biblical femininity

in the last year of my life i (hope) have been studying alot on what healthy relationships between men and women look like. it's brought up alot of questions and i've gotten alot of answers... but i always have more questions than answers.

i LOVE questions. i love asking questions because people fascinate me and questions - when answered in honest vulnerability - show me the depth of who people are. likewise, when there are questions i'm asking myself, i get a better sense of what drives me and makes me who i am when i'm able to see a character trait of my own - whether good or bad - more clearly.

one of the shockers for me this last year was realizing how deeply engrained secular femininism is in my mindset when it comes to how it has impacted my view of ministry, church leadership and my own interaction with my brothers in Christ.

lately, while still trying to counteract alot of what society-induced feminism has taught me over the years, i read the book Wild at Heart by John Eldridge.

whoa.

when i finished the book it was as if i'd started seeing the men in my life through new eyes. i'd gained a new appreciation for who they are and the God-given motivation they have to protect, pursue and seek adventure.

"The heart of a man is like deep water ..." - Proverbs 20:5

i am beyond blessed to have men in my life who cherish me for who i am, delight in me, rescue me when i am in need, protect me and inspire me by sharing their love for God - the source of their strength. i've been grateful for their place in my life before, but i've never quite appreciated them as much as i do now.

with gaining some new understanding of the masculine heart, i've of course started questioning how God designed the feminine heart as well. it's been fascinating as i read exerpts about healthy femininity the way God designed us to be and what that looks like in the Body of Christ.

it's so difficult sometimes to explain to an american woman these days that i'm okay letting the men in my life lead. when i say something like that, they almost think i'm saying i'm less than a man and i don't think highly of myself or my abilities in comparison with a man's.

that's not it at all.

i believe a woman with men in her life who offer kind strength rather than abusive and controlling strength (which society has us believing is nearly the essense of masculinity) does not see herself as less... but as valued.

today i came across a great insight from Elizabeth Elliott in her response to what the "Essense of Femininity" is. i wanted to share a part of it that really hit home for me:

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"The first woman was made specifically for the first man, a helper, to meet, respond to, surrender to, and complement him. God made her from the man, out of his very bone, and then He brought her to the man. When Adam named Eve, he accepted responsibility to "husband" her---to provide for her, to cherish her, to protect her. These two people together represent the image of God---one of them in a special way the initiator, the other the responder. Neither the one nor the other was adequate alone to bear the divine image.

The gentle and quiet spirit of which Peter speaks, calling it "of great worth in God's sight" (1 Peter 3:4), is the true femininity, which found its epitome in Mary, the willingness to be only a vessel, hidden, unknown, except as Somebody's mother. This is the true mother-spirit, true maternity, so absent, it seems to me, in all the annals of feminism. "The holier a woman is," wrote Leon Bloy, "the more she is a woman."

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. "If a man will let himself be lost for My sake," Jesus said, "he will find his true self." A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate---humble obedience---but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested.

To gloss over these profundities is to deprive women of the central answer to the cry of their hearts, "Who am I?" No one but the Author of the Story can answer that cry."

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seriously? how freeing are those words?!?!

"life's a dance we learn as we go", as that old song says... and oh boy am i learning.





(the entire chapter that Elizabeth Elliott contributed to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood -A Response to Evangelical Feminism by Wayne Grudem and John Piper can be found online here.)