15:16-32 is mocking. There are four very different groups of people at this particular crucifixion: Mark mentions pagan roman soldiers, common men and women who were passing by on their way to the Jewish festival, the highest Jewish officials who had political power in Israel, and two dying convicts who were also being crucified. Four groups of people, who were very different, were all doing the same bizarre thing: they were mocking and shaming a man they barley knew, who had spent his life healing the sick and helping the poor and marginalized of their society. And yet these people were unashamed in their openly hostel mockery of a naked and bloodied man as he died in unmistakable agony. What was so offensive about Jesus that would cause this kind of unanimous and inhumane contempt? This hatred of Jesus is something that is seen even today. Anne Rice wrote of how she came upon this contempt in even scholarly academic circles in her book Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt:

“I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts. I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling. The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers of the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.”

I too, noticed as I began to explore the world of ‘Christian academics’, that there were many authors whose writing evidenced vast amounts of time and research though they rejected every tenant and claim of Christianity. After reading one author last semester who mocked (at great length and with great research) the claims of Christ, I remember wondering, since he was convinced that Christianity was so ridiculous, why would he not just pursue another field of study? This contempt of the historical Jesus is not just in academics, it is in newspapers and schools, and even church pews. Now, you may be thinking, ‘I don’t despise God and I certainly know more people who don’t care about God then those who hate Him.’ But indifference is the most polite form of disdain, it ignores and goes back to its’ own interests while avoiding confrontation. And then there are those who believe they are not offended by God as they continue to reject Him because they are not actually interacting with the whole of who He says He is, but with a god of their own self creation. The truth about who Jesus is, as a real person, is much more demanding and therefore offensive God than the gods we create. Many people interact with God as though they can conform Him to a ‘spiritual but not religious’ utilitarian being who rewards their goodness, comforts them in pain, and aids in crisis. Who would hate such an agreeable God as that? What is it about Jesus that makes us so disdainful of His presence in our life?

To Be Continued...

Note: Some of these thoughts have been taken from a sermon preached at Redeemer Presbyterian Church by David Bisgrove entitled Mocking Jesus.

A Way Of Blossoming

2007-07-09T18:09:00.001-04:00

Whether or not you think this next series is relevant to growing in womanhood depends on how you think a person develops lasting character. All beauty and goodness in our lives is the result of our becoming more like God which is something we do as we grow in closeness and love to Him. Jesus called the ways in which we desire to be beautiful and purposeful ‘fruit’, and used imagery of Christians being like branches that are one with the vine who is God. With this picture, it is clear that apart from Him we can do nothing. Love is naturally transforming. Understanding the reality of what it means to long for or despise the love of God, is essential to making positive decisions and identifying areas where we are cut off from the life and love of God. And as our lives become more marked by wisdom than by spiritual idolatry, the fruit of grace has a way of blossoming.

So far, most of the discussion has centered on God’s pursuit of us, but equally essential to the course of your life is your response to His invitation. As Rabindranath Tagore said: “love's gift cannot be given. It waits to be accepted.”Interestingly, the Bible speaks of the human response to God in feminine allegory; Lady Wisdom is the example of a faithful and holy interaction with God, and The Harlot is the archetype for sinful rebellion. This next series of posts will examine both trends in our hearts, and why the reality of Christ surfaces these two extremes within us.

The Gray Tee-Shirt

2007-07-07T00:15:00.001-04:00

God is
Good,
Beautiful,
Real,
And true.

But often God isn’t real to us. His presence doesn’t seem as real or comforting as a human smile or a hug. And sometimes the brutality of life convinces us that He isn’t good. A realization of just how many people in thousands of different cultures center their lives and hopes on a completely different God can undercut our assurance that ‘we know Him truly’. His beauty can be so scarcely seen that it is hard to keep its memory alive. I always seem to lose God in little pieces, just like how people fade out of your life when they die. After their room is clean, you peek your head in and know that their desk will never be tossed about as it became when they would get lost in their work. Their smell fades out of their clothes, the bed, the curtains. No matter how deeply you long to bury your face into their favorite gray tee-shirt and breathe them in, it is silently and forever gone. Their mail stops coming. You don’t see their handwriting anymore on little notes or grocery lists. Evidence of their existence in your daily life fades on the outside and pools into your heart where it evaporates quickly and is gone. When the mark of God on you grows faint, and He doesn’t seem active in your life, it is easy to lose heart and faith.

Whether God seems recently distant in a believer’s life, or if a person has never known Him before, there are two distinct responses when we don’t acknowledge the transcendental nature and activity of God in our lives. And that’s what the next several posts will be about. We’ve already looked at why it’s important to be intentional about having a depth of feminine character, and how a lot of the confidence to be the woman you long to be comes from having your identity’s foundations in God’s pursuit of you. This next section will look at how our hearts respond to God and what that has to do with becoming women of beauty and strength.

Faith, Trust, and the Weight of Glory

2007-07-06T22:57:00.000-04:00

If faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1), then in order to build your relationship with God in faith, you must not only hope in the reality of God, but also be assured of Him. Assurance, or trust, is the first crisis humans face according to Dr. Eric Erikson, who outlined the stages of human development. He believed that an infant who came to innately mistrust the god-like figures of their parents would be hindered in the successive stages of growth, because a person who cannot trust the outside world becomes twisted in on themselves in a terrible way. An inability to trust leaves the soul cynical, afraid, joyless, and completely self-focused. While I don’t agree with all of Erickson’s theories, he has insight into the effects of a lack of trust and how this lack causes the inability to have faith— whether that faith be in the goodness of the surrounding world, or for our purposes, in the goodness of God.

Most people live marked by a lack of trust of who God is, specifically, we live untouched by what the ancient philosophers called the transcendental nature of God. God is real. He is good. He is beautiful. And He is true. Plato believed the good, beautiful, real, and true could essentially be reduced to the same thing— something that for him had no name. Augustine, genius of the patristic era, took this metaphysical conversation that stretched through the ages before him, and thrust it into the heart of the gospel. The triune God, who has revealed Himself, is Plato’s un-named essence of the transcendentals. He is the perfection and judge of what is good, beautiful, real, and true; everything that embodies these attributes is only a shadow that makes our hearts long for His full weight of glory.

Stairway To Heaven

2007-07-05T17:14:00.000-04:00

These last few posts have focused on the love of God. As I have been writing, I have thought a lot about the reality that He really is Immanuel, which means God is with us. He is not a god after the world’s religions, which create stairways to heaven out of law and religious practice. Though He does call us to heaven, He also descended to earth to rescue us with a pursuit that is real, intentional, and incredibly personal.

The reason it is important to meditate on these issues, is because the real heart problem in our modern culture is not individualism, or secularism, or moral relativism, or even evolutionary influence. It is the same as it was before the modern era or Darwinism. Look at any person who claims to be a moral relativist and you will see inconsistency in the way they actually live. Note also, that Darwinists don’t really follow survival of the fittest to its natural end in euthanizing whole cancer wards or allowing entire people groups die in Africa without aid. People don’t live as though they don’t believe in the existence, or sovereignty of God. When faced with great enough suffering and pain, our deep calls out to Him.

I recently heard the story of Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral. He was a powerful and violent Soviet communist who had killed many of his own people and eradicated freedom, economic development, and religion. George Bush, who was Vice President at the time, was the American diplomat who attended this funeral. Bush reported that Brezhnev’s widow stood motionless by the open casket as the funeral came to a close. But then, just before the top was lowered, she reached over him and made the sign of the cross. “There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong.” {Gary Thomas, in C.T., October 3, 1994, p. 26} Brezhnev had done away with the open practice of religion in their land, and yet in his death, the widow’s prayer over his soul was demonstrated by the symbol of an ancient Roman torture device which has throughout the world come to mean hope and life and peace with God.

Etched deeply in the fabric of humanity is the realization of the existence of God (Romans 1). There is no logical basis for morality, purpose, or ethical community, in a world without a Creator. Faith—the means by which we receive the unmerited gift of salvation— often lacks, not a belief in a God, but rather a trusting relationship with the God who actually exists. Christians believe not only that He is in part knowable, but that He has revealed who He is through Scripture and in the person of Christ. To relate to Him therefore in a way that is untrue to who He actually is, would be as ridiculous as if someone interacted with me who, despite my correction, still thought of me how they wanted to perceive me. Think of how absurd it would be if we interacted with a developing mortal as we do with the changeless, immortal God. What if someone said to you: “well, I just like to think of you as a man named Oliver who professionally base-jumps and lives half the year in the Himalayan foot-hills.” “But that’s not real,” you’d protest, “that’s not who I am at all!”
If God is real, he certainly has more consistent and defined characteristics than you or I, since He is eternal and un-created. It is the work of men, not to define Him after our preferences, but to discover Him as He really is. As the Psalmist wrote: "Let us press on to know Him."

That You May Be Filled Up

2007-06-30T23:11:00.001-04:00

The Apostle John desired that you might “come to know and {believe} the love which God has for us.” I always imagine a pause in his mind when he finishes this thought with a simple but compelling reason why: “God is love.” Stay in that thought for a minute before you continue with him through the verse. He finishes, “and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16).

Edwin Schlossberg once said: “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” I hope that these pages have enabled you to grow in the desire of God. I hope that your faith would always rise out of desire and a response to what God has already done. After all, that's what faith is-- remembering what God has already done for us. And faith produces hope because it creates a vision for the future that is built on the trust formed in the past. And finally, I pray with Paul that you may “be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18-19).

And I Was Enticed

2007-06-29T23:19:00.001-04:00

I've heard pastors say that nowhere in the Bible does God speak of His relationship with us as sexual. This is rather bazaar, I think, to separate the language of marriage from the idea of sexual union, when the Bible clearly connects the two. Still, many might think I’m taking this thought too far. But listen to the words of the men who wrote scripture. Jeremiah, when he pondered how his life and ministry came to such a low place, thought on his relationship with the Lord that had led him there and had the courage to utter these words: “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed” (Jeremiah 20:7 NRSV). Other versions of this verse use nicer words such as deceived, or persuaded. But as Allan D. Wright points out in Lover of My Soul, this word is the same as in the law of Exodus where it commands that “If a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged, and lies with her, he must pay a dowry for her to be his wife” (Exodus 22:16). It is the same word the Philistines used to tell Delilah what they wanted her to do to Sampson. God uses it in 2 Chronicles and 1 Kings when He asked who would entice a rebellious king.

My favorite use of this word is found in Hosea 2:14: God said, “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, bring her into the wilderness and speak kindly to her” (NASB Version). The New Century Version translates this word: “So I am going to attract her...” The whole context of this verse is Israel’s unfaithfulness. The reason why He is drawing her out to the quiet of the desert is because she is continually pursuing other lovers.

The second chapter of Hosea continues: “I will betroth you to Me forever; yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in lovingkindness and in compassion, and I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness. Then you will know the LORD” (19-20). Three times in Hosea God repeats I will betroth you; I will betroth you; I will betroth you. He tells her of how He wants to have a relationship rooted in righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness. Isaiah 62:5 tells us that even though we have rebelled against God, and committed adultery against Him, there is still hope, not only for faithfulness, but for real romance, love, and mutual enjoyment. “For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5).

Notice this sentence at the end of God’s re-instatement of Israel: “Then you will know the LORD.” How do I say this... this word ‘know’ is the same kind of ‘knowing’ in Genesis 4:1 that resulted in Eve becoming pregnant. What this means for us today, is that knowledge about God, and knowing God can be separate pursuits. Certainly Israel knew about the Lord. But God said, after we have committed, or covenanted together you will know me in a humble intimate way that only lovers speak of.

The Shoreline of Wonder

2007-06-29T23:18:00.001-04:00

“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). The Bible calls few things a mystery, and no book in the New Testament speaks more of mystery than Ephesians. The mystery of how, or why God would describe His relationship with us in marital terms, and even in sexual terms, is certainly a mystery that I will not embarrass myself by trying to write about. Huston Smith said in The World's Religions of mystery: “A mystery is that special kind of problem for which the human mind has no solution; the more we understand it, the more we become aware of additional factors relating to it that we do not understand. In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder” (p. 389)

Ultimately, the reason God gave us hearts that needed relationship was not so we could relate and love humans, but so that we could love Him. We are sexual so we can begin to understand the level of intimacy God desires from us. John Piper has said that “we were given the power to know each other sexually so that we might have some hint of what it will be like to know Christ supremely.” Sexual imagery is able to articulate what it looks like to long for Him, to pursue and take hold of His love and promises, as well as what it looks like to turn from him and embrace other idols.

John Piper, Sex and the Supremacy of Christ P30

He Dwelt Among Us And We Beheld His Glory

2007-06-26T16:28:00.001-04:00

Hosea had to marry Gomer in order to understand what it was like for God to seek out and wed Himself to the people of Israel. I suppose I’d have to marry a harlot in order to comprehend what it was like for Jesus to invite me to the alter. From eternity the Son awaited His Father’s order. When time was full, the heavenly Father declared, I have a bride for You. “Where is she Father? What pure companion awaits? Have you created another Adam and Eve, another Garden of Eden? Where is this pure, undefiled fellowship You have chosen for the Son of God?”
There.
God pointed towards the rebellious planet. He pointed at the people who had eaten the forbidden fruit. He pointed at the people who had danced around golden calves. He pointed at those who had made pleasure their greatest passion. He pointed at all the people who had sold themselves cheaply and thoughtlessly for a quick dime or a cheap thrill. He pointed at pornographers, drug pushers, pimps, and felonious prisoners. He pointed the self-righteous, the self-absorbed, the lukewarm. He pointed at corrupt government leaders. He pointed at people who harbored private sins. He pointed at you and me.
There is your bride, Son. Go, take for yourself an adulterous wife.
So the Word became flesh...

-Allan D. Wright, in Lover of My Soul

Presented

2007-06-14T15:31:00.001-04:00

My favorite part of any wedding is when the church is quieted and old wooden doors are pushed open to present the bride. I think of the moment when Audrey Hepburn appears at the top of the stairs in ‘My Fair Lady’, and how she was valued as worthy of adornment and then presented—shown off with joy and respect—before an audience where she captured the attention of the prince. Every woman who has spent her life ignored, criticized, and discarded, will one day be presented to the saints as one made beautiful by the God who is beauty incarnate. Paul wrote that he “betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin” (2 Corinthians 11:2).

Acts 9:36-43 tells the story of “a disciple named Tabitha” who was “abounding with deeds of kindness and charity,” which she did continually. When she fell sick and died, the local believers sent for Paul, believing that He could raise her from the dead. He arrived to the house where they were “weeping and showing all the tunics and garments that {Tabitha} used to make while she was with them. But Peter sent them all out and knelt down and prayed, and turning to the body, he said, ‘Tabitha, arise.’ And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. And he gave her his hand and raised her up; and calling the saints and widows, he presented her alive.” Imagine the awe that came over the room. This is like our story too, for we were so enslaved to sin that our separation from the light and life of God rendered us as dead. But Christ has “reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless, and beyond reproach” (Colossians 1:22). And not just fiercely and gloriously alive, but radiant and beautiful. Paul’s desire in proclaiming Christ was that he would “present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28) He describes in another letter that the kind of maturity we are to aspire to, as one whose stature is “measured by Christ's fullness” (Ephesians 4:13).

What an inspiration to pursue victory in our lives, knowing that an actual, physical moment will come those who have hidden their very lives with Christ in God will be presented with Christ, to God. The Bible promises us that “when Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory” (Colossians 3: 3-4).

Ezekiel 16 Part Seven: Arise, Shine!

2007-05-17T16:27:00.001-04:00

Notices the language God uses in verse 11 and 12: “I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your hands and a necklace around your neck. I also put a ring in your nostril, earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.” The Hebrew word for ornamentation is similar to the word for witness or testimony, and each of these pieces was to serve as a reminder of the one who gave them. God will later ask of his unfaithful bride in Jeremiah 2:32: “Can a virgin forget her ornaments or a bride her attire?” How can you forget these signs of beauty and testimony between us? These are some of the same gifts that Eliezer put on Rebekah to show Isaac’s intention towards her in Genesis 24:47; it says that Eliezer “put the ring in her nose and the bracelets on her arms.” The crown of course demonstrates Israel’s rise to a position of honor and authority.

Verse 13-14 concludes: “...so you were exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. Then your fame went forth among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect because of My splendor which I bestowed on you," declares the Lord God.”

This description reminded me of the last chapters in Isaiah. For pages the prophet goes on, in no kind terms, as he brings forth the indictments against Israel. But then Isaiah writes of how the Lord is going to restore them at the end of chapter 59, and 60:1 opens this way: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the LORD will rise upon you and His glory will appear upon you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” Observe how God’s glory becomes hers, and then the nations come to her light and the brightness of her rising.

“The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord gives grace and glory; no good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11).

Ezekiel 16 Part Six: Fine Linen, Bright and Clean

2007-05-02T01:00:00.001-04:00

Ezekiel 16: 10 is the beginning of the work that God does to beautify His bride: “I also clothed you with embroidered cloth and put sandals of porpoise skin on your feet; and I wrapped you with fine linen and covered you with silk.” Isn’t it fitting, that beauty plays such a prominent role in this love story? Notice that God provides clothing and adorns her with choice fabrics. Matt sometimes buys me clothing, or jewelry, and just as in the case of this passage, it is normal for his thoughtfulness to be more precious than the gift. “I got this for you because I noticed you didn’t have this color,” he’ll tell me, or “this dress was just the color of your eyes.” To adorn is to notice and enjoy unique beauty, and then desire to enhance, draw attention to, or increase it. That is just what God does here for Israel, and what He seeks to do within you.

Women seem to have a gift for infusing sentiment and memory into everyday things don’t they? Mothers are the ones who save baby curls and prom flowers. We love to create meaning and pour spirit into the mundane-‘ness’ of everyday life. Ticket stubs, photos, rose petals.

Did you know God does too? Scholars have an unbelievable gift of turning the ribbons of sentimental imagery across Scripture into boring cross references. But this precious tendency of God that resounds within us is too valuable not to be aware of. Come and see the particularity of the temple instructions a different way. Hear the heart of God when he gets excited about the first dwelling place where He will manifest His Shekinah glory on earth. He is specific because it means something to Him. “Remember that moment we had with the Noahic covenant?” he asks. “Think of me when you see rainbows.” “Jerusalem, that’s our home I’m re-making for us.” “Every Sabbath, look forward to believer’s rest I wrote to you about.” “See the stars? Remember what I promised to Abraham.” The Old Testament is full of celebrations, festivals, and commands to remember and delight in the history of God’s relationship with us. God certainly isn’t one to forget anniversaries! He makes all sorts of them up and insists on keeping them special. He is the ultimate Romancer.

Look here at the precious sentiment He shows when dressing His bride; He dresses her in fine linen. People who were of mixed heritage were not even allowed into the inner courts of the temple. Paul, for example was falsely charged with bringing a gentile into the temple complex and it led to his lengthy imprisonment. This was a little girl who stood outside and looked in on the beautiful buildings and the respected men that moved within dressed in the purest white linen. God ceremonially cleansed her, and then dressed her with the same linen that was used to distinguish and honor His favored priests. And Christ has done this for you, for He “has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father” (Revelation 1:6). God had clothed priests in fine linen (for example in Leviticus 6:10) as a symbol of purity and consecration; just as it is here. The symbolism of fine linen is found throughout the Bible even into Revelation, when it says in 19:8 that “fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear (fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)” Israel is given embroidered cloth and beautiful porpoise skin sandals, wrapped in fine linen and covered with costly silk. God knows how to adorn a beautiful woman.

Ezekiel 16 Part Five: Cleansed II

2007-04-24T14:43:00.001-04:00

Mark 1:40-45 tells the story of a leper who came to Jesus, and falling on his knees before him, he searched for words to ask for a miracle from this stranger who was his only hope. His words were simple and vulnerable; he didn’t even specifically ask for what he desired. Instead, he merely whispered, crumpled at Jesus’ feet: “If You are willing, You can make me clean.” Verse 41 shows Jesus’ response to this leper: “Moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’ Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.”

Ezekiel 16:9 talks about God bathing His own Bride with water, and how He washed away the blood that covered her and anointed her with oil. Just as a bride prepares for her wedding, whether it’s just a body scrub at a spa, or a full year of beauty treatments like Esther (Esther 2:12), Israel also was purified before they received the covenant laws at Sinai. Exodus 19:14, records that “Moses sanctified the people, and they washed their clothes.” So too believers are washed, sanctified, and justified by the name of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Ezekiel 16 Part Five: Cleansed

2007-04-14T20:03:00.001-04:00

"Then I bathed you with water, washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil."
~Ezekiel 16: 9

Proverbs 20:9 asks: “who can say, ‘I have cleansed my heart, I am pure from my sin?’” Though the Old Testament spoke of ceremonial acceptance before God in terms of ‘clean’, or ‘unclean’, few people use the word today. But it resounds with our soul doesn’t it? Sexual abuse victims still speak of this feeling. Social outcasts feel it. Sinners feel it. I never understood suicide until the day I felt unclean in my soul. It seemed to me that there were many ways to radically alter an unbearable life before ending it. But the truth of the matter is just as RW Emerson put it: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”

Where do you go when your faith, built upon the experiences of your past, is clouded and unsure, like a broke-down city? Where do you go when hope for the future is foolish and it seems like there’s no love or life left in you anymore?

Well, I get in the shower.
And I weep.
Because you can try to change; you can get counseling, memorize scripture, follow all the right steps and every word of advice. But deep inside, there are memories, and there is pain and sin, and you know that your heart is dying. There is nothing you can do to fix it. There is nowhere you can go where the reality of your sin won’t be. You know, I can honestly say that God has never failed to meet me in this place. God is always “near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

This is the part of the story where God shows up. Let these beautiful words from Titus wash over you like hope that rains down on desperate sinners: “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:4-6). Did you catch the ‘But God’ part? Did you see how He moves towards us out of the wealth of His mercy and love for mankind? Did you pause to take in the fact that when He washes you, you are regenerated and renewed? Regenerated means the contracts you made with the devil not to love again after a betrayal—broken. The root of bitterness you planted that corrupted dozens around you and took over your mind—gone. That sexual addiction you fed— healed. The shame you live with because of sexual abuse—replaced with comfort and joy. It doesn’t always come in a moment. But it comes. And when the kindness of God, your Savior, and His love for you appears, He saves you, washes you, and there is a regeneration and renewal in your heart that is the exclusive work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is always with you in the moment you realize your soul needs to be cleansed. His heart towards you is undivided: “I am willing;” He said, “be cleansed.”

Ezekiel 16 Part Four: Pursued For a Response

2007-04-11T09:13:00.001-04:00

The events of the narrative pass quickly. Verse seven says of her childhood only that she grows up and matures into a woman. Ezekiel 16:8 continues: “then I passed by you and saw you, and behold, you were at the time for love; so I spread my skirt over you and covered your nakedness. I also swore to you and entered into a covenant with you so that you became mine," declares the Lord God.”

When she entered the age of consciousness, God pursued her heart for a response, just as He does towards you. Have you ever realized that God is actively seeking to draw your heart to His with kindness? It’s not only how He pursues you everyday but also the process He used to first draw you to salvation. Romans 2:4 says that “the kindness of God leads you to repentance.” David penned these words as He thought of Yahweh’s pursuit of his heart: “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will lay hold of me” (Psalm 139:7-10). Jeremiah 31:3 talks about how “The LORD appeared to him from afar, saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.” Jesus said “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). These verses are some of my favorite; they open my heart again and inspire me not to resist the love of God that allures me with his kindness.

Ezekiel 16 Part Three: The Despised God Has Chosen

2007-04-09T09:19:00.001-04:00

This is the part of the story where God shows up. Ezekiel 16: 6 recounts this well-known moment: “When I passed by you and saw you squirming in your blood, I said to you while you were in your blood, 'Live!' Yes, I said to you while you were in your blood, 'Live!'” God spoke the world into being and commanded the nation of Israel to be established. He spoke light into your world and truth into your heart. John Wesley wrote of this verse in his explanatory notes: “This is such a command as sends forth a power to effect what is commanded; he gave that life: he spoke, and it was done.”

The world is full of people reaching out for the favor of a being they call God: in Far East ancient mountain temples, and Amazonian witch-doctor huts, in the underground churches of the Middle East, and over tears and empty bottles in bars. Every religion and culture has rituals and rules that claim to enable its followers to become people who attract the approving attention of their god. This is not the heart of Christian love. God’s eye has certainly noticed you, and beauty and worth are significant to this story, but not at this point. The fulfillment of every rule and ritual in Christianity is love; John wrote of this: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). What is it about you that you admire about yourself, what is it that you excel at, what are the ways in which you are beautiful? God has a purpose for all of your beauty and gifts, and they need to be set free from being used to attract His approval of you. You already have it. Fill your best qualities in the middle of Deuteronomy 7:7-8: “The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were _________, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers...”

What was true of Israel then is still true of you now. God’s rescue and pursuit of you has always been, and always will be, based in His nature of love and delight that spills over onto unworthy children thrown by the wayside and rejected by men. Your response to God’s pursuit is vital to the story of your life. Your beauty has a purpose. These are deep issues that many people down-play because they end the story with God’s first movement towards us which is unconditional. Be sure to both continue on in the narrative, and to save the importance of your role in the story for then.

This truth will free you to have an identity not based in the validation of anything but the cross that proclaims your worth. It is always a perspective-giving exercise for me to take up Paul’s exhortation to “consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen...” (1 Corinthians 1: 26-29).

A Note on Ezekiel

2007-04-02T02:40:00.000-04:00

I have always imaged Ezekiel how Michelangelo painted him in the Sistine Chapel: suspicious and plain, with an awkwardness that accentuated his lack of poise. Poor Ezekiel’s life was marked by tragedy and bazaar demonstrations to a distracted audience. He was exiled into Babylon, but continued to write about the Israelite’s idolatry with other Gods and their alliances with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia. His writings are some of the most expressive marital imagery in ancient literature. His two primary chapters that deal with marriage imagery are chapters 16 and 23.

Ezekiel 16 Part Two: The Two Most Beautiful Words

2007-03-31T23:17:00.000-04:00

Not only was Israel marked for life by failure and inferiority because of her heritage, but God, who is narrating this story, says that “no eye looked with pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open field for you were abhorred on the day you were born” (Ezekiel 16: 5). Ephesians 2:3 says that “we too... were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” From ages past, unwanted children have been thrown into fields or over cliffs; our society does this in a quieter way, behind closed doors in hospitals and clinics. But the rejection and destruction of children is just one poignant image of what the world does to it’s innocent helpless. Consider your story. You were rejected. You were raped. Left by a parent. Born with weakness or deformity. Perhaps your mind is fractured and you struggle with emotional stability. The world is full of poverty, hatred, lack of education, racism, family problems, jealousy, slander, and every evil thing.

It is at this point in the story that the two most beautiful words of any language are spoken: But God. Listen to the writers of Scripture tell the same story:

Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

Ephesians 2:4-5: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”...

Psalms 73:26: “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

Ephesians 2:12-13 recounts the story this way: “Remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

Ezekiel 16 Part One: Origins

2007-03-29T16:10:00.001-04:00

Ezekiel 16:3 begins the story of

Israel

with her first state: “your origin and your birth are from the land of the Canaanite, your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.” Many people have pain when they consider where they started in life; shame and inferiority can originate from countless causes. But for Yahweh to say of His bride, ‘your origin and your birth’ were not from a pure blood line, was a deeper offense in their ancient near eastern culture than we would first realize today.

For Israel to be associated with the neighboring peoples of the southern hill country was a direct threat to the Abrahamic promises in Genesis 15. The promises of a Land and People were the foundational symbols of Jewish identity; to say Israel had their cultural and moral heritage from these groups was a pronouncement of failure and shame. This can be hard to understand in our individualistic culture where the place a person ends up is more significant than where they came from. But for ancient near eastern cultures, honor was ascribed primarily by birth and blood ties. Theirs was a collectivist society, and honor was connected more to the past—where you were from— rather than where you were going.

People have said that if the end has come, and the world has not been set right— keep going, it is not yet the end. Our hearts longs for the faithfulness and justice of God just as we wait for dark nights to be followed by dawn. David wrote in Psalm 130:6: “My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning,” and the theme of the expected justice of God is a theme through his writings. Because the story of creation is etched onto our desires, we expect for good to be triumphant at the end of all things. Yet it is clear that we live in the midst of pain and sin.

The reconciliation of these quiet and often unspoken realities is either to minimize the current tragedy of life, or to set our hope in the dramatically altering power of the cross. Christians do not put our hope in the beginning of the story of our lives when we hope for all to be well. We put hope in the life-altering grace of the cross. Christianity, unlike any other religion, places an emphasis, not on the perfection of the person, but primarily on the perfect work of God. We can hold to both the doctrine of human depravity and dignity/beautification in Christ. Part of the reason why this story is so captivating is because of the depths of tragedy, in Israel’s story and in mine that Christ gently raises us out of.
A savior is supremely precious to sinners.

Feminine Imagery

2007-03-22T16:37:00.001-04:00

It is possible to both learn from Biblical feminine imagery, and acknowledge that God the Father, and Jesus were revealed primarily as male. (Contrary to most nineteenth century paintings Jesus was not androgynous!) There is no confliction by saying that God is the perfection of both genders since He is outside of the ‘either/or’ gender reality we were created in. Both genders find their origins in His person (Genesis 1: 27), and neither gender can claim to be the fullness of the image of God without the other. It is also clear with humans that daughters as well as sons can be the ‘spitting image’ of their father, though their genders are different.

Because Christians have held God’s attributes as the source and standard for ours, it was disappointing to me that the few dozen Biblical descriptions of God in feminine terms focus really, on just one aspect of womanhood: mothering. This has led some readers of Scripture (mainly Catholics) to reduce the essence of femininity down to procreation. Pope John Paul II said in an address that “Genesis 4:1 speaks of, the mystery of femininity is manifested and revealed completely by means of motherhood, as the text says: ‘She conceived and bore...’” First Things, an excellent scholarly journal on life, politics, and public life, published an article that stated this same opinion. It states “no investigation of gender can allow itself to be carried too far off from the body... the farther from procreation we get—into the home workplace, the social sphere, the political sphere—the more careful we should be in our proclamations of what is naturally male or female. A discussion of gender that stays focused on our gendered bodies will help us from overemphasizing either sameness or difference, because, when we look at the human body, we see both.”

But the essence of womanhood is not motherhood! But when only taking into account the feminine imagery used of God to the exclusion of the rest, this is the emphasis that was considered Biblical. (Forget Biblical, it is surprising that it was considered anything but offensive.)

Just as men pattern their masculinity after the images of king, or shepherd, women can look to the archetypes in Scripture that are consistently feminine to flesh out a full picture of femininity. Since all of the male/female allegories come from the creative mind of God, it is not accurate to say that men pattern their gendered identity after God and women pattern theirs after humanity whom He pursues. Both men and women can use the allegorical archetypes to put words to the desires of their heart that are often stirred by the world around them.

Pope John Paul II, in“Mystery of Woman Revealed in Motherhood”. During the General Audience in the Paul VI Hall on 12 March 1980, Address As Published in the English Edition of the L'Osservatore Romano.

Butler, Sarah. “Sex or Gender.” First Things. June/July 2005.

As Awesome As An Army With Banners

2007-03-22T16:14:00.001-04:00

This story in Ezekiel, is also in Hosea, and is further developed in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel. Both Jesus and John the Baptist used this language to describe their relationship, like two good friends enjoying each other in the back of a church together before a ceremony. In Matthew 9: 15 “Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests be sad while the groom is with them?’” John spoke of his relationship with Jesus with wedding imagery: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. So this joy of mine has been made full” (John 3:29). Paul carries the idea through his letters and of course Revelation describes the wedding supper of the Lamb when Christ comes to claim His bride.

This allegory reveals the deepest truths about the potential for human relationship, and our desire for love, commitment, and sacrifice. For thousands of years people have been getting married, and it was very unclear as to why. The reason, humans instinctively covenant with one another, is a mystery only revealed since Christ walked on earth. The mystery of marriage is that it shows us how Christ and the Church are in relationship with one another: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). Ultimately, the very reason God gave us hearts that needed relationship was not so we could relate and love humans, but so that we could love Him. We are sexual so we can begin to understand the level of intimacy God desires from us. Sexual imagery is able to articulate what it looks like to long for Him, to pursue and take hold of His love and promises, as well as what it looks like to turn from him and embrace other idols. Even in the healthiest marriages, “there are deep places within your heart and within the heart of your husband that are only for the Lord. That is the heart of modesty in singleness and in marriage. ‘The deeps call only to God’”. (Elizabeth Elliot. Let Me Be A Woman. P86)

When interpreting analogies in Scripture, the simple truth must be kept in mind that the “invisible attributes” can be better “understood through what has been made” (Rom 1:20), meaning that the seen reveals the unseen. The writers of Scripture use the tangible things of this world to help others peer into the mysteries of the deeper spiritual reality that is separated by the densest curtain—only easily pulled away only by one with eyes of faith. The Bride of Christ is only one of about seven images used to describe the New Testament Church. Though many are pictures of living things like a body, or a vine, the church is also depicted in a masculine way when it is spoken of as a victorious army conquering evil. The church is feminine in her responsiveness and submission to Christ, and yet militantly aggressive in their encounters with those who oppose the Kingdom of God. When Jesus spoke of constructing His church, He said of it that even “the gates of Hades will not overpower it (Matthew 16:18).” The writer of Song of Solomon describes his own bride this way: “Who is this that grows like the dawn, as beautiful as the full moon, as pure as the sun, as awesome as an army with banners” (6:10)?

Thoughts On Why I Love The Author God

2007-03-11T23:43:00.001-04:00

I always considered myself somewhat of an artist even before I found a medium. In my search, I first found that in order to be an artisan, you must have the vision of what is to be created and the patience to craft it into being. A painter will not produce a master piece if he does not first have a love of color, of detail, of how to capture life on canvas. I had no time for such detail; I had not the passion for brush strokes and what strange colors came from accidental blending of magenta and amber.

And then I serendipitously happened upon a love of writing and with it, the passion that just might be enough to produce something of worth. I set about the patient work of endless reading, vocabulary building, note-taking, compiling, and then the painstaking writing process of each composition. This morning while I laid wrapped face up in starch white cotton, I was thinking of adjectives for the word auspicious when I felt the Spirit move through the floating montage of words above me.

The God of Isaiah 45 drew close and spoke quietly the way lovers speak into one another. He knew my passion to write and my desire to speak into more people’s lives than I could possible meet and know. He came reminding me again that He is the source of truth and insight I had left unsought. It occurred to me immediately that He is the Author of the greatest literary work in History that comes alive in different ways each time it is read. It is timeless, powerful, relevant. No scribe has plummeted it’s depths; no mortal or spirit has learn to wield the full force of it’s truth. It is for children, scholars, the broken and the proud. Men walk backwards through the snow into forbidden countries to take it to humble villages knowing the Word will bring a life so powerful they are willing to risk their own. God is truly the Master Author. He impressed upon my heart that He will give me words and truth that I could not find anywhere if I search the libraries of the world.

Thank You To The Moffatts

2007-03-08T22:47:00.001-05:00

It has been some time since I have sat down to really write.
Small comments of negativity have blown the wind quite out of my sails and I have made no progress since then. Thankfully, two voices of very generous encouragement have given me the heart to carry on and remember why I write. I thought I might share these reflections with you.

I write about what it means to be a woman because I met a woman named Rachel Waters who loved that she was a woman, and woke up every morning aware of and thankful for that. At first this seemed strange to me. But then I realized that I dream for my husband to one day be very aware of the fact that I am a woman, and certainly it is more difficult to inspire a conviction you do not have. I want my daughters to be glad and rejoice in what will set them apart in childhood as girls, and in their later years, as mature and beautiful women.

I have grown in my knowledge of and enjoyment of those qualities in women that we call ‘femininity’. But just like the enjoyment of God overflows into spontaneous praise, so too my discovery of femininity is beginning to overflow with ideas and conversations. C. S. Lewis’s well loved quote on praise is always worth reading again: “All enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.... The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside... Just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?’”

Someone once said that “painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.” What a beautiful and concise reason for us all to pursue our artistic expressions. Van Gogh is my foremost inspiration of what it means to behold beauty— to internalize it— and then to desire to share it. “If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something—the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it.”

Lewis, C. S. “The Problem of Praise in the Psalms” (found in Reflections on the Psalms New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. P90-98.

Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write. 2nd ed. Saint Paul: Gray Wolf P, 1987.

Batter My Heart, Three Person God

2007-03-06T10:05:00.001-05:00

By John Donne
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. P165.

Miracle on 34th Street

2007-03-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

In her book Captivating, Staci shares the story of when her husband John was praying on the beach, and how a humpback whale surfaced just in front of where he was sitting. “John knew immediately that this was a gift from God to his heart alone, a gift from the Lover of his heart” (Eldredge 117). She was moved by his story, but she desired for God to speak to her that way also. Not long after, Staci also found herself on an empty beach and waited for her own whale. But none came. So she reminded herself of the precious gift of Christ’s death on the cross and of how all of creation is a gift that shows God’s extravagant generosity towards His children. She wondered if it was silly or selfish to pray for something more.

As she walked away she rounded a bend and came across a delicate orange starfish. This little starfish whispered the love and intimacy of God to her: “He answered my question. Yes. He loved me” (Eldredge 117). But then she rounded another bend, and found herself surrounded by a sea of starfish of all colors and sizes. There were hundreds of them! Each one was “an intimate gift from an intimate God” (Eldredge 118).

My room-mate Gretchen recently told me the story of when she had just been through a heartbreaking rejection. She was living in a new place where no one knew her story or the way she was fighting for healing and restoration. One night, around three in the morning, as she was crying, and praying, and writing in her journal, she wrote the words: “God, you know how people say You put your arms around them? Do You actually do that?” She closed her journal and went to bed, not waiting for an answer. But then, just a few minutes after she laid down, her room-mate came in and climbed in bed with her. She put her arms around her. God prompted the room-mate to move towards Gretchen even though it seemed as though she was sleeping, and the room-mate had never done that before.

I felt like Staci when Gretchen told me her story, I felt awe and hope and disappointment all at the same time. I had no story like that. And how would God ever send a whale to me? I live in the heart of Manhattan, on 34^th street—the same block as the empire state building. But I started praying that God would send something big- something obviously for me. And while I waited I thought about what it would be. The best and grandest gesture I could think of was if a whole flock of little birds came and sat on my apartment window sill. (I love birds.)

God sent elephants. A dozen of them. They walked right past my apartment building on 34^th street. No joke. I later found out that they walk that route every year when the circus comes to the Madison Square Gardens, because the trucks they are transported in don’t fit through the tunnels into Manhattan. They’ve come for years, and people line the streets to see them. But as I was walking back to my apartment from Matt’s at just the exact moment they went by (and they move surprisingly fast), I knew that they were there from God to me; “an intimate gift from an intimate God” (Eldredge 118).

Eldredge, John, and Stasi Eldredge. Captivating. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc., 2005.

Photo by Bryan Nance Jr.

On Snapple, and the Profound Joy of Being Loved

2007-03-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

Matt keeps a brief list of the clothing stores I like, and what size I am at each; sometimes when we’re walking by a store that I like he’ll lead me in by the hand and explain: “I just wanted to buy you something special today.” He knows what entrees I enjoy at restaurants, and what drink I would get at gas stations for when I wake up later down the road. These small gifts are so meaningful to me because they demonstrate that I am known by him in detail; they are little physical proofs that someone thought I was worthy of study and thoughtfulness. Gifts show that the giver is seeking to win his lover's heart by reminding her of his persistent desire. And the magic of love turns Snapple into a statement of value.

God is seeking to give you gifts that remind your heart again of His love. And His romancing of your heart, is intensely personal. In this courtship, the vastness of the knowledge, power, and creativity of God meets the intricate complexity of your beautifully created soul. If people in your life, who care for you have given you gifts that touch your heart, “how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:11)
The depths of God’s thoughtfulness and generosity will not be able to be expressed even though He will continue to pursue your affection for the rest of eternity. Ephesians 2:7 say that in “the ages to come He {will} show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us.” Theologians have long said that God has created desire in us that could only be filled by Him. God created your heart to desire and to be able to experience Him. John Piper has said of this love affair: “God will never run out of fresh ways for us to revel in the profound joy of being loved! The wealth of His grace is immeasurable. It will take eternity for Him to show all the kindness he has to show. That is what it means to be God.”

Piper, John. A Godward Life. Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 1997 Page 292

Filling Your Life

2007-02-28T19:32:00.000-05:00

Perhaps in your earthly love story with your husband, you noticed him long before he started to try to catch your eye from across a crowded room. Or maybe you were like Matt and I, and went back, laughing through the memories, with him pointing out the ways he pursed you when you were oblivious to the effort. In the story of God’s pursuit of you, it may seem as though you were the one to find Him. Or maybe you’re not quite sure how you came to know God, or why you’re still reading about Him right now. But I do. You are drawn to God, because God is pursuing you. Jesus wanted you to know that He noticed, and pursued you first: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you” (John 15:16).

God isn’t waiting for you to get your life ordered, your waist smaller, or your attitude, or finances, or sex life under control before He will really love you. Before you even began to want to please Him, He was pleased with you. And not in a passive way—God was in full pursuit of your love and enjoyment of Him. He was actively drawing you; Jesus has said that “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” (John 6:44) He has done infinitely more for you than you could ever imagine. Did you know that “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above?” (James 1:17) In your whole life, whatever has brought you joy, made you smile, inspired your heart, or brought life into your being, it was all from Him. All life flows from God. Psalm 103 says that He is filling your life with good things as He crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion. “O taste and see that the Lord is good, how bless is the man who takes refuge in Him” (Psalm 34:8)

On The Business of Wooing

2007-02-26T01:50:00.001-05:00

If anyone else were telling Israel’s story, they would tell you that the tiny nation on the ‘great sea’, as they called it, was constantly oppressed and often ruled by the neighboring kingdoms. Israel tells her story as though she is the most important nation in the world. And she is. Because she has been chosen, and loved by a remarkable suitor who has transformed her with His everlasting love. This is her story.

The pages of Scripture radiate with the stories of fervent love, of couples like Rachel and Jacob, Pricilla and Aquila, or Elkanah and Hannah. The Israelite people spoke of a love that was “like a seal over {their} heart, like a seal on {their} arm, for love is as strong as death... many waters cannot quench love, nor will rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the riches of his house for love, it would be utterly despised.” ( Song of Solomon 8:6-7) But this isn’t just a legend for you to curl up and read about, you are the leading women in this heart-stirring account of love lost, and the suitor who died to save his bride.

When Matt first started falling in love with me, he had to figure a way to capture my attention. I certainly never thought he would notice a girl like me. (Neither did anyone else.) The world was just beginning to thaw with the spring weather, and he would take me on long drives with the top down through the country-side...and get lost. I only just learned (because I asked him as I wrote this chapter), that he went down the wrong roads on purpose, and we were never really lost. He would call and always leave messages, but I knew that he called and encouraged lots of people. He also asked other people about me—I thought he was just a really nice guy.

Alan D. Wright wrote on the business of wooing, that “in true courtship there is no room for pride. The suitor must pour out his heart. But a wise does not reveal all his qualities at once. He wants to attract his beloved, not smother her. Most of all, he wants her to want him. That’s God’s nature too. He could easily smother you, suffocate you, and consume you. He could easily engulf you, ensnare you, and enslave you. But the Lord doesn’t need you as His possession. He already owes you. The heart of God longs for your freely given love.” At first, when Matt was ‘pursuing me’, the only result was that I thought he was a nice guy— not just to me—but to everyone. But a suitor doesn’t want the women to merely think favorably of them, a suitor’s aim is for his beloved to desire him in return. And so it is with God.

Let Us Leave the Majority Opinion

2007-02-25T11:46:00.001-05:00

It took me a while to really embrace this concept of the Church being a feminine archetype for two main reasons. The first objection that came to my mind was, that if it actually mattered that women had an example to look to in Scripture, and if that example was such a sweeping form throughout Scripture, then why hadn’t I heard of anyone exhorting women to learn from the Church’s story? This objection was motivated by the more weighty consideration, that the whole theory sounded slightly — ok— very, heretical. Aren’t we supposed to only look to God as our primary example? In a moral and spiritual sense, yes. But just as men pattern their masculinity after the images of king, or shepherd, women can look to the archetypes in scripture that are consistently feminine. One reason why this idea may sound foreign is because no one is going to say that God reveals Himself more as a model for men than for women, unless they can give women an alternative inspiration. (This circles back to the first concern, but softens the second.)

Throughout Scripture, not only are women’s roles compared to the church, but the church is unfailingly referred to as feminine. And so with G. H. Hardy’s encouragement that: “It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority; by definition, there are already enough people to do that,” let us leave the majority opinion and press on to discover this wonderful character in Scripture of εκκλησία—Christ’s bride the Church.

Are You Sure About That?

2007-02-23T11:22:00.001-05:00

Though I've written about this before, I wanted to repeat a few thoughts as I transition into writing on the Church, who is the primary Biblical archetype.

A form is an idealized character or concept, which can be followed or modeled after. This works in two basic ways. I’ll use the Proverbs 31 woman as an example. Sometimes, the Proverbs 31 woman is talked about as a stereotype; she is someone who has characteristics that all women possess as they mature. In this way she is an embodiment of a generalization applied to all women. When other women do similar actions as her, you could comment that they are like the Proverbs 31 stereotype.

The other use of a form, or archetype, is to employ the image as a model, or the epitome, of what all women should be. I hate when people do this with the Proverbs 31 woman. It is my opinion, fiercely held, that the proverbial woman in chapter 31 is not a universal standard for women any more than the other physical characters of Scripture. Of course that last chapter in Proverbs has something to teach women, but its elevation has caused unnecessary confusion; just as the deification of Mary, or Jael would cause complications if they were held up as archetypes, even though they are each called “most blessed among women”. We find ourselves in so much unnecessary trouble by making unneeded rules and guidelines that God never intended us to be under.
G. K. Chesterton, speaking of the complexities of Christianity, gives this metaphor: “Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, he same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong... Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises.”

To Run Wild

2007-02-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

We need archetypes because how to become more feminine is obvious is some ways, but not in others. An archetype is an image, a character, a story, that gives us a good direction to start in, while not being too specific. It is an art teacher telling you to paint spring, while not forcing you to have any one item in the picture. It is a guide telling you the mountains are west, but sending you off on your own to discover the rivers, and pastures, and wildlife between here and there. This really bothers some people. Some people just want the end product and how to get from here to there the quickest way possible. But life only happens on the way. Creativity, and joyful, artistic expression, is what happens when you give a child of God a paintbrush and a blank canvas. And that is what God has given you: an artist’s heart, the blank canvas of life on which you are to paint, and a paintbrush.

God is the great author of life and love and faith, and you are an author too. God painted the world and sky with color, and you are a painter too. Why would you let someone else take your canvas away, and turn it into a ‘paint by number’ slat? I actually know parents who will not give their children paint by number coloring books. At first, I thought that was very weird, but then I saw the wisdom of it. Why just notice where your children have colored outside the lines, when you could get a glimpse into what they think their neighborhood, their dog, their family looks like. You can ask them why they drew mommy with a baby that hasn’t been born yet, or why they colored the sky red instead of blue, and they’ll tell you amazing things. You are God’s child, and you have amazing creativity that delights His heart as well. Don’t be scared of a blank canvas. The struggle, confusion, and moments of breakthrough that follow, are what fill a canvas with original art.

This isn’t to say that there are no rules or right ways of doing things. But God’s rules are not about uniformity. When God says no to something, it is because He is shouting yes to something so much better. Start to look for the ‘yes and amen’, in the law. G. K. Chesterton has said: “the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

Put Down Your Paintbrush and Step Away From the Rose-Bush

2007-02-19T15:43:00.001-05:00

Peter Kreeft said once that an archetype is a picture in the mind of God that humans catch onto. An archetype is what Plato called a ‘form’. It is the essential ‘flower-ness’ of all flowers that enables you to recognize a flower, even though they differ in shape, or height, or color. Be very careful who you let define what your goal should be as a person. Most women, have been edited their whole lives to fit an arbitrary model that was never meant to define them. Femininity is like being a flower; you may be a rose, and your mother, a daisy, and I am an orchid. But we are all women, and the archetype of femininity should enable and inspire us to become more fully who we are, instead of editing us into an unnecessarily narrow standard.

It is a tragedy that women today are asking the church how to be more beautiful, more feminine, and they are so often put through an assembly line of doctrine that spits them out on the other side pinned up, stuffed in, and talking funny. The process of ‘growing in godliness’ is in some ways narrow, for there is only one path to life, and in some way limitless, as the God who we pattern ourselves after is limitless. I have often found myself disturbed at how alike women in the church are. I feel as though I am Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s tale and I am sure that this rose bush was at one point white, and not red like every other rose bush in the Queen of Heart’s garden. And then I smell the stench of paint. Some one’s been painting the roses red again.

An Addendum: Gracing the Gospel

2007-02-14T09:10:00.001-05:00

While on the topic of this ministry of ‘being’, and inspiring growth in other women through uniqueness, it is necessary to also say that it is ultimately the allure of God inside us that draws men, not our words, or appearances, or personality. If a person is truly seeking God, it is not because they have discovered Him on their own, or because you were godly, or attractive enough to convince them that this religion worked. Women can grace the gospel with their individual attractiveness, but it is God’s beauty that draws people to Him. The church is the bride of Christ, and Christ is the One who is alluring His bride. It is only for our joy that He has chosen us as His co-laborers.
So enjoy watching people fall in love with Him for the first time, and know that your mistakes and misrepresentations of Christianity could never separate a seeker from the love of God.

An Eighteen Year Old Girl Named Heidi

2007-02-14T00:54:00.001-05:00

Leonardo da Vinci has said: “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” When I was twelve, an eighteen year old girl named Heidi took a leap of faith and started a small Bible study, that formed my first fellowship of the heart. I have never been the same.

When a friend of mine was searching for a kind of Christianity that she could be a part of, she started going to a local singles group, looking for people that would help her change for the better. She didn’t find anyone who was living Christianity in a way that she could see herself living too. She tried to find Christian women she could admire, and is for the most part still looking. Maybe one of the new people I saw and haven’t reached out to at church was like my friend. Maybe last Sunday, was the very last Sunday they were still seeking and hoping for the Christianity they could immerse themselves in. What if I was the girl some one was praying that their beloved friend would find and be inspired by?
God, in His graciousness, does not allow us to see the ever-widening ripple effects that our wrong choices make, just as we cannot see the multiplying effects of our good choices. My friend has the permanency of child out of marriage in her life now, and she will walk a different path than many women her age; but there is so much hope and life ahead of her, and I am believing that she will find that godly, and feminine example who will inspire her to become more of who she was created to be.

I’m writing this blog on femininity, and I don’t know if she reads it. Even if she did, I don’t know that it would help her. But I write anyways because when I lay awake at night thinking about my dearly loved friend, I also think about all the other people who are also awake thinking about their mother, sister, daughter, or friend. They are praying too for someone who will love, and value their loved one who they can’t seem to reach. It breaks my heart when I think about the girl I spent long summer days during childhood with. Life has hardened and changed her, and her laugh is different now.
I used to be devastated that I couldn’t be good enough to inspire my friend to desire a better way of living. I thought that if only my relationship with Matt was better that she would see something more than she had, and wouldn’t want to be in abusive relationships anymore. But my friend is nothing like me, and the kind of femininity that I am supposed to live before God, is not the same as what she is called to be. And while I can do some things, I can also rest in the fact that she is a different part of the body than I am, and I can’t model what that part looks like. But maybe I am the right fit for your daughter, or sister, or friend. And maybe you’re the person to speak into my friend’s life in a way that I could never hope for. You have no idea who is watching you. You have no idea who is looking for you to give them hope that they can be fully who they are as an individual, and grow as a Christian.
Christianity is supposed to be big enough for all women, of all ages, races, ideologies, fashion styles, and personality types. And the more women, who come alive with a purposeful ministry through their femininity, are going to make this increasingly true.

The Depth

2007-02-12T09:28:00.001-05:00

The rest of your life waits to be altered. The world waits to see how you will reflect the glory of God. Ok, maybe they don’t know to hold their breath yet—but God is. So what you need to now ask is, if you are willing to be transformed by the beauty of God into who you need to be. I don’t care if the idea of becoming more womanly is appealing to you. I want to know if you are willing to be alone with yourself, to sit with your pain, and brokenness, and faults, and to give that awareness to the Holy Spirit who only uses it to bear you up. I want to know if you are willing to invest in godliness, the way that other people haven’t, so that you can be a rich and rare haven in a world where other people are shallow and busy and selfish. You’re ministry is urgently needed, and beyond that, it is irreplaceable. Don’t move past this thought too quickly. Think for a moment what irreplaceable means, of times in your life when you have looked into peoples eyes and really understood the depth of this concept. Your ministry to the world, of who you are, is irreplaceable.

What Irremplaçable Means

2007-02-11T23:21:00.001-05:00

There have been experiences in life when I have felt, for a fleeting moment, what irreplaceable means.

I was running down a beach with Matt, still in pajamas, to get away and out of the house . People didn’t know we were in love yet. The beach was empty as far as I could see; the sky was hushed and low, white-like the color of bolivarian cream. A storm was coming, but the sea was waiting for it utterly still. It was so still that I could see crabs around my feet, and I jumped, frightened and laughing into Matt’s arms, and then I stayed there. And his eyes were the blue of the American anthem, the same color as the silent tide pools, and everything was breathless.

And I saw, for one still moment, what irreplaceable means.

I was warm in front of the fire, sitting with my family and my three best friends. It was a breath of fellowship before I went back to New York, where people don’t know me, or hear my heart when I speak. I was thankful, like I never had been before, for these eight people who knew me, and love me for better or worse.

And I saw, for one intimate moment, what irreplaceable means.

I was falling asleep in my bed when Melissa climbed in with me. She became a woman since I was home last. She shares the Bible verses she’s been memorizing and I feel like I get a glimpse into this brand new person, who is somehow more like a friend than a little girl. We find that we have both, ironically, memorized the whole chapter of “The Mad Tea-party” From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the 51^st Psalm. We say them together. Erica comes in from her bedroom because we are making too much noise, but leaves again because we are only funny to ourselves. Melissa’s eyes are brown, like the Gobi desert, and I watched when they closed for the last time that day.

And I saw, for one quiet moment, what irreplaceable means.

No One Else Quite Can

2007-02-10T16:21:00.001-05:00

Every woman has a calling to be both a work of art that reflects God, and an artist who carries out the creation mandate by shaping the raw landscape she lives in. This great adventure of becoming and creating, is the way we can find our identity and purpose as women. Not only will this transform us, but the beauty of a woman who is living this out will affect everyone around her.

2 Corinthians 3 talks about a glory that radiated off of Moses’ face when he came out of the presence of the Lord, but he would put on a veil because he didn’t want the Israelites to watch it fade. Paul says that the Israelites still have a veil of blindness over their hearts because the veil “is removed in Christ.” (2 Cor. 3: 14) But then the chapter goes on to say that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3: 18) You bear the image of God in your womanhood, and you are “transformed into the same image from glory to glory” as you fall in love with God more intimately. Though the chapter ends with this thought, chapter four opens with an interesting addition: “Therefore, since we have this ministry...” I missed this connection for years because of the chapter division, but it is so clear that ‘this ministry’ is referring back to the themes in chapter three. We know they are connected because of the word ‘therefore’. As believers are transformed into the image of God, they reflect His glory off of their face just as Moses’ face did.

This is a ministry. Every face is entirely unique, and if you shine the same light on every face, every one will reflect the light off differently. Besides the fact that God delights to know you, a major reason why He so urgently pursues your heart is because you reflect aspects of His character that no one else quite can. That’s a thought we don’t hear a lot: you have a ministry to people simply by becoming who you were created to be. A heart fully alive and responsive to God is a powerful ministry. Martha Graham has said: “Each of us express something about God. “It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

One Way We're The Same

2007-02-09T18:49:00.000-05:00

Gender is woven so intrinsically through our being that it’s hard to pick out which parts it affects, and if there are any it doesn’t. Though our whole being seems to image God either as male or female, it’s clear from Scripture that men and women reflect God the same in our spirits, though our bodies and souls are different. This is why in the Bible, moral commands and encouragements are given mostly without distinction between male or female. Men and women don’t ‘specialize’, or have greater abilities to live out different characteristics of godliness; for example, men don’t have an easier time being thankful, women aren’t naturally kinder just because they are a woman. But while our spirits are alike, our souls and bodies are diverse. I use the word soul to encompass personality, and the seating place where the differences of how we think, feel, and act differently come from. Who could argue that men and woman are the same in the way they think or feel?! Clearly, our bodies are also beautifully, wonderfully different. God created two genders, that were equal in their moral standing before him spiritually, but beautifully different in their bodies and inner beings for the same reason He created different seasons, and places, and cultures: glory.

Why We All Need Archetypes and...Dan.

2007-02-09T18:45:00.001-05:00

How to become more feminine is obvious is some ways but not in others. I live in Manhattan, and the other day I passed a man, dressed up for work in a women’s pantsuit and heels. He looked as though he had not been trying to dress like a woman for very long, there was a lot of feminine grace to be wanting. I’ve heard that some people hire a specialist for hundreds of dollars an hour, to teach them how to appear to be more like the opposite gender. Sometimes I feel like that man I passed on the street. Sometimes I feel unfashionable when I am comfortable, and awkward when I try to dress up. I still don’t have a black clutch and so I carry my keys to black tie events. I don’t have a cute sneeze, and no one would hire me to teach them how to stand, or walk, or laugh like a woman. How much more so issues of the soul and spirit. Women need an image to aspire to, a character in a story that we could be so familiarized with, that we could just think of what they would do in our place and then know for ourselves.
I have a friend named Dan who is the most loyal and wonderful ally. He is Sam from the Lord of the Rings. He waits in Matt’s basement for us when we’re coming into town, and never really leaves. He buys things when he’s out that made him think of me. He is fiercely devoted to Matt, Miranda, and I, and is sometimes more offended than we are when we are wronged. When someone I love is in crisis, and I don’t have time to think of principles, I am empowered to give them the encouragement they need to bear them up if I can think of what Dan would do if I were them, and he was me. Sometimes a scene in a story can bring truth to the present situation when you haven’t been faithful to prepare for crisis. We all need examples.

A Juliet For Romeo

2007-02-05T00:02:00.000-05:00

After finding so little feminine imagrey in Scripture, I closed my books and picked up photography as a hobby, thinking that the idea had hit its last dead end. But I couldn’t put the study out of my mind. So I would think about it, and go with different ideas until they dead-ended too. But one night, I was thinking aloud with Miranda; it was four am in the morning, and suddenly I realized that God had built into the whole narrative story, a female prototype. The thought just came to me—as though out of thin air: it’s the church.

Look again at this well known passage in Ephesians: “For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5: 23-24). Though the verse doesn’t come out and say it, the whole premise of this section is that because Christ acted, so husbands should act. Just as the Church responded, so wives should respond. For thousands of years people had been getting married and it was very unclear as to why. The reason, humans instinctively covenant with one another, is a mystery only revealed since Christ walked on earth. The mystery of marriage is that it shows us how Christ and the Church are in relationship with one another. (Ephesians 5:32) But the concept of the Church being the feminine example isn’t just in this section, it’s everywhere.

The feminine model of first, the chosen Israelite people, and then the Church, is the main character in the riveting story of how God has come to save His bride. This study has completely transformed my life, the way I see God, and my relationship with Him. These ideas have changed the message I live to the world through my femininity, because a powerfully redeemed woman represents the Church who God rendered heaven and earth to be in communion with. This message is the purpose, the heart, and the passion behind this study of femininity: we become more feminine women in order to grace the gospel, and to manifest the glory of the beautiful cross.

If you are reading this, and you do not consider yourself to be a Christian, it might be obnoxious to you that I bring everything back around to what may seem to you as unnecessary religious thought and jargon. The reason that Christians are always talking about ‘the cross’, and ‘the gospel’, is that this good new, the knowledge that we are not marked by our own abilities or works any longer, but that God Himself, in flesh, was so moved with compassion (and passion!) that He fully satisfied His justice so that He could be true to His nature, and still be with the Bride that He loved is...life altering. It is so life altering that when you ‘get it’, we call that conversion. It’s like a newlywed obnoxious bringing everything back around to their love story. And is this one a love story! It is the love story every love story is patterned after. It is dark in some places, God even seemed to give up on His bride who continually committed adultery against Him, and even wrote her a certificate of divorce. But the story isn’t finished.

It is in this story, that men learn what true masculinity is, and women learn what it means to be beautiful and alive as women. But the bigger point is, that we all learn who God is. And that’s the point. If you are a Christian, God has enabled you through His forgiveness to have an identity and a purpose that is bigger than yourself, and I would add, a feminine identity and a feminine purpose if you are a woman.

In the Image

2007-02-01T22:06:00.001-05:00

Once, when the Pharisees came to question Jesus, they had crafted a question about taxes. Matthew 22: 15 cites their intent: “Then the Pharisees went and plotted together how they might trap Him in what He said.” The question seemed simple enough: “Is it lawful to give a poll-tax to Caesar, or not?” (Verse 17b) The catch of the question was that the Jewish law already had the people paying significant taxes to the temple in addition the foreign superpower of Rome. Rome had shredded every source of identity for the Jews, by invading and controlling their culture and religion. Paying Roman taxes was a hot issue, which was why the ‘tax collectors’ were hated in their society as betrayers. There seemed no way for Jesus to answer in a way that wouldn’t upset someone. Either way he seemed to have to take a political side, and the Pharisees were hoping that he would say not to pay taxes to Caesar in order to get him arrested.

He asked to see a coin and addressed the crowd, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” (Verse 20) The coin bore the image of Caesar, so Jesus said give that coin back to Caesar. But then He finished by saying: “and {render} to God the things that are God's.” (Verse 21) The first thought in a Jew’s mind was that...God owns everything because He created it. But then my mind goes back to the first question he asked: “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” (Verse 20) James 3:9 says of men that we have “been made in the likeness of God.” You bear God’s image and that comes with rights and responsibilities. Elizabeth Elliot wrote this to her daughter on the eve of her wedding: “You are, Valerie, by the grace of God, a woman. This means you have responsibilities. You are fully a woman, and this means you have privileges. You are only a woman, which means you have limitations. ...Thank God for this, and live it to the hilt!” (Elliot, 151)

Studying what the image of God means is necessary, because the fact that we have been made in his image as women, means that we have responsibilities as women, just as we have moral or rational responsibilities because of having been given a conscience and a mind. Genesis 1:26 is the first mention of image in the Bible, and is the verse that comes before the famous “male and female He created them” section. Verse 26 links image with authority and opportunity: “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them ...”” Genesis 1:26 is called the creation or cultural mandate, and the emphasis’s on taking dominion of the earth and on gender in the next verse, are interestingly paired. Genesis teaches that we bare God’s image as we shape the earth in all forms: in music, art, education, government, law, economics, agriculture, family, and academic pursuits. Any activity that takes raw nature, and orders it, or shapes it to create something new, is what dominion is about. “We are God’s royal stewards, put here to develop the hidden potentials in God’s creation so that the whole of it might celebrate his glory.” (Bartholomew, 37) The fact that God gives the creation mandate right as He finishes created is like Leonardo da Vinci handing you paint brush when the Mona Lisa is mostly finished, and asking you to paint her smile. Unbelievable.

Plato's Forms II

2007-02-01T01:43:00.000-05:00

A form is an idealized character or concept, which can be followed or modeled after. This works in two basic ways. I’ll use the Proverbs 31 woman as an example. Sometimes, this Proverbs 31 woman is talked about as a stereotype, she is someone who has characteristics that all women possess as they mature and so she is an embodiment of a generalization applied to all women. When other women do similar actions as her, you could comment that they are like the Proverbs 31 stereotype.

The other use of a form, or archetype, is to use the image as a model or the epitome of what all women should be. I’m personally a little put off by this use of the Proverbs 31 archetype. Of course that last chapter in Proverbs has something to teach women, but its elevation has caused unnecessary confusion, just as the deification of Mary, or Jael would cause complications. While every female character in the Bible has something to teach about femininity, there are really only two sweeping forms throughout Scripture, and one is far less spoken of than the other.

Plato's Forms

2007-01-31T20:15:00.001-05:00

Sorry to leave everyone hanging. I haven't posted more about the origins of femininity being in the person of God, because I haven’t quite been able to articulate in a theologically sound form, what it is that I have come to be convinced of.

I’ll take a chance.

Even though God is described as a relational God, a helper, lifegiver, artist, muse, giver of rest, source of mystery and reason for modesty, and a whole myriad of other more feminine traits, I don’t think that woman are supposed to look to God as the whole of what we pattern our femininity after. I came to this conclusion after searching for the type of sweeping feminine imagery in Scripture that you could create an archetype, or model after. An archetype is a picture in the mind of God. It is what Plato called a ‘form’. A form of a thing is its’ essence, it’s the ‘flower-ness’ of all flowers that allows you to recognize them as flowers even though they may all be different shapes and heights, and colors.

The very unexpected conclusion I came to after studying femininity in the Bible, was that God himself, as revealed through the story of humanity, is not the most prominent form of what women are supposed to model themselves after. Part of the reason I’m hesitant in say this is because I’ve never heard anyone say this before. And doesn’t it sound slightly, ok, very heretical? Aren’t we supposed to only look to God for the character after which we pattern ourselves? In a moral and spiritual sense, yes. But just as men pattern their masculinity after the images of king, or shepherd, women can look to the archetypes in scripture that are consistently feminine.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please post. My thoughts on this are not set in stone.
To Be Continued...

Feminity In Isaiah

2007-01-31T13:51:00.001-05:00

The majority of feminine imagery is found in Isaiah, and as you can see by the...three verses below, there are not very many.

Isaiah 49:14-15 expresses how God is like a mother who always keeps her children in her thoughts: “But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me.” Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you.”

Isaiah 66:12-13 describes the comforts that come from the God of all Comfort: “For thus says the LORD, "Behold, I extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you will be nursed, you will be carried on the hip and fondled on the knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; and you will be comforted in Jerusalem.”

Isaiah 46:3-4 speaks of creation in the human terms of giving birth and the following stages of development in a mother/child relationship: “Listen to Me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, you who have been borne by Me from birth and have been carried from the womb; even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will bear you! I have done it, and I will carry you; and I will bear you and I will deliver you.” Deuteronomy 32:18 also has the imagery of God bringing forth a creation as a woman does: “You neglected the Rock who begot you, and forgot the God who gave you birth.”

God’s attributes are the source and standard for ours. This is why it seems sad that the majority of biblical imagery is masculine. The few biblical descriptions of God in feminine terms are all poetic analogy, and without exception focus on one aspect of womanhood: mothering. This discovery for me was nothing short of devastating. After weeks of research the Bible, it seemed as though the lack of direction for women from the Church was not due to a lack of teaching, but an actual lack of Scripture. This had never crossed my mind as a possibility. I was sure that in the Bible, somewhere that I had missed in my previous study, there would be passages that talked not just about the feminine attributes of God, such as submission, wisdom, or beauty, but an actual feminine portrayal that would be a little more helpful.
What is here, is all that was found.

To Be Continued...

Two: The Origins of Femininity in the Heart of God

2007-01-31T13:50:00.000-05:00

Resolute, and full of assurance that I would find femininity’s origins in the heart of God, I began pouring through Scripture in search of what Genesis claims. My eagerness waned as the hours passed. Most of the feminine imagery I found was in context of God being a female bird. So far this search was not going very well. There were some things to glean from these analogies, although they were not quite what I was looking for. Throughout Psalms, the writers reference the comfort and protection found under the shadow of God’s wings. God is described as a Mother Bear robbed of her cubs (Hosea 13:8) and a mothering hen in Matthew 23:37 with similar protection described in Ruth 2:12.

Deuteronomy 32:11-12 describes God as a mother eagle:
“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
That hovers over its young,
He spread His wings and caught them,
He carried them on His pinions.
The LORD alone guided him,
And there was no foreign god with him.”

We know this verse is a reference to the female eagle because she is stronger and larger than her mate and is the one who bears the eaglets on her wings when they learn to fly. With unforeseen motion the eagle will plummet down and force them to fly alone. But just like our Father, the mother eagle is always near enough so she can ascend to just below them when they become too tired to go on. This verse is a captivating image of a God who supports the weak on wings that soar high while still pushing His children out of comfort zones. Moses uses the same imagery in Exodus 19:4 when he writes: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you to Myself.”

What poetic images of a God who is tender and strong, and grows us up to be the same. In the next post I will cover Isaiah's discriptions of God in feminine terms.

God as Incorporeal

2007-01-29T19:11:00.000-05:00

“Since God is neither male nor female, but more than that, and yet condescend to reveal something of himself by the way we are created in his image, we can rejoice in the way in which our particular personalities, housed in our femaleness or maleness, reflect a bit of who God is.”

Dawn, Marva J. “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting” Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing co Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1989 P46

God. Gender. The Questioning of Saints’ Masculinity Because of Literary Devices.

2007-01-29T18:58:00.000-05:00

If women and men are made in the image of God, then God must be both masculine and feminine. Speaking of God in feminine terms has gained some popularity in the last few years, so allow me to go through some mandatory clauses before I get into the origins of womanhood in the heart of God. God’s being revealed primarily as male is theologically essential to our understanding and worship of God. I believe this emphasis is necessary and intentional. If God wanted to reveal Himself primarily, or even partly as feminine, it certainly would not have been unusual to either Old or New Testament cultures that often fell away to worshiping female deities. (See Judges 10:6, 1 Samuel 12:10, and Acts 19:24-28)

The feminine revelations of God are similar to descriptions of other men in the Bible. Paul described himself with feminine tenderness in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 saying “But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.” Frustrated Moses complains to God in Numbers 11:12: “Was it I who conceived all this people? Was it I who brought them forth, that You should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a nursing infant, to the land which You swore to their fathers'?” Certainly no one would question these saints’ masculinity based on feminine literary devices. Some scholars have said that God could also be called ‘goddess’, but God’s revealed names are theologically significant and we do not have the right to redefine that revelation.

God is predominantly masculine in Scripture: He is king, judge, lord, shepherd, father, and husband. God is called ‘father’ because he is “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:3), and was titled ‘father’ even before the incarnation because that relationship existed between before creation. The masculine images and names communicate something real about God and a switch to feminine imagery would dilute the strong emphasis on covenant authority that is central to the doctrine of God.

Two: Something to be Celebrated

2007-01-15T00:11:00.000-05:00

So humanity has two genders.
And each gender finds its origin and uniqueness in the heart of God. The first question when I began to wonder what it meant to be a woman was: do women show what God is like just as much as men do? I’m not sure how I grew up as a Christian and never knew the answer to this. Part of the reason for my confusion was because woman’s purpose is often spoken of as being “a helper suitable for {man}.” (Genesis 2:18) 1 Corinthians 11:9 comes out and says why woman was created: “for indeed man was not created for the woman's sake, but woman for the man's sake.” There is obviously a context for that verse, but that was not always how it was presented.

Even though women have a special ability to grace a man and bring honor to him that is not her ultimate goal. Women bring glory and joy to the heart of God first- for all things have been created for His glory and renown. Surely if the whole of nature was made for this purpose then women would not be the only excluded creation. Isaiah 43:6-7 says: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, and whom I have created for my glory.” And God has said in the chapter before: “I am the LORD, that is my name; I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to graven images.” (Isaiah 42:8) Women bring glory to God by being like God, because God of course is everything excellent and praiseworthy. But women do not only reflect God’s nature back to Him in a general or moralistic sense. We do that by being outstanding women. God is given glory through many other generic human and moral qualities also, I am not saying that femininity or masculinity are the most essential ways we bear God’s image or worship Him, they are just one. But realizing, and believing, for the first time that God was glorified, and the world—somehow bettered, because I was born a little girl was deeply moving to me. Seeing gender as something to be celebrated—everyday—and especially on the first day, of a persons life, is meaningful because it is a testimony that God is deep and wide, and spills over out of Adams ribcage and into Eve. It makes me smile to think that maybe angels join the heart of the father when He rejoices too over little boys, and baby girls.

Two: Different Than When You Last Looked

2007-01-14T22:29:00.000-05:00

God had a purpose for creating two genders. Part of that is to bring Himself glory through the manifold display of His nature through the image mankind bears either uniquely as a man or uniquely as a woman. Just as having five senses enables us to experience the world multidimensionaly, the different genders also highlight the different revelations of God. God often gives us pictures in Scripture to teach us what He is like: He is king, judge, potter, shepherd, father, and husband. Each image draws out a different viewpoint of God’s character and He seems different than when we last looked.

It is like experiencing a mountain view over four seasons. In the summer, the wildlife runs over hills and gathers around swift rivers and in meadows. Fall sets the landscape on fire with color; the birds fly away overhead and are gone. Winter strips the trees bare so I can see farther from the same throne-stump than before. Springtime is rebirth set to nature’s soundtrack; it brings in its’ own favorite colors. Each season has its smell and feel, and discoveries.

The universe, has not one dimension but three, the globe has four seasons, the human: five senses. The sky has two great lights: one to illumine the earth and the clouds, and the other to quiet the earth and unmask the stars.

So humanity has two genders.

In the Image

2007-01-10T20:22:00.000-05:00

So how exactly does human nature hold the image of God in a way that all the images and statues of the world do not? Bearing the image of the Creator is often spoken of in terms of moral qualities (such as love or patience). But if this were what bearing God’s image meant, then Adam would have lost the image before he even stepped out of the garden. Bearing the image of God is more than a sum of our parts, “everything we are is like God. We are the image of God (1 Corinthians 11:7). To say we are ‘in’ God's image is to say that we are made ‘to be the image of God.” (1)
The image of God encompasses our entire being, not just our outward composition. “The image of God embraces everything that is human.” (2) It manifests throughout our body, soul, spirit, but also has something to do with our morality, intellect, and language capacities, the creation mandate, and the way that humans learn to relate to God, nature, and each other. I would say that becoming more feminine, means traveling towards the image of God in your mind, body, and soul, in order to relate to men, nature, and God how we were meant to. But I believe that women, bear the image of God differently than men do. If this statement tempts you to write me off as heretical, allow me the chance to convince you. My first argument is from common sense: women are different in their bodies, emotions, even the way their brains function in some capacities. I have already made the case that our souls in heaven will continue to be a particular gender. Though the creation mandate was the same for man and woman, as is their intellectual capacities, women definitely relate to the world outside them differently than a man.
The major reason I connect bearing the image of God being to gender, is because Scripture does. Genesis 1: 27 says “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”. Most books on women’s issues over-quote this verse without really coming out and saying what its significance or meaning is. The phrase ‘male and female He created them’ is an explanation of how mankind was created: either as male or female. This doesn’t mean that the image of God only has to do with gender or that human sexuality is the only way mankind displays God. “The point is not that God is male, female, or both. To say that our eyes image God, remember, is not to say that God has eyes; it is rather to say that our eyes picture something divine. Similarly, our sexuality pictures God's attributes and capacities.” (3)
God is also renewing the image in his people and is transforming us to look more like “Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). 1 John 3:2 tells us that one day “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”. If we bear the image of God either uniquely as a man or as a woman, that means that we also grow in looking more like God, and therefore Christ, as we become more of a woman.

(1) D. J. A. Clines, in "The Image of God in Man," Tyndale Bulletin 19 (1968): 53.

(2 & 3) Piper, John, and Wayne Grudem. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Wheaton: CrossWay Books, 1991.

Like Wide Black Puddles

2007-01-10T18:12:00.000-05:00

From the beginning of recorded history and across the world’s cultures, idol worship has always been practiced. But ancient Jews were a peculiar people, because their God forbid the making or worship of graven images. Instead, God said that they were an image of what He was like, and that one would come who would be the “exact representation of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3) Creation, without being carved or reordered in any way, represents and resembles God.
This can both draw people to God as well as repel them. It is a common experience for people to be apprehensive of God because of their life experiances. And it makes sense that God would be similar to the rest of what we have seen in our world. But the image we bare is a lot like the pictures I have left of my great grandmother: they are faded and torn around the edges with black and white spots left where the picture was damaged. The photograph is just an image, and not a perfect one, like the reflection of a cityscape off a wide, black puddle.
Mark Buchanan has said of this: “In our own hands, God has become our image bearer rather than we his.”2 God can be made out vaguely, as though “in a mirror dimly” (1Corinthians 13:12) by looking at His Creation, but we see Him most fully by experiencing Christ.

2 Buchanan, Mark. Your God is too Safe. Sisters, Oregon, Multnomah Publishers; 2001 P13

I'm Heading Down to the Keys

2006-12-30T11:55:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I've posted since I'm on a road trip to the Florida Keys, but I hope to have internet access- and thus post- soon. In the meantime, here are some pictures of myself, the ocean, and the lovely Miranda Suzanne.

It has been refreshing to spend long hours in thought and writing while going from the open road straight to the sea. St Agustine has plenty of beauty to inspire. I absolutly recommend coming to see this amazing little town.

Books that I've been reading:

Macroeconomics
James
Sailing around the world alone
Desiering God by Piper
12th Night

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

2006-12-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

Return to your rest,
O my soul,
For the Lord has dealt Bountifully with you.
Psalms 116:7

My aunt Rachel, has a wood burning stove in her home, and in the winter she lays fresh pines on the top...the aroma is really something you have to be there to believe. The cadence of seasons take the world under in turn, and winter comes in through windows and under doors. Her winter is filled with soup, and classic books, good tea, and early nights bundled in the loft where the heat gathers. Everything about her life changes as the earth does. Rachel is not a Christian, so winter doesn’t include Christmas, and though she loves creation fiercely, she doesn’t necessarily agree with the biblical view of nature being fallen, but awaiting restoration.
Christians would say that earth alone shares with man the condition of being both full of life and death, and because we are such the same, there are patterns and lessons writ large over landscapes. Rachel doesn’t love nature because Romans one says it teaches her about God or herself, she just knows she sees that divine spark in the earth and oceans.
My hope for myself and for you this Christmas, is that we would learn about rest and restoration from earth’s winters, and show up to learn all this season has to teach us about ourselves and the heart of God. I hope the days stretch out and are filled with the rejuvenation that takes place only in quiet solitude. I hope for a time of restfulness instead of busyness, to have a spark of the fire that Christ cast over the world—a slow flame that warms from within and grows to transforms all it touches.
Merry Christmas.

On Femininity as Characteristics, Tea in Coffee Shops, and Beachballs

2006-12-04T15:17:00.000-05:00

Now that I think about it, this idea surfaced at a coffee shop on a ‘couple’s date’ with Heidi and Mike (now Daniels.)We were all having tea. Conversations with them feels like pulling the hidden beach ball you aren’t allowed to have, out of your graduation gown, and letting it fly. No one really holds onto the ball for too long lest it be confiscated; we lurch the topic into the air with questions back and forth, to keep our own legalism from pulling the topic down; telling us we should already know the answer to the question, or that it shouldn’t even be asked. The pile of books, spontaneously brought along with our bibles, intrigued other people when they caught snippets of our conversation. Sometimes the volume got a little out of control, and the ball would fly over to a different table or seating nook, and people couldn’t help but join in bopping the forbidden beach ball back into the air. It’s safe because it’s non-committal, if the ball comes to you, you push it up. It is over sooner than anyone can accuse you of heresy. People ask their questions and then settle—slightly ruffled— back into their papers with a suppressed smile. It does feel good.

The topic this night wasn’t particularly controversial, but interesting enough:
“I just don’t like the female arch-types the culture throws at us,” Heidi began. “It’s as though in order to fulfill the image of ‘Christian woman’ you need to be totally inspired by the Proverbs 31 woman, and do decoupage, and have rose wall-papered bedrooms.” (Even though Heidi does have a have rose wall-papered bedroom)
“Well, would you say that the problem people find themselves in,” Matt volunteered, “ is wanting to give a specific image that other people can work towards, as an inspiration—” Heidi finished his thought: “but then you end up losing identity as you journey more towards the ideal. So people feel like in order to be ‘more of a man’, or ‘more of a woman,’ you need to become less of an individual person.”
“So would you say then that there is a problem with our ideal, and not necessarily the practise of giving one?” I offered.

This whole time Mike had been drawing lines on a napkin.
“Maybe,” he started in a still-distracted tone, “being the fullest woman or man you can be, isn’t about having all the ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ qualities in order to achieve the ideal. Maybe it’s growing in all the gender-related qualities that you are supposed to have.”
“Would you add to that then that men and women are both supposed to have a little bit of both?” Matt asked.
“And what are the feminine characteristics?” I asked, wanting to define the terms.
“And how do you know which ones you are meant to perfect in order to fill the role God has for you in telling people about who He is like?” Mike asked before sitting back into his chair and crossing his legs.
We all immediately knew that something really right had just been discovered, because anytime an easy, black and white solution is scrapped for a vague and more colorful concept that is harder to nail down or box in—it has a greater chance of being a God thing, rather than a ‘church’ thing.

To be continued...

On Webster

2006-12-01T12:27:00.000-05:00

A word on definitions: defining a word is simply taking a concept or idea, and translating the abstract thought back into the physical realm in the form of a spoken or written word. Womanhood is sometimes hard to see in the physical, so translating it into word makes this vague concept more tangible.

Peter Kreeft’s chapter on definitions in his work: Socratic Logic is helpful in finding the best definition for this concept. He illustrates how the best definition of a concept would be a statement that identified the thing’s essence, as well as its specific difference. An essence is stated by finding what “general class the thing essentially belongs to.” (Kreeft 126) In other words, what is femininity at its essential nature? Christianity is a religion. Flowers are plants. Djembe is a type of drum. Next, “the specific difference tells us how the thing defined differs from all other members of its class.” (Kreeft 126) For example: flowers are a plant, but they are not trees or bushes.

There are other rules for defining concepts. A definition cannot be metaphorical, vague, circular, or only defined by what it is not. Many definitions of being ‘feminine’ break these rules and thus are not helpful. An example of a circular definition would be: What is femininity? The quality of being a woman. A woman then, is the state of being a female genetically, as well as possessing feminine qualities, which is just another way of saying ‘feminine’. In Christian writing on the topic, I also see a lot of vague examples or insights on the definition, but it is never really stated. And then there is the negative definition. Women are not men. Feminine is not masculine. Again, completely unhelpful.

So what is femininity?

Femininity is a set of characteristics through which humanity proclaims the manifold nature and glory of God. Humanity does this by baring His image either uniquely as a male or as a female. Feminine characteristics are differentiated from the other ways mankind bares the image of God in that they are not moral characteristics, or masculine characteristics.

So there it is in a nut shell.

The Feminist Movement Part Two: June Cleaver

2006-11-29T17:09:00.000-05:00

In the 1950s the June Cleavers of the world packed their pearls and pumps to join corporate America, and it was less than a decade before most external marks of gender distinction faded out of American society. Before this point in history, most cultures had a way of hi-lighting masculine and feminine differences through dress and time occupation; these differences were seen as outward materialization of deeper realities. However, when the obvious distinctions of gender were stripped from society in the 1950’s, it uncovered a lack of solid doctrine. And so the questions, unmet with sufficient answers, lingered in the air as though an answer in and of themselves.

Feminism’s deceptions began to erode at the truth of what it means to be a woman on the heels of an era that made important advancements in gender equality. During the sixties and seventies there were two important questions being asked: the first was can genders be held as separate and yet equal, and secondly, what does it mean to be uniquely feminine or uniquely masculine? America had been asking since Plessy vs. Ferguson if separation and difference could still be equal— in terms of race as well as gender. Feminism whispered no, and the annihilation of gender distinction began. (As Christians we should know that while God only acknowledges one race: the human race, He acknowledges two distinct genders. This is why separate cannot be equal between ‘races’ but can between genders.)

Instead of returning to the beliefs/teachings of church fathers, the following era saw a religious re-institution of the obvious distinctions that eliminated the need to ask deeper questions. Since the role of women in the home and the church was under attack in society, there was counter action against the efforts to dissipate or reverse gender roles. The wearing of skirts and dresses became entwined with the definition of evangelical femininity. The modern home school movement also began which was consistent with the efforts to encourage women to be more home-centered.

These two areas of emphasis however, do not present the whole picture of femininity any more than if you were to define a man only in context to his role in the home and the church! My mother’s generation needed strong expositional teaching on submission and a women’s role in these two areas as her world during the sixties and seventies was saturated with lies that undermined these truths. My generation however is no longer inundated with strong anti-femininity messages, and yet the church continues to fight a battle that I would submit, the truth of God’s word has already won. We are daily seeing a return to the truth that women do thrive in the home, that women do long for children and family, and that a career is not the pinnacle of life.

The Feminist Movement Part One: Is it Necessary to Re-visit the Crossroads?

2006-11-29T16:48:00.000-05:00

Femininity has been so drastically redefined over the past one hundred years. Women have unprecedented opportunity and freedom which has motivated many to stop and consider the questions you have just been contemplating. Choice unveils values and character because in order to say ‘yes’ to something, you must say ‘no’ to an unknown number of other opportunities. It is easy not to think about direction when walking down a one way street but crossroads tend to provoke thought. In this way, women’s liberation has been a great tool to inspire women towards contemplating what their expression of womanhood could be.

Heresy, for example, provides a beautiful opportunity to discover afresh truths that are worth debating. Many of the Church's greatest and most beautiful creeds initiate from strife and division in the Church. It seems that through every age, the church has had its unique battles as culture adopts different worldviews. Often virtues rise in importance in order to combat the current of the culture; the most superficial readings of other era’s writing confirm this. C. S. Lewis writes of this: “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes... The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds... not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”

My experience with the church’s teaching on the subject of womanhood has always been narrowly focused on two or three good points. These, unfortunately, were over-taught to the exclusion of most everything else. I hope this has not been your experience. But because this was mine, I found myself on a very passionate pursuit to try and understand why I was experiencing frustration at what was being taught about ‘biblical femininity’ within women’s circles. This search led me to the feminist movement.

Every book on the shelves of the Christian woman’s isle has its section on the feminist movement, and how it has poisoned the modern Christian woman. Because of this, I am inclined to apologize before I begin mine. If it helps, my thesis is the opposite of what is normally stated which is why I broke my initial vow not to write on the issue. It is true, the feminist movement has shaped the way most 21^st century Americans view the role and nature of femininity. The reason that I am addressing this issue is not to re-state this point, but to suggest that perhaps the American Christian’s view is more sharply influenced by the church’s counter attack of the movement’s assertions. For this reason, I feel it would be beneficial to revisit the recent history of the feminist movement in order to analyze how the church has responded to it. Though I did not witness the events—being only twenty years old—as much as I have been able to gather, this is a summery to my understanding, of what occurred:

Continued...

Sketch

2006-11-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

Before moving forward, it might prove useful to analyze where you are in your perception of femininity. How has the word femininity been defined in your experience? Whether you have thought about the essence of womanhood extensively, or not at all, take a moment to free write on what it means to be a woman. Allow your answer to surprise you. Instead of editing yourself, surface everything in your heart even if you find yourself voicing concepts that upon writing, you recognize as false. If nothing initially comes to mind, listing the words that mean about the same thing to you as the word ‘feminine’, often reveals what you strongly associate with it. Ask yourself what images or people have been defining examples of femininity in your life.

Once you have a thoroughly sketched your experience with this concept, analyze what is written. When I poured all my ideas and presumptions into black and white, I realized that one very important question needed to be asked to clarify my pre-conceived notions. The question that plagued me was: “how much can femininity change from what I just defined it as, and still be God-glorifying womanhood?” In other words, how big is your definition? Could it assimilate into another culture or time period? The final definition needs to be deep and specific, but also encompass all women.

Is your definition too narrow?

Daybreak

2006-11-07T23:08:00.000-05:00

Once when I was in the hospital, I was walking-very slowly- to the bathroom and an old woman was walking down the hall just the same pace as me. Her skin was antique white like mine, and her eyes were dull blue-gray like ocean shadows. And we looked at each other, her and I, and I think we both wondered how long the other had to live. Then bowed over, like branches after a storm, we continued walking on, knowing you cannot ask in hospitals though sometimes I think people should.

When I think about her, I think about the long hallways of retirement homes. The hallways hold in their quietness the smell of the end of all things. I pass by the rooms until I see her in my memory and she sits facing the window. The light that silhouettes her is the sun of a new beginning, but tomorrow it could be the light of heaven or judgment that throws her shadow back. I wonder what she thinks about. All that she has done is a shadow behind her. All that she was praised and loved for was branded on hearts long since dead. Now there is silence. There are stories too, but mainly silence. Now all she has, is what she has been, and what she is as she sits in the quiet room. We all know this because we sense the emptiness of only sitting around and telling even the most glorious of tales.

All my life I’ve done instead of been. But the beautiful thing about being a Christian, is that the Holy Spirit comes and He testifies to us these truths if we will reach into the supernatural and receive them by faith. Psalms 91 says “so teach us to number our days, so we will incline our hearts to wisdom.” Maybe the reason God strips every man just before he return to dust, is so that the heart can incline to wisdom. The dull roar of the audience, wealth, physical beauty and strength; it all just quietly fades. There is God, and who you are, alone at the end of a hallway. And when I’m there sitting in my wheelchair I want to have been something worth being.

I want to be a woman. Not just do and not do the things women are allotted to. These two things seem so similar but at the end, just a degree off lands you miles from true north. It’s hard to grow in who you are instead of what you do, but it can be done. It takes a willingness to be quiet, to be intentional, and truthful, and willingness to endure brokenness and pain. Ironic, that all these things can come with old age or before, depending on the softness of a person's heart. Well, I know for myself, I want to be willing to be who I am ment to be this side of the light, while the rising light still means daybreak.

Stepping Out of Yesterday's Clothes

2006-11-07T19:58:00.000-05:00

We all have a list of things to be intentional about. Purposeful removal of sin may or may not be on your list. Keeping your hair straight-ironed might be higher than anyone knows. Health, relationships, your creativity, or rest may be on your list. I would like to invite you to add ‘being feminine’ to your list. Some will have to be convinced that being feminine is even a good thing, because it’s been defined in their experience to be negative or just plain insignificant.

For now, put the concept of identifying, and living out of the part of you that is uniquely female into your own words. Perhaps the definition you’ve been taught seems to exclude significant parts of your personality and character. Or perhaps for you, the word feminine draws up images of long skirts and rose wall paper.

Maybe you need healing in this area, because you have been molded into something that isn’t who you were created to be so that you would be more ‘christian’. But all mass-produced people could never bring the heart of God worship or delight because we do that through our unique expression of Him. That’s what bearing His image means. Perhaps this is you. Perhaps you really hate Proverbs 31 and Titus 2 and all aspects of women’s retreats especially decoupage.

That’s allowed here.

Others are neutral or very comfortable with the strictest versions of femininity. For everyone who has a position and everyone who maintains a non-position, you are welcome on this journey.

I started this journey because I wanted to step out of the smallness of my American Christianity like yesterday’s clothes. I wanted to finally find a definition of womanhood that was big enough for all times, for all people, full of grace and truth. I believe in a definition that has many faces, but isn’t inclusive at the expense of losing truth.

This journey is for people who love the truth more than being right—or at least, really want to be that way. I hope this blog will be big enough for all of you. But even if it’s not, know that God is. God is big enough for all cultures and all types of women. One of the most beautiful truths I’ve learned as I’ve just started to take in the world, is that Christianity is big enough. God restores and renews all peoples so that they become who they were created to be. I hope that as you journey into what it means to live, you will start to allow something to unfold inside of your spirit, something beautiful and deeply feminine.

The Invitation

2006-11-04T00:07:00.000-05:00

Before you begin this blog on femininity, a relevant question to first ask is why it matters if you can define what it means to be a woman. Many have established the position that womanhood comes naturally—like the seasons, or the skies as they redress. They say our gender is so tailored into the fabric of our being, that it is not something that needs to be thought on at length. Womanhood is beautiful because part of becoming a woman does unfold naturally, like a flower that leans into the sun or opens to the rain. And it seems like it should be that way. But sometimes ideas that seem to be universally understood are really not. It is difficult to articulate and define terms such as womanhood, justice, compassion, or what it means to just be human and fully alive.

I am just 20 years old. As I take my first steps into womanhood, I am realizing that how I participate in this existence we call humanity, is intrinsically tied to who I am as a woman. My belief about the essence of femininity colors every part of my life, because my gender cannot be extracted out of my body or soul. The ancients described man as being composed of body, soul, and spirit with gender woven throughout all three.

Now this is very interesting. As humans, we can take an abstract concept like femininity, and mentally remove it from the body it manifests itself in. The mind can do this with all definable concepts. An example would be subtracting the color white from snow. You could never physically remove ‘whiteness’ from snow—but you can do it mentally. The contrast of femininity and color is fitting because both are very hard to describe. How do you define ‘blue’ or 'red'?

A basic law of our universe, is that God created all things to be irreducibly complex. Though people have the amazing ability to conceptualize the essence of femininity apart from it being in a particular woman, I do not believe this separation will ever be a future or spiritual reality. Some argue that gender is not essential to the essence of a person because they believe it is temporal. And yet Jesus was referred to as masculine after his resurrection and recognizable as the same person. We know that “we will be also in the likeness of his resurrection” (Romans 6:5). There is nothing in Scripture that alludes to a loss of gender in Heaven, only the fulfillment of marriage as we know it.

Elisabeth Elliot writes in Let Me Be A Woman: “The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman.” Galatians 3:28-29 seems to argue this as well: “There is neither Greek nor Jew, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In Galatians, Paul is speaking of the equality we have in Christ as He address the question of gentile inclusion before the Jerusalem counsel in Acts 15. In all of his later letters, Paul acknowledges the differences between the groups by giving individual instruction to slave and free, male and female, etc. So this verse cannot be used to mean there literally is no difference between genders.

The fact that I am a woman does make me a different kind of Christian because I represent a different facet of God’s image on earth than a man. Much is shared but some is not. If being a woman is an intentional, God-glorifying sanction that will never cease to be, then studying the essence of what it means to be a woman is important. Gender is the second largest classification of human beings in the physical realm. Because of this, gender studies should not be lumped with ‘side issues’ the church cycles through every five or ten years, it should be a fundamental topic we come back to again and again. And acknowledging the journey is the first step.

So I would like to invite you to be intentional about walking in femininity if this is your first consideration of it, and to encourage you in the journey if you are already walking. I look forward to reading your imput as we go deeper into these ideas...

-Stephanie

And I Thought That Was Beautiful

2006-10-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

If man's first problem is being sinful, his second is ignorance. Being intentional is the art of seeing. There are so many levels of awareness beyond just opening your eyes to the world. Today, I walked down the streets of Manhattan and even though my eyes were open, most of the actual picture was filtered out automatically. I have no idea what I missed. But I did see the canopy of all-black umbrellas—their pointed spokes are always at head level. I saw the white umbrella. I saw a woman who was crying as she walked in her husband’s arms, because she was old and still vulnerable, and I thought that was beautiful.

Do you ever wonder what you’re not seeing? I’m especially afraid of what everyone else sees in me that I am blind to. Watching the early auditions of American Idol has been the greatest motivator towards seeing myself accurately, because the show exposes the levels of self deception a person can sink to. Some of the contestants couldn’t accept the truth of how terrible their voices were, even when credible judges were all telling them not to ever come back, or quit their day jobs. Somewhere they must have made the choice to actively lie to themselves and only listen to people who said what they wanted to hear. That is frightening... on so many levels. Firstly, because this type of lying is usually not isolated to one talent (or lack thereof), and secondly, because they may never realize how distorted their self perception is.

Then again, maybe we’re all more like these poster children then we think we are. After all, actively lying to yourself and simply not pursuing truth brings you to the same place. Ignorance is Deception’s brother. Both are exposed through living with your eyes wide to the world and a mind that loves the truth rather than just being right and comfortable. I see in my own life, that when I am not walking in love or discipline, my problem always stems from the fact that my thinking is wrong. If I don't believe and recieve truth about an area, I certainly cannot walk in it. But so often, the cause of sin and problems in my life, is not the active acceptance of untruth, but the lack of discipline to stir up and remind myself of what I believe. This is all just a long-winded version of my mother's belief that if we were to live out of even 10 percent of what we already know, we would be saints. Being intentional is asking what characteristics are defining to your identity and purpose, and then being moved by truth and conviction.

My prayer for us all is that we would step outside of
our normal thoughts,
our schedules,
our familiar places,

And be willing to see.