I spoke with my mom on the phone last night. Our conversations keep circling back to these weird times we are living, and she said something I thought was worth writing down: I hope people are taking this time to slow down and think. Maybe it will change the way they live. Maybe it will change everything for them.
Like it or not, she’s right. Everything has come to a screeching halt, and it is the perfect opportunity to pose thoughtful questions. Before we start the engine back up–if that is what happens–question everything. Knock on the door and boldly ask for bread, for understanding and insight. I am posting a small series of some of my midnight conversations–I’d love to hear yours, too.
I’ve been thinking more about femininity and our culture, and how it enmeshes itself with our modern American version of Christianity. I have touched on this in a previous post, written last year after Rachel Held Evans passed away. In a way, she split hairs for the faith community. She stepped into a gap and bluntly asked the questions we all had but were too afraid of rocking the boat. We differ in many ways, but like her, I have wandered this desert of perplexing “Biblical womanhood” for several years.
It has never felt natural to me to paste myself to the wallpaper or be a domesticated “help meet” to my spouse. I’m pretty independent, sort of stubborn, and embarrassingly low maintenance. I crave uncomplicated routines and despise laziness. At the same time, I am aware of the truth in the statement that beauty fades but a gentle spirit is forever lovely. The gritty sandpaper of the Spirit has had to smooth a lot of my rough edges, and I’m learning to yield a bit sooner as clay in the hands of a Potter.
My husband has pursued a career while I have stayed home and raised children. The feminist would cringe if they heard me declare my love for homemaking (by that I do not mean house cleaning), but I’m afraid they would stand and applaud if I confessed how much I grieved my lost dreams from my twenties. I didn’t even know what those dreams were, but I was sure I could knock them out if given a chance. Then God gave me four babies. It powered up the Holy Spirit sander–they have completely worn me down. Now I am equally at home in my mind mindlessly washing dishes as I am doing anything work or dream-related.
How does one explain the peace that comes with forfeit to a go-getter who has pursued their dreams? This was where I slipped off the train that carried people like Rachel Held Evans to feminist-Christian applause and success. I stopped questioning if God’s ways were higher and if His words held water. Of course they were. Of course they did. In our marriage, it wasn’t an argument that landed me a loser; we simply allowed the money making responsibility to rest on my husband’s shoulders, because he is better at it. It made sense. Likewise, I’m better at home life. Happier, even. I love my kids and am thankful to stay home with them. Some things are no-brainers: our marriage works best when we link arms and humbly take up our respective responsibilities.
Still, I’m no June Cleaver. There remains an unspoken tension when we compare our life to others in our conservative, evangelical circle, because even though things work for us, it doesn’t line right up with expectations. For beginners, we got married and told as few of people as possible just to avoid the gratuitous reactions of people who only slightly knew us. In the Love and Respect class we took, we found ourselves a backward combination: he wanted more love and I wanted more respect. There isn’t a bone in Joe’s body that desires an important, well-spoken, sharp-dressed, influential presence in the church. It makes me uneasy to admit how much I despise small talk and womens’ conferences and table decorations and fussing about refreshments and furniture and baby showers.
We are two oddballs, puzzled over mysteries like the perceived higher calling of being in the “paid ministry” and fellow believers who have no interest in setting a foot in their child’s school or Sunday school class. We are often impatient with a world that encourages us to love our neighbors but has such a hard time realizing that that means here and now and him and her. There is nothing remarkable about us, yet we feel so much on the fringes of Christian culture.
What do you do with folks who don’t fall in step with the crowd? What if they just won’t step in the water and ride the current? What about the system shakers that don’t take a side? I’m afraid I can come off as annoying or impossible to please. But if a person is bold enough to challenge the norms, they risk all sorts of labels.
After studying scripture and asking God to throw more bread, I think mostly everything I was raised to believe about women is only half true, if true at all. Rachel Held Evans hinted at it–I think she was on the cusp. I am finally understanding why my life, my marriage, and our perspective (mine and Joe’s) doesn’t always line up with cultural expectations. The view from the mountaintop looks nothing like the view from the valley. But sometimes in the church, we’re given a perspective that paints a picture only accessible from the top. It cuts out a lot of people who have to climb trees, like Zacchaeus, because they’re at a disadvantage–simply put, they’re too short to see. We’ve been fed a steady diet of what a women or a man ought to look like with little nuance and appreciation for differentiation. Mostly I am thinking on women, because I am one. Specifically in our culture of conservative American evangelicalism, we’ve been alerted to two paths–loud, obnoxious, rebellious (wrong), or gentle, quiet, obedient (right).
It should be simple, but I keep throwing rocks at the foundation of what I’ve been taught to see if it holds up. For example, the husband is supposed to be the head of the home, the spiritual leader. But what about the single woman? What about the woman married to a man who doesn’t want to be a spiritual leader? What about a woman who has lived through abuse and doesn’t trust men? With one-size-fits-all, it is difficult to find a place for the outliers.
As I get older, I realize I’m more aware of how easily I fell into this supposition that people who are able to follow the rules or match pitch must be right, therefore knocking the rest of us out of the running. But womanhood is not only for homemakers and hospitality and June Cleaver. Even if all the audio Bible versions I’ve ever listened to are women actors acting helpless, weepy, pitiful, or emotionally unstable, I know this is not a valid picture of womanhood.
I think I’ve always been a bit aware of the disconnect. The flannel board from my childhood Sunday school memory made Lydia, Martha, Mary, Magdalene, Esther, Ruth and Naomi all look the same. Even Eve just needed a robe in place of her carefully-adjusted hair and fig leaf to look the part. They were beautiful, shallow, Elizabeth Taylor versions of Bible characters, none of whom resembled any women I’d ever seen. None were portrayed as people I actually knew–none except poor Martha–and she was, in church, brushed off as a distracted control freak. Martha, whose work ethic resembled every good woman I’d ever loved and admired, the first to get up and serve, the last to sit down and rest. The tireless mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who fixed food and cleaned it up with not one nod of gratitude in her direction.
I could read the story, but how was I to really believe it, that love was sitting at the feet of Jesus and not getting the table set for supper? It took years before I put it into context, that at the time Martha’s story was unfolding, Jesus was there–God in person. Poor Martha. She should’ve been using paper plates, not scrubbing dishes.
This is what fooled me for so long–flannel board women, two-dimensional stories. Tales that wrapped women in petty roles. None of them mirrored my mother, grandmothers, aunts, or virtually anyone I knew in the midwest. When I happened upon the chapters describing the roles of men and women in the church, I shrugged and figured they were antiquated. It kept men happy to limit a woman, it made them puff their chest out a bit to keep them quiet.
Let me say, I rarely, rarely saw a man who led his family the way our Bible told us–the “spiritual leader”. My father loved my mother, but did he love her as much as he loved his own body? It seemed pretty apparent that deep down every mother was in charge of the leading.
This is actually what flipped the switch for me.
God doesn’t ask easy things of us. He didn’t ask that a man simply go to work and make money, then retire to the couch for the rest of the evening. He asked him to take care of a woman like it were his own flesh. He doesn’t ask women to sit pretty and keep kids quiet. He asks them to live meaningful lives where not a single word or action is wasted. He didn’t send Jesus to ace some test and prove He was flawless. God held a heavenly list of people who needed to experience love, and He sent Jesus to check off each personality type that has ever represented all of the human race. He hung out with his single friends, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. He loved on women who were abused and tossed to the side. He approached women just to talk with them. He let women touch him. He raised a little girl from the dead and asked for some breakfast. He took the babies from the arms of their mothers just to snuggle them for a moment and smell their sweet heads. He let women be the first to witness his risen self–even though a woman’s voice didn’t count as testimony in the court!
You want to know who has chutzpah, who made the balls-iest move in all of the New Testament? It was a Gentile woman with a demon-possessed child who begged Jesus for help. Those good men, those wonderful, super perceptive, servant-hearted disciples (note my sarcasm) told Jesus he needed to make her go away. But Jesus pulled her aside and spoke in code. It was a secret language she understood, a pact between just the two of them. Hear this: Jesus pulled a Gentile woman into his circle and spoke her heart language:
It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.
And she shot back the quickest answer only a woman with incredible wit and a lifetime of pain could give:
Yes it is, Lord. Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.
In that time, a man would have every right to kick her in the face for being so cheeky. Jesus applauded the woman and healed her daughter that very instant. (Matthew 15)
Women are essential, elevated, big-time, multi-dimensional characters. We get it wrong all the time because we have the mountain view, the view that values beauty, success, health and wealth. We display our Beth Moores and Ann Voskamps and June Cleavers as the ultimate example of womanhood because they fit our flannel board minds, but we forget we are little shorties who need to climb a tree to see Jesus. The scope of womanhood is an ocean.
Now there are voices all the time being added to this discussion. They challenge our perspective and have incredible sway on our thinking. I listened to a recent podcast of Jen Hatmaker interviewing Glennon Melton-Doyle. These ladies are prominent faith leaders, you could say, and the frustration they expressed regarding this very subject–a woman’s place in society–was palpable. Both authors have recently released books, manifestos, you could call them, regarding the friction caused by unrealistic expectations–the flannel board woman. The conversation was all about feminism, power, the church. However, Hatmaker and Melton-Doyle explained their way out of the fundamental evangelical church, which they felt restricted their freedom. From their perspective, they are breaking chains and the unspoken rules that held them captive participants to life. They describe themselves as teachers of women, as if they are opening doors no one has ever walked through. They say they know the secret to regaining their wildness, untaming the tamed. It begins with hot anger at the system and courage enough to challenge the status quo. There is a sneaky twisting of facts. Do not subscribe to their fake news.
Jesus does not hold women in bondage. He raises a banner of love over us.
Get out of your Sunday school room and toss the flannel in the garbage. God’s love for women is not a thrift store, hand-me-down version. You can’t buy a higher quality, more fulfilling, satisfying, wild and wonderful life than the one He wants to give to you. Power, success, beauty–you’ll forget what you used to want when you run into Jesus.
Climb up into the tree to see Him, let your perspective be changed.
