O Zion, Haste
I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a region dotted by dilapidated family farms and former coal towns. We are the second poorest county in the state and the most exotic animal we ever saw was the occasional bear or mountain lion. But within the church I discovered the world.
I met women like Amy Carmichael and Mary Slessor and learned that the measure of womanhood was not your relationship status or professional accomplishments, but whether you lived your life in service of God and others. In elementary school, I knew the flags of over thirty nations—not because of the Olympics but because we hung them from the ceiling every year during our missions’ conference week. I became versed in cold-war politics when for two summers we sent our VBS nickels and dimes to the underground church in the Soviet Union.
The story of Christian missions is a complicated one. When I was young, it was all about adventure and holy passion and converting cannibals. As I grew older, I discovered that mission efforts often ran parallel to and sometimes intersected the darker story of western colonization. I read Achebe and Paton and Forster and had to face the reality that when David Livingston was taking the gospel to free souls in the interior of Africa, the United States was embroiled in a civil war to keep their cousins enslaved.
Until recently, sorting through the complicated picture of Christian missions has been more a question of presuppositions and sanitized history. And to some degree, it always will be; but thanks to sociologist Robert Woodberry, it might be getting a bit clearer. In the latest edition of Christianity Today, Andrea Palpant Dilley writes about Woodberry’s work to find a “significant statistical link” between democracy and Protestantism. And after years of detailed research, extensive travel, and with the help of some elaborate computer models, he has.
Woodberry’s research can be summed up by this claim:
“Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.”
In a word, when I was learning about Amy Carmichael and Mary Slessor, I was learning about the greatest promoters of sustainable democracy.
If my childhood was shaped by the stories of missionaries and conversion, my adult life has been shaped by the stories of soldiers and violence. I was a newly-married 22-year-old on September 11, 2001, still naïve enough to believe that our response would be limited to fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. But over the subsequent decade, our attempts to “bring democracy’ to the Middle East have failed; and if this has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot win “hearts and minds” with guns and tanks. In fact, if Woodberry’s claims are correct, this is best accomplished through the gospel of peace.
But it’s even more startling than that.
According to Woodberry, the missionaries who had the most profound influence on developing democracies were “conversionary Protestants.” They were missionaries whose social work—the work of building schools and hospitals and advocating for the rights of the oppressed--was motivated directly by their evangelistic impulses. In other words, these missionaries did not go to the far-flung corners of the world in the name of social activism; they went to convert souls in the name of Jesus Christ and in the process, changed the world.
So my question is why? Why must conversion be a vital part of missiology in order to affect real and lasting social change?
I think the answer is wrapped up in what conversion is. True, gospel conversion is fundamentally about change. It changes how we understand God, ourselves, and each other. For people like David Livingstone and Amy Carmichael, the gospel so profoundly changed them that they ended up changing the world. Perhaps without even realizing it.
At the same time, Woodberry’s research also reminds us that the gospel is not simply about future flourishing. The gospel changes life here and now by reconciling us to God and each other. When the gospel teaches us to fight greed, violence, and apathy in our own hearts—when it teaches us that we are truly our brother’s keeper because God is ours—the gospel sets the foundation for societies that can flourish.
And if it isn’t doing this, you can be pretty sure it’s not the gospel.
More than anything Woodberry’s research confirms what the Scripture already teaches us. It confirms that where the Prince of Peace reigns, there is peace; where the Bread of Life grows, hunger will not; where the Great Physician is at work, disease and death flee. And ultimately, it confirms that when the Author of Life is allowed to write the story of our lives, we will finally be free to live in the abundant life that He has promised.
They Also Serve
And most of the time, I feel like I’m failing on all counts.
Every morning, I wake up with more on my “to do” list than is humanly possible, and every night I go bed having proven it. But instead of simply acknowledging my limitations, I regularly feel discouraged and overwhelmed. In fact, I have been feeling this way so often that I finally had to face a harsh reality. I am a prime candidate to join that particular type of support group that meets in musty church basements. I need to draw my chair up into the circle and when it’s my turn, bravely stand and say, “Hello, my name is Hannah and I have a messiah complex.” But I don’t think I’ll be alone there.
I’ve noticed a certain agitation among women of my age, a longing to do more. We are tempted to believe that what we are already doing is not enough, that the dishes and laundry and school lunches are not “real,” that ministry that is not global or public or exciting (like reconciling races or saving orphans) is not true ministry. We see the brokenness around us. We want to change the world. We are ready.
But I worry. I worry because if this impulse is not properly rooted, it will very quickly lead to burnout.
I've seen it in my own life. All that holy passion and zeal, the joy of finally discovering my voice, of finding my place in the kingdom can quickly be replaced by needing to save the kingdom all by myself. And when I can’t—when I’m busy with more mundane things—the guilt creeps in. I hear a voice saying, “You have so much to do. Don't you dare rest yet.” And “How selfish of you—you live a life of privilege and ease. Why aren’t you suffering for the gospel?”
I grew up in a context that, for good or bad, heavily emphasized what we needed to do for God. We were told to sacrifice this life for the next, to be sold out, to be surrendered, to be on fire, to be radical. And I was. And I am. But the older I grow and the busier I become, the more I believe that being sold out to God means first learning about my own limitations.
In order to work for Him, I must first learn to rest in Him.
Micah 6:8 has become something of a theme song for our generation. “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The cause of justice and equality pulses through our veins. We long to “proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
But can I say something? Can I ask you to stop trying to save the world? Can I encourage you to embrace your life of limitation? Because here in the weakness, in the failure, in the inability, He is strong. And here, only in your limitation, will you ever learn to walk humbly with Him.
And it is only when you learn to walk humbly with Him that you will be able to do justice and love kindness the way that He does.
Almost 400 years ago, there was a man who had a tremendous gift. He was a poet and statesman, an active political thinker and even deeper personal philosopher. But then the lights went out. By the time he was 44, he was completely blind. It seemed like a cruel joke--how did God expect him to use his talent for the kingdom when he couldn’t even see to write? “Does God exact day-labour, light denied?” he asked.
The answer he found is one that we need today:
"God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts: who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait."
God is inviting us to work in His kingdom. He is calling us to something more than this world can offer. But He is calling us first to Himself, to remember that He is the Messiah. Not us. And He is calling us to believe that those “who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.”
Even if they only stand and wait.
The Least of These
On the third Sunday of January, people all across the country celebrate Sanctity of Human Life Day which commemorates the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. And the very next day, the third Monday in January, people all across the country celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day which commemorates our complicated history of racial inequality.
On the surface, these two days may seem disconnected, nothing more than an odd fluke of the calendar. But if you look closely, there is a deep and profound connection—one that reaches to the very definition of what it means to be human. Every year, this third week of January reminds us that when society doesn’t view you as a person made in the image of God, it won’t see your children as image bearers either.
This year, this week struck me particularly hard because I had just finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Published in 1861, Incidents is the first-person account of Harriet Jacobs, a woman who had been born a slave but eventually escaped to freedom. Harriet’s story is important because it shows how women uniquely suffered under slavery. Often preyed upon by their masters and unable to legally marry, these women had little hope. But as Harriet's story reveals, if there was anything worse than being a woman and a slave, it was being a mother and a slave.
During Harriet’s life, American society operated under the legal precedent of partus sequitur ventrem or “the child shall follow the condition of the mother.” Whenever a slave gave birth (even if that child had been fathered by a white man), her son or daughter was automatically a slave, the property of her master who could do with that child as he saw fit. Harriet writes that the slave mother
…sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns… I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave trader, and… before night [they] were all far away… I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, “Gone! All gone! Why don’t God kill me?” I had no words wherewith to comfort her.
And I had no words when I read this.
I immediately thought of my own three children—children who live in a world of innocence and security, who know nothing but abundance and love, who trust me to protect them. How could a society be so degraded, so unfeeling, that something as natural as the bond between a mother and her child was completely disregarded?
And then I remembered. We are not much better.
Ultimately, the laws of Harriet’s society saw her children as less than image bearers because they saw her as less than an image bearer. "The child shall follow the condition of the mother..." Today, the laws of our society view unborn children in much the same way. And I wonder why? Could it be that we view unborn children as less than image bearers because we view their mothers as less than image bearers?
"The child shall follow the condition of the mother…"
To all you who are tiring of the fight to protect the unborn, who are jaded by “culture wars” and one-issue votes, let me say this: We are not fighting simply for the imago dei of unborn children; we are fighting for the imago dei of their mothers as well.
To all you who think it is enough to fight for the unborn, who turn a blind eye to the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, let me say this: We are not fighting simply for the imago dei of unborn children; we are fighting for the imago dei of their mothers as well.
Because as much as we’d like to convince ourselves that we’d have stood for the rights of Harriet and her children; as much as we’d like to believe that we’d have marched shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King himself, if we shy away from protecting those who today bear God’s image—whether born or unborn—we must not trick ourselves into believing that we would have protected them then.
So on this third week of January, do not truncate your vision of justice; expand it. Do not walk away from the fight because it has been too narrowly waged on one front. Instead, become a true one-issue voter—a voter who sees the image of God in your fellow men and willingly fights the evil that preys on them. To co-opt C. S. Lewis, the problem is not that our desire to protect the sanctity of human life is too strong; it is that it is too weak.
Do not forget that God Himself once became a child, embracing the weakness and vulnerability of living nine months in His mother’s womb. Do not forget that this same God also made Himself a slave in order to redeem those who were enslaved to sin. And do not forget that this same God calls you to defend “the least of these” even as He defends you. Because it is in the face of those yet to be born, in the face of the oppressed, in the face of the slave that we see Him.
We see them imago dei.
Teach Like a Girl
Doris Day in "Teacher's Pet" (1958)
One of the books I discovered over the holidays is a collection of vignettes about the women of the New Testament. I was prepping for this year’s women’s Bible study at church and like any good teacher (who is consistently running just shy of deadline), my first stop was the Amazon search engine. I typed in “Women of the New Testament” and one of the first entries was written by, of all people, Abraham Kuyper. Apparently in the midst of reforming turn-of-the-century Dutch society, establishing an entire branch of theology, and pastoring multiple congregations, Kuyper also had time to write on women of the Bible. (Abraham Kuyper: Statesman, Theologian, and Father of the Modern Women’s Bible Study?)
I snagged a 1933 English edition (complete with “Suggested Questions for Study and Discussion”) for a little over a $1. Presumably Kuyper wrote his Women of the New Testament in the late 1800s (I couldn’t find an exact date), and so it’s not surprising that he affirms a fairly traditional understanding of womanhood. What is surprising, however, is that his traditionalism has been thoroughly informed by the gospel and in some respects, doesn’t look like traditionalism at all.
Take this gem from the chapter about Mary of Rome. In writing about the work a woman is called to as a Christian, Kuyper says:
A woman who really loves Jesus must place all she has upon His altar… therefore Jesus may expect that those who love Him exert their energies strenuously to help His sacred cause to prosper. In this matter, too, talents are too frequently buried; gifts are allowed to lie fallow, and energies to remain latent. This does not imply that a woman must forsake her home… but a woman frequently proves to be amazingly ingenious and energetic in the care of her husband and children. She should give full expression to that same ingenuity and energy in her endeavors for the Lord. (p.86)
He reiterates the same thought in discussing Priscilla, who with her husband Aquilla, actively taught and discipled early converts:
A woman such as Priscilla was, is a potent influence in any congregation to which she happens to belong, and we might wish that we could point out ten or twenty such women in each of our larger congregations. From her position in the Word of God, she affirms that a woman, also a married woman, has another calling besides those of dispatching daily duties and engaging in activities of mercy. A woman, too, must have faith, and that faith must borrow its strength from a knowledge of the truth… In that lies the strength of a Priscilla. She knows the truth, and knows how to present it with perfect clarity. Beside, she has the ingratiating tenderness of feminine appeal, a quality no man has… (p. 105).
There is a lot of debate about the role of women in Church and society. And while I’ll quickly identify as a conservative, I’ll also quickly admit that women who use their gifts to teach the Scripture—whether through writing or speaking—can sometimes feel like their femininity is a weakness. Teaching is something they do despite being women rather than an outgrowth of their full personhood which includes being a woman. But for Kuyper at least, Priscilla’s womanhood was an asset that allowed her to communicate the truth in a distinct way—in a way no man could.
Thinking about this reminded me of another woman I read about over the holidays who “expounded the way of God more perfectly.” For Christmas, my husband gave me a copy of Laura K. Simmons’ Creed without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers. (Don’t assume too much about us—he also gave me the first three seasons of Duck Dynasty, the juxtaposition of which reveals more about me than I care to admit.)
Dorothy Sayers is best known for her detective stories, but she was also an academic translator and lay theologian who actively argued for orthodox Christianity in the public sphere. Simmons writes that Sayers
had a unique combinations of talents: a keen theological sense coupled with tremendous writing skill and a concern for how ordinary people understand Christianity. In an increasingly complex and fragmented world, we need these gifts more than ever. (p.12) So to all you Priscillas and Dorothys out there who have been gifted to communicate the word of God, do so; and do so out of your femininity. Do not be afraid of your curves or what Kuyper calls the “tenderness of feminine appeal.” Do not believe that you must adopt a masculine voice or be something other than you are to be heard. At the same time, do not hide behind your femininity; do not give yourself a pass for sloppy work or careless study because you are “a woman” and less may be expected of you in theological circles. You must do the work because, in the end, logic and clarity and beauty are not masculine concerns but human ones.
Do the work because you love Jesus and you are offering Him your talents and energies. Do the work and engage in it with all He has created you to be—including your womanhood. Remember that being a wife or mother or aunt or sister or niece or daughter is as much a part of God’s calling on you as your ability to teach His Word in the first place. Because if Abraham Kuyper has anything to say about it, your womanhood might just be the very means by which you communicate it best.
Putting the "Christian" in Christian Publishing
Let me say up front that I’m new to publishing, and I come with all the innocence of freshly born babe. I’ve been given a remarkable opportunity (a gift really) to write a book with Moody Publishers which will release in April; and I have to consistently thank my editors and marketing gurus for holding my hand through whole the process. So, please understand that I write out of innocence, as the girl in the crowd who might just be able to see that the emperor’s clothes are not as magnificent as everyone claims.
In fact, they may not even be there at all.
Of course, this innocence could be nothing more than naïveté. Perhaps with time, I will understand what others already know. I’ll understand the pressures of balance sheets and payrolls. I’ll understand that while idealism may write books, pragmatism sells them. I’ll understand that this is simply “the way the world works.” Still I can’t help but wonder whether our concerns about publishing—the questions of plagiarism and ghost writing and the cult of celebrity—stem from precisely this. This is the way the world works.
In his first epistle, John warns us against being conformed to the ethos of the world. When I was growing up, I understood this “worldliness” to be certain style of dress or music; and while these things can certainly reflect the world system, worldliness is much more insidious. Worldliness is a short-sighted vision that is concerned only with this present age. Given this, we shouldn’t be surprised that pragmatism is the world’s modus operandi. If this life is the only thing that matters, then we ‘d better get while the getting is good.
In contrast, a truly Christian perspective understands that reality is not defined only by the “here and now” but also by the “there and then.” On this time table, the goal isn’t only success in this life but success that will last into the next. When we apply that to publishing, being a truly Christian publisher means more than simply producing content that is “Christian” but publishing in such a way where both means and end are guided by the timeless gospel we proclaim. To co-opt James K. A. Smith, we must never forget that the liturgy of our publishing actually shapes the things published.
With this in mind, here are a few thoughts about what should characterize our publishing efforts. Truly Christian publishing…
1. Does not disdain small platforms because it understands that God uses weak things to confound the mighty. Don’t misunderstand; having a small platform doesn’t mean you deserve to be published any more than having a large one does. (A small platform may indicate an inability to write.) But having a small platform doesn’t mean that you DON’T deserve to be published either. In God’s kingdom, size is of little importance because in comparison to Him, we’re all miniscule. 2. Will make space for unique gifting even if it is not trendy. One of the dangers of the celebrity culture is that it inevitably elevates a certain style or approach to the standard, tempting everyone else to copy it. Soon titles sound the same; graphic design becomes interchangeable; buzz words emerge; and everybody ends up quoting everybody else. It reminds me of Marcus Mumford’s frustration that every other band now sounds like Mumford and Sons: "That's kind of what we're reacting against. When we started, it was quite fun doing what we're doing, 'cause no one else was doing it. It was like our little secret." Truly Christian publishing understands that God places the members in the Body as He wills and aims to develop the unique voice of each—even if it is one crying in the wilderness.
3. Must be based in community. There’s a bit of a myth that “creatives” work best in isolation where they are free from the obligations of relationship. Within Christianity, this myth sometimes presents itself as freedom from the obligations of a local church. Now, as a mother of three, I’ll be the first to lobby for enough quiet space to put two thoughts together, but as a Christian, I also believe that my craft cannot be separated from those who live closest to me. Made in God’s image, we are designed to both create AND live in intimacy with other image bearers; these relationships lend accountability and inspiration for the work we do. So that in God’s wisdom, we actually end up doing our best work when we are doing it in context of relationships, when we are doing it in service to God and others.
4. Works collaboratively. Bringing a book to the public involves a whole host of gifted individuals using their talents to achieve a final goal—editors, marketers, publishers, and yes, even bookstores like LifeWay. Quite frankly, an author does not a book make. And as authors, we don’t have the right to say whatever the $#!@% we like because we are not the only ones involved in the process. (If you need more control, there are plenty of self-publishing options available these days.) At the same time, publishers must be willing to catch the author’s vision and let this guide the marketing, design, and distribution. Instead of forcing a book into prefabricated models of marketability, we must allow the content to shape even the delivery.
5. Moves with the Spirit. Here’s something that neither publishers nor authors will like: some of us have only one book in us. I’ve thought about this as I wrapped up final edits on my manuscript—I know God gave me this particular message but I have no guarantee that He will give me another one. Of course, I like to think He will, that this book will be the first of many, but I must be willing to submit to His plan if it is not. I cannot expect to hold Him to a timetable of a book a year or even every two years. When His spirit moves, I move—beyond that I can’t promise anybody anything and I’d be foolish to try.
6. Writes, publishes, and markets with humility. One of the biggest marks of wordliness is trusting the systems and structures of the age instead of trusting the Lord of the universe. Instead of saying “if the Lord wills, tomorrow we will do such and such,” the world whips out charts and stats and logarithms. Certainly, we must work, we must plan, we must analyze data, we must be effective; but even as we do, we must also understand that if God doesn’t build the house… well, all our effort is useless. Truly Christian publishing knows that the One who first gave the message is the same One who will carry it forward.
Publishing is risky business. It takes guts to invest this much time and money into projects that have no guarantee of reimbursement. I’m thankful for publishers like Moody who take those risks in order to honor God and further His gospel. But I’d also like to suggest that because publishing is such a risky business, it will require more faith of us, not less. Faith to follow where God leads; faith to pursue kingdom rewards instead of monetary ones; faith to believe that even the power of celebrity isn’t more powerful than God Himself.
But if we do, if we have this kind of faith, even the world can’t stop us. Because as John reminds us, this is the victory that overcomes the world—even our faith.
Who's Afraid of Proverbs 31?
But recently, several women have been challenging a typical approach to this text. At the recent Q event, Women and Calling, progressive blogger and author Rachel Held Evans reiterated her long-standing concern that we tend to misuse this passage, making it more of a “Pintrest page come to life” than the poem it is. Sarah Bessey makes the same point in the recently released Jesus Feminist. She writes:
Some evangelicals have turned Proverbs 31 into a woman’s job description instead of what it actually is: the blessing and affirmation of valor for the lives of women… It is meant as a celebration for the everyday moments of valor for everyday women, not as an impossible exhausting standard.
These women have a legitimate concern. How many Mother’s Day sermons or Bible studies have turned Proverbs 31 into a checklist? How many times have teachers used it to reinforce their private applications of gender? How many times have you felt defeated from just listening to such sermons? So let me go on record as saying that I agree with Evans and Bessey. With one caveat.
Proverbs 31 is intended as a blessing and affirmation, not of all women, but of a certain kind of woman: a wise one.
Because while Proverbs 31 isn’t prescriptive, it is descriptive. It is designed to tell us the kind of woman who deserves honor and praise. In this sense, the poem is the culmination of an entire book whose main goal is to teach the difference between wisdom and foolishness. But as the beginning and end of Proverbs point out, you don’t become wise via a checklist; you become wise by fearing the Lord.
To be fair, it’s easy to confuse prescriptive and descriptive passages. Obviously it happens in Proverbs 31, but it happens just as often in less controversial texts. The Beatitudes or the Fruit of the Spirit can quickly become metaphysical checklists if we divorce them from their Source and view them as goals to meet in our own strength.
Just be peaceful. Check. Just be kind. Check. Just be humble. Check.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
But while these passages are not intended as “To Do” lists, they are a kind of “field guide” given to describe what we will look like if our hearts are being changed by God. They describe the fruit and bark and leaves of the tree so you can know what kind of tree you’re looking at. In the case of Proverbs 31, the poem shows how wisdom embodies itself in feminine form; so that in a beauty only God Himself could conceive, a book written primarily to young men doesn't climax with a description of a mature man but with a description of a mature woman.
Evans rightly pointed this out during the Q event. She noted that the original audience of Proverbs 31 was men, and joked, “Can you imagine a men's conference where that was the central text?“ (It was a pretty funny thought.) But even this isn’t the whole picture. The main audience of Proverbs 31 is men—true—but it’s given to men in order to teach them the kind of women they should celebrate. One of the assumed purposes is to distinguish wise women from foolish ones in order to help men “find” a good wife.
Talk about sexist.
Or maybe not. Maybe this actually affirms a woman’s imago dei. To understand what I mean, consider Proverbs as a whole. Throughout it, you’ll find this recurring theme: weak men can be ruined by strong men but strong men can be ruined by foolish… women. Yes, women.
And here’s why: Women are men’s spiritual equal.
Think about it. If a woman were not equal to a man, then her spiritual life would be of little consequence to him. She simply wouldn't be able to influence him for either good or bad. But if, as we are, equal image bearers, reigning as queens alongside earthly kings, then the kind of women we become is of supreme significance. We have intrinsic power that we can use for either great benefit or great destruction.
Because of this, Proverbs is intent on teaching young men to flee from foolish women in order to embrace and affirm wise women. This is why they are to avoid the adulteress but to delight in the wife of their youth. They are to avoid women who are quarrelsome but to celebrate those who speak with kindness. They are to avoid women who tear down their homes and to run to those who build them up.
In other words, a wise woman can make a man; and a foolish one can break him.
This assumption of a woman’s power is implicit in the description of the Proverbs 31 woman who wields influence over both her home and society. Because of her wisdom, her husband sits in the gates. Because of her wisdom, her household doesn’t fear the coming winter. Because of her wisdom, her children rise up and call her blessed.
In this sense, Proverbs 31 is both a song of affirmation AND a standard of what maturity looks like. We must not shy away from the descriptive principles simply because they have been misused. Apart from them—apart from knowing that a wise women “stretches out her hand to the needy”—we wouldn’t be able to distinguish her from a foolish one and we’d end up assuming that ALL women deserve praise when in reality, not all of us do.
To quote The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one is.”
Not all women are sacrificial. Not all women work hard. Not all women are kind. Not all women are generous Not all women are joyful.
Some women are selfish. Some women are lazy. Some women are mean. Some women are stingy. Some women are bitter.
But a woman who is wise, a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. She is such a rare find, so exceptionally valuable that Proverbs 31 describes her as more precious than a jewel. A beautiful, expensive, glittering jewel. So that just like light reflects and radiates through a diamond, the light of God’s nature reflects and radiates through her, bursting forth in resplendent glory.
And for this kind of wise woman, wise men get up on their feet and cheer.
So, yes, please don’t reduce Proverbs 31 to a checklist or a Pintrest page come to life. But let’s also remember a harder truth. Wisdom doesn’t come naturally to any of us. Our only hope of being this kind of noble woman comes by looking into the face of the One who is Wisdom Himself and allowing Him to conform us to His own likeness. And when we do, He will make us the fully formed image bearers we are destined to be. He will make us women of kindness and grace and sacrifice and love and joy. He will make us like Himself.
To Have or Not to Have: Childlessness and Imago Dei Identity
This past week I found myself cuddling the newest member of our church--a sweet, Dreft-scented little girl named Hope. As I held her in my arms, I have to admit that I felt the ache of maternal longing well up inside me. The memories of my own children at that age and the sheer wonder at new life were almost too much. And yet, my husband and I are not presently pursuing any new members of the family. For us, as it is for many couples, the question of when and whether to have more children has been a complicated one, one that has forced us to wrestle through desire, calling, and limitation. On the other hand, for an increasing number, the question is not when or how many children to have; the question is whether to have them at all.
Last month, Time magazine explored this phenomenon in their cover story entitled, "The Childfree Life: When having it all means not having children." And then earlier this week, Emily Timbol wrote a piece for Her.meneutics, a blog of Christianity Today, explaining why she and her husband do not intend to have children (and why she’d appreciate you not judging her for it.) Now, couples choosing to not have children is nothing new; but what I do find interesting is why they are choosing this. The current argument seems less rooted in the classic appeal to overpopulation or the desire to commit oneself to extreme callings or even a worry about bringing children into a terribly broken world. Instead, it seems that more and more couples are choosing to not have children in order to pursue certain lifestyles and careers unhindered. And while it’s easy to chalk this up to Millennial selfishness, (see here for a piece that rightly challenges the temptation to make Millennials the scapegoat for every societal ill), I don’t think it’s that simple. At the same time, the question of whether to have children is going to be increasingly pesky one for Millennials for a couple of reasons:
- 50+ years of reliable birth control has successfully divorced children from sex and created an entire generation that is functionally illiterate about reproduction and child-rearing. We may know how NOT to have children, but we have not been schooled in how to have them.
- A growing Gnosticism that separates gifting from biology and links it to intangibles like personality and intellect. We simply don’t view gender and the capacity to have children as gifting in itself.
- The belief that aforementioned intellectual gifting is somehow necessary to the. future. of. civilization. Getting sidetracked by mundane things like children wouldn’t be in the best interest of greater human flourishing.
- Increasing inability to think generationally. In a society obsessed with youth, we don’t have categories for aging--whether that is our parents' aging or our own future aging. This means that we also don’t understand children as the bridge that connects generations, stretching back to the past and on into the future.
Among Christians, I think it’s also fair to recognize that that the question of childlessness is heavily influenced by the gender debate. Since 2nd-Wave Feminism, conservative Christians have responded by elevating the calling of a wife and mother. But because this sometimes came as a reaction to feminism, it also sometimes devolved into an idolization of motherhood and wifery, of understanding women only in terms of biology. To be fair, conservative Christians aren’t the only ones capable of this. In this brave new world of IVF, surrogacy, and egg donation, we brazenly reduce women to their reproductive capacities at every turn.
So how should we navigate the choice to have or not have children?
The first thing we must do is clarify what we are actually talking about. When we broach the subject of human reproduction, we are not talking about “babies” or “children” as if they were pets or diminutive, lesser versions of adults. When we broach the question of human reproduction, we are discussing the unique capacity of human beings to create new image bearers of a transcendent God. By definition, this is not reproducing the same way plants and animals do. And the difference lies, not in the mechanics of reproduction, but in what we are creating in our procreation.
Ironically, one of the arguments in favor of childfree living is that we need to view women first as people, as image bearers, and not simply in terms of their reproductive capacities. And while I understand this impulse, I’m concerned that it is often based on a one-dimensional understanding of imago dei. Instead of some nebulous, idealized autonomy, imago dei is better understood as the convergence of the relationships in which we live. We must understand ourselves, as Anthony Hoekema suggests in his book Created in God’s Image, through 1) our relationship with God; 2) our relationship with each other; and 3) our relationship with Creation as its steward.
What that means for the question of children is that we cannot properly discuss the how and when of having them apart from these relationships. Unlike we've been taught, this is not simply a matter of personal choice. Consider how the very act of conception mirrors a relational understanding of imago dei. When 1) a man and woman unite their bodies in dependence on 2) God’s sovereign will, they act as His representatives in 3) stewarding Creation by being fruitful and multiplying. Here in this one moment, the three planes of imago dei identity align and allow God’s nature to shine through their lives like light through a prism. What before was invisible to the naked eye, suddenly bursts forth in a rainbow of color, incarnated through the very process of conceiving, birthing, and nurturing new life.
Of course, this is not the only way human beings image God, but we cannot continue to talk about reproduction apart from it. Unfortunately, in our culture, babies and children are more associated with the cutesy-ness of baby showers, miniature haute couture, and the tallying of “firsts.” And parenting is reduced to a sort of pastime that some couples undertake. Worse still, babies and children, when not wanted, are seen as barriers to self-fulfillment and personal goals. So the message that many young couples receive is that having children is something that you can pick or choose if you like it or not. And if you’re not quite ready to pull the trigger, get a puppy. Because, after all, there’s not much difference between human child and canine one, right?
But what if procreation isn’t simply a hobby but as the Scripture actually speaks about it, the creation of new image bearers? What if, when Adam fathered sons and daughters in his own likeness, he mirrored God’s first fathering man and woman in His own likeness? And what if, bringing a life into being and sustaining that life is one of the most God-like things human beings could ever do?
I don’t think this demands that every individual become a parent—clearly some will not and are no less capable of experiencing imago dei—but I do think that it changes the tenor of the discussion and how we view children. So that ultimately, the decision to have children is not one we make simply because we “feel” like it or don’t. It’s not a choice we make out of sentimentality (maternal ache notwithstanding); and it is not one we avoid out of fear or the desire to be unhindered.
Instead, the choice to produce and nurture a new image bearer is directly tied to our own status as image bearers, and as such, it is a choice that we make in context of relationship not stark autonomy. It is a choice made in prayerful dependence on God, in loving relationship with others, and as a steward of Creation who rules with the same life-giving authority and the same open-hearted generosity that God Himself does.
Walking Wounded
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the religious disposition of Millennials, but being a pastor’s wife in a rural, southern setting, I have to admit that all this angst and alienation from the Church isn’t all that unusual. In fact, if you spend any reasonable amount of time around the Church, you’re sure to meet those who have been harmed by it. My husband seems to get the lion’s share of these stories, often at the most unexpected moments; sometimes it’s when he’s out running errands or when he’s picking up the kids or making hospital visits. And more often than not, they start something like this: “I used to go to church, but then this pastor…”
Now, I’ll be the first to argue for the legitimacy of the Church. In fact, I have argued for it quite extensively; for goodness' sake, not only am I a pastor’s wife, I am a religious writer. My entire life is invested in the established religious structure. (Because as much as we hate to admit it, as much as we like to believe that we are the “independent voice,” every faith blogger, by definition, is part of the reigning religious order.)
And yet.
And yet, there’s something that those of us who embrace the Church must remember about those struggling to do so--especially those who have recently emerged from a religious context empty of the gospel. When you have been taught false things about God, when leaders have spoken blasphemy in His name, when you have endured, not simply the failures of good men, but the manipulation of bad, recovering from it will not be easy. Doubt will be strong and alienation deep.
Ironically, those of us most committed to elevating the gospel in Church practice are the first to miss this. Even as we proclaim that the gospel is life, we forget that the absence of it is death. We forget that religion devoid of the gospel starves, maims, and pummels those trapped in it so that when they are finally liberated, they walk out wounded. And just like the Allied Forces were shocked when they liberated the concentration camps of WWII Europe, we continue to be shocked when we encounter those who have been harmed by religion and struggle because of it.
Notable Christian author Latayne C. Scott writes about her own struggle after leaving the religious, but gospel-absent, context in which she grew up.[i] She recounts that even after recognizing the distortions that she had been taught to believe, even after coming to understand grace, even after committing herself to the faithfulness and generosity of a community of believers; she still could not feel its safety because “nobody knew how to address the needs of a heart broken by a church.” She writes,
The unarticulated and untargeted sense of betrayal I felt became the permanent inner garment of my soul… How, I ask, would one assess all the hours of church attendance, all the vulnerabilities of prayer and fasting and secret sacrifice? …How utter the sense of loss, how unrecoverable the hours and years, how foolishly squandered the hopes.
Who do you blame when you have been duped by a church?
For me, I couldn’t find anyone to blame. Not my friends, I knew their good hearts… I wanted to reproach myself for being suckered—but how could I hold responsible the trusting eleven-year-old? The trusting teenager? The trusting college student…
If there is no loss as great as the loss of one’s god, there are few tasks to compare with setting out to learn to serve another one. If you’ve been burned by a god, how do you learn to trust another one? Make no mistake about it, I knew I needed what only he could provide; forgiveness of sins, eternal life, church and community based on truth, not beloved fictions…[but] I knew from the beginning that I would walk with a spiritual limp the rest of my life. I came to a time when I hung on only by my fingernails and Scripture passages… I hungered so desperately for the ability to trust and be vulnerable to God that I asked him to take my life if I could not experience that…
Theologically speaking, [that church] was my first love; and it broke my heart. Nothing about leaving [it] seemed courageous or noble at the time: It was pure spiritual survival, the escape from the burning building into the arms of strangers. Some of us go still-singed into atheism or simmer in anger, or distract ourselves with other things… Some of us, through the grace of God, learn to love him. Often that one act can be the greatest sacrifice of will in our lives, to respond and surrender to his love for us. And so those of us who know the safety of the Church must learn to understand those who don’t. We must learn to differentiate between those who limp across the finish line and those who aren’t even in the race. We must remember that the fight for orthodoxy isn’t simply a fight for right doctrine or an ideological battle between legalism and grace. It is a fight for souls. It is a fight to free those who have been held captive and abused in Hell’s prison camps. And we must not be surprised when they cannot run out to meet us.
We must not be surprised when they need medical attention. We must not be surprised when they can’t trust someone in uniform. We must not be surprised when their empty stomachs cannot handle a full meal. We must not be surprised when we have to pick them up and carry them. We must not be surprised if they turn out to be the most vulnerable among us.
Because as quickly as their experience will enable them to spot a false gospel, it will just as quickly make it difficult for them to embrace the truth. This should not lead us to judge them, but to judge ourselves. To confirm that we are teaching only grace and truth. To question whether we have wept with those who weep. To ask whether, like Christ the Good Samaritan, we have stopped by the way to rescue those who have been beaten and abused, robbed and abandoned.
And above all, it must make us determined to give them Jesus. We must hold out His grace and mercy; we must hold out His truth and love. Because it is here, in His presence, that these starved, helpless souls will finally find hope. Here with the One who causes the blind to see, who makes the lame to walk, and who sets the captives free. Here, only here, will they find--will any of us find—the victory we so desperately need.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________ [i] I purposefully omitted Scott’s religious background in order to let her words speak for those caught in a variety of gospel-less, but religious, paradigms. These paragraphs are take from Scott's book, The Mormon Mirage, pp.274-276, 292.
Women's Work
Last week the Pew Research Center released a report revealing that women are the primary breadwinners of 40% of American households. Conservatives have interpreted these statistics as yet one more step on the road to social ruin. And I agree that they should give us pause—not because of how many women are in the workforce—but because of the staggering number of these women who are single mothers. But somehow, instead of focusing on issues like male abandonment, the conversation inevitably shifts to the fact that women are earning more money than men. The standard conservative response goes something like this:
“It’s not that women can’t work—it’s just better that they stay home with their children. Men should be the primary providers for their families.”
For the record—and perhaps in my defense given what I’m about to write—I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for the last eight years and my husband has been the primary breadwinner for our entire marriage. Still, I find this response highly problematic. Not because I don’t value what happens in the home, but precisely because I do.
The problem with this kind of response is that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of work and what it means to provide for a family.
One of the interesting things about gender issues—both inside the church and out—is that they are rarely about gender alone. Instead, gender is often a presenting issue for deeper values and assumptions--in this case, how we evaluate what it means to “work” and what it means to “provide.” (For those following the New Wave Complementarianism conversation, this post addresses Theses 17 and 22.)
A significant part of the problem is that we are still relying on the false paradigm of work vs. home. It is ironic that even as conservatives push against what they see as the fallout of 2nd Wave Feminism, they end up perpetuating the very philosophical assumptions that made feminism problematic in the first place. They continue to define “work” as something that happens outside the home and is rewarded financially. In context of feminism, this division plays out as an undercurrent of condescension toward women who have not pursued careers. In conservatism, it plays out by restricting men to the workforce and women to the home.
The problem is that these strict categories simply don’t exist. When God created man and woman in His image, He commissioned them to rule over creation by reproducing and stewarding the earth together. But not only were they to rule together, the very things that embodied their rule—reproducing and stewarding—also had to be accomplished holistically. God did not issue two commands but one command that exists with an internal tension and intrinsic interconnectedness.
Anne-Marie Slaughter highlighted this tension in her article, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, that appeared the July 2012 issue of The Atlantic. In this now famous piece, Slaughter argues that the greatest barrier to the success of both the family and business is that they are pitted against each other. So that when we insist on a strict divide between home and work, we set ourselves up to fail at both.
Secondly, by defining a man who works outside the home and earns a paycheck as the “primary” provider, we unintentionally communicate to women that what they provide is “secondary.”
If by saying “a man must be the primary provider,” we mean that a husband should be the first to sacrifice his freedom by indenturing himself to an employer because his wife needs greater flexibility to care for young children –well, and good. But what I’m afraid we are unintentionally saying is that by being the “primary” provider, he is doing something more essential to the well-being of the family. We are saying that the greatest need of the family is financial.
That is not to say that money is unnecessary or that money is not a legitimate expression of our values. One of the most romantic things that my husband has ever done was purchase life insurance for me at the same time that he was purchasing it for himself. In this moment, he communicated that he understood what I contributed to the family. He understood that despite the fact that I did not earn a salary, the work I did at home—the boo-boos kissed, the noses wiped, and the books read--was just as much a “primary” provision to our family as his work in a salaried position.
Which brings me to my third and greatest concern. By defining “work” as what men do in the role of primary financial providers, we allow women to excuse themselves from stewarding the earth because we position “work” as a male characteristic instead of an imago dei one.
When we say a woman “can” work, we are, in essence, saying that work is optional to her identity. But as a person made in the image of God, a woman MUST engage in meaningful work that capitalizes on both her biological potential and her personal gifting. Where and when and how this happens will vary, but she must be working because work is what humans do--not simply what men do.
Don’t think this is problem? You’ve obviously never watched the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
It is, in fact, so likely a problem that the apostle Paul warned against it in two of his epistles. In Titus 2, when he calls women to be “workers at home,” he does so in context of calling them to "renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to [be]… zealous for good works.” In I Timothy 5 when he issues a similar call, he cites that the danger of caring financially for young widows is that they would become “idlers... gossips and busybodies.”
Paul’s concern seems to be not simply that women would work outside the home but that they would cease from working altogether. When your physical needs are being met by someone else, the natural pressure to be a working, productive person evaporates. The greatest danger to a woman who is wealthy enough to stay at home is not materialism, but laziness. The greatest danger is that she would not keep working even as she is at home because she would think that "working" is what men are called to do.
As women made in the image of God, we must be productive, life-giving people because our God is a productive, life-giving God. How this works out in practice is undoubtedly affected by our various callings and seasons of life. But in the end we are not Cinderellas waiting to be whisked away from our work--we are Susans and Lucys bravely embracing our call to be Queens over Narnia who rule faithfully alongside our brother Kings.
So that in the end, the best we can say is about work and family is that a husband should provide for his family by working imago dei and a wife should provide for her family by working imago dei as well. If these new labor statistics reveal that men are failing to do this, we should be concerned. But we must be careful in how we express this concern. If we are not—if we insist on perpetuating the oversimplified categories of work vs. home--we run the risk of undermining the very thing that we are called to pursue in the first place—the flourishing of every individual as an image bearer of our infinitely complex, infinitely glorious God.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If this post piques your curiosity, here are several more that address the issue of gender and work:
http://www.sometimesalight.com/1/post/2012/09/my-take-diy-pintrest-and-the-rise-of-the-new-domesticity.html http://www.sometimesalight.com/1/post/2012/11/mad-men-june-cleaver-and-biblical-womanhood.html http://www.sometimesalight.com/1/post/2012/08/dear-coal-miner-exterminator-cafeteria-lady-hotel-maid-and-anyone-else-who-works-a-less-than-glamorous-job.html http://www.sometimesalight.com/1/post/2012/09/on-being-a-stay-at-home-mom.html
The Grace of Scandal
This week has been a big one for scandal. Whether it’s been inside the Church, inside the Beltway, or inside a Philadelphia courtroom, it seems like our collective dirty laundry has finally spilled out of the hamper and onto the floor. And while I don’t delight in scandal, I realized this week--after being bombarded by it on every side--that scandal offers a strange kind of comfort. Perhaps it’s not the scandal itself, but that the revelation of scandal stands testimony to a God Who is faithful to His promises.
When you’ve suffered because of another person’s sin, one of hardest parts is the helplessness that comes when no one else knows or even seems to care about it. In this place, it’s easy to begin to believe that God doesn’t either. You begin to doubt, you begin to fear, you begin to worry that the truth will never be revealed. You reconcile yourself to the fact that justice will never be done—you question whether it even exists at all.
But it does. And that is never clearer than when a scandal finally breaks.
When a scandal breaks—when painful truths finally come to light—we are watching God fulfill His promise that “nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” We are watching Him actively “bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and disclose the purposes of the heart.” We are watching Him prove that day and night are alike to him and that He sees the pain of His children and will vindicate them.
In this sense, scandal is grace. Scandal is grace because it restores our hope in God’s justice. Sin will be found out no matter how expertly we cover it or pretend that it doesn’t exist. But scandal is also grace because it reminds us of our own need to confess—of our own need to submit to this same justice. Because if we don’t voluntarily confess our sin today, it promises to be a scandal tomorrow.
You see, scandal only happens when we refuse to repent. But when we do—when we willingly uncover the hidden secrets of our heart--the only scandal left is the scandal of His mercy. The scandal of a mercy that remembers that these now confessed sins have been already been atoned for. The scandal of a justice that refuses to punish us twice. The scandal of a God who says: “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy."
And so when we confess our sin to Him and those we’ve wronged, He covers them. He does not minimize them and He does not always remove the consequences, but one thing He does not do is flaunt them. He does not hold a press conference to shame or humiliate us in the midst of them. He does not make a scandal of them.
So when the Gosnell verdict was finally announced this week, I found myself unexpectedly crying—not tears of relief so much as tears of thankfulness. Thankfulness for a God Who promises to reveal the hidden things. Thankfulness for a God who sees every time a child suffers, every time a government abuses its power, every time I convince myself that my own sin can be covered. I cried tears of thankfulness for a God who loves us too much to allow darkness to continue and Who joyfully receives us with open arms when we finally come running out of it.
Woman in the Image of God
Last Friday, Edith Schaeffer passed away at the age of 98. Despite the potential to have been overshadowed by her husband, Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer, she held her own as a writer and thinker, delivering a message of joi de vivre and teaching a generation of women that there is power in the small moments, that even things like mothering and domesticity are an expression of God’s image. She taught us that when God takes up residency, our homes will be filled with His nature—filled with art and music and beauty and wonder and hospitality and joy.
But something’s happened to Christian women in the subsequent years--something that I’m not sure even Mrs. Schaeffer herself would approve. Over the last several decades, we’ve flipped the paradigm; instead of seeing womanhood (and all that comes with it) as an expression of imago dei, we've come to see our womanhood as an end in itself. We’ve come to believe that our core sense of self rests in our gender and our ability to conform to certain paradigms. And in doing so, I’m afraid we’ve developed a bit of identity myopia.
This idea has been rolling around in my head for a while now, but I didn’t quite see it clearly, didn’t quite have the words to speak it, until one day. It was the same day that I resolved to start blogging. It was the same day that I realized that my daughter was growing up.
She was six at the time, maybe seven, and I remember this moment of awareness that she was being shaped, not simply by her school work or television, but by the routines and liturgies that were happening in our home. She was being shaped by me. Every moment of every day, she was forming an idea about what it meant to be a woman. When I put on my makeup, she put on hers. When I wrote my stories, she wrote hers in a hot pink, spiral-bound notebook. She was becoming the woman I was.
This awareness made me consider what kind of woman I wanted her to become, and I realized that it wasn’t enough to teach her simply about womanhood—I had to teach her about what it meant to be a person. What it meant to be made in God’s image. Because all that is true about my womanhood--all that is beautiful and glorious and lovely--flows out of this deeper identity. If I didn’t start there, nothing else would make sense.
At the same time, I began to observe a kind of identity myopia among my peers. I saw women desperately striving to fulfill roles. And then angrily casting them off when the weight and expectations were more than they could carry. I saw women judging those who couldn’t carry them. I saw woman fighting loneliness and a pervasive sense of loss because they were single or not yet mothers. I saw women defining themselves by their sexuality or dress size. I saw women lost and wandering, confused about who they were and what they were supposed to be.
And I knew that there had to be an answer.
There had to be a truth that could speak to all of us. There had to be a truth that could transcend all the differences, that could bring order to the chaos. And that truth was this: each of us is made in God’s image and we will never be at peace until we live in it.
You see, being made in God’s image does more than establish the equality of all people (although is does); it is does more than simply level the playing field between men and women (although it does); it does more than argue for the sanctity of human life (although it does). Understanding that you are made in the image of God gives you a way to finally make sense of your life, to finally know who you are.
To know that your nature flows from His, to know that your identity mirrors His, to know that “in Him you live and move and have your being” to know that you are destined to be like Him, to know that He will move heaven and earth until you are.
This is what it means to live imago dei. This is what it means to be human.
And this is what Jesus Christ came to do. The perfect Image became the perfect Image Bearer to restore what we have lost, to redeem what we have sold away--the bits of ourselves that we have prostituted off to smaller gods. The perfect Image became the perfect Image Bearer so that we could finally be what we were meant to be, so that we could finally be like Him.
Which brings me to the book I’m working on. When I first started talking with Moody Publishers about writing for them, one of the questions they asked was, “How do you want to influence women?”
This is how.
More than anything, I want women, I want my daughter, I want myself to understand that the point of our existence—the answer to the question “Who am I and why am I here?”—is not found simply in being a woman, but in living imago dei. Our core sense of self comes, not in our domesticity or our careers, not in our relationships or motherhood, not in our brokenness or our fears, but from God’s nature. It's not that the details are unimportant; it's that they only make sense in the scope of the larger picture. In the end, I want what Edith Schaeffer did: I want all of life--all the domesticity, all the arts, all the beauty, all the love, all the philosophy, all the theology—to flow from this central Truth:
You were made to reflect and represent God on this earth. You were made for glory.
The writing is going well; but as you might expect, it’s slow at times. Something as heavy and intricately-layered as the image of God doesn’t come easily, and it’s just like me to try take on the world in one fell swoop. And yet, even this serves as a reminder that the whole point of living imago dei is living in dependence on Him, of following Him one faltering step at a time.
As you think of it, pray for me. I don’t view this so much as “my” book or a chance “break into the market.” It is a sacred trust. It is both a privilege and a responsibility. And most days, it scares me to death.
But just as quickly as I become afraid, His Spirit comes and whispers to my quivering heart, “Do not fear, my daughter; I have made you for this. I will give you the words that you need. For this moment, for this time, this is your work; this is how you reflect and represent me. My daughter, this is what it means to live imago dei.”
Trusting the True Shepherd
And I guess we could leave well enough alone if spiritual abuse didn’t cut both ways. If ministries didn’t routinely supplement budgets by underpaying staff with the caveat that they’ll be eligible for welfare. If pastors’ wives and children weren’t targeted for the sake of simply existing. If 1,700 pastors didn’t leave ministry every month—many out of despair and discouragement.
But they do.
And so we must talk about spiritual abuse, because we must remember that the danger isn’t in how dramatic it is but in how common it is. The danger of spiritual abuse isn’t simply in the extremes but in how quickly, how easily any of us can use another person’s love of God to pursue our own goals and our own agendas.
I myself don’t have a salacious story to offer—no tragic account of childhood abuse or breaking away from some cult-like congregation. And yet, my husband and I have wrestled through the pain of working in the Church, of rejection and false accusation, of feeling abandoned by those to whom we looked for advice and care. We’ve also watched as friends have walked darker paths and still bear scars from those who wielded power over them. And we’ve watched as they have wandered from church to church—not because they’re troublesome—but because they’re looking for Jesus and He’s simply not as present in most churches as He should be.
So when I speak about spiritual abuse within the Church, I do so from a place of trying to grapple with the brokenness of Christ’s body. It is not about adding fuel to the fire or airing grievances. It’s not about “getting back.” (Although this will be a legitimate temptation for people who have been deeply hurt.) When I write about spiritual abuse, I do so with the express purpose of finding healing, of learning to be whole again.
Because while my husband and I have chosen to stay in the organized church—even to make it central to our lives--the choice didn’t come easily. It came through tears and brokenness and times of angry questioning. It came through feeling abandoned by God and wondering why He thought it was such a good idea to gather a bunch of dysfunctional people together in the first place.
Yet, for all that I don’t understand, I do know this: Jesus is the only answer to the brokenness.
Rejecting the Church will not heal the pain. Harboring bitterness will not heal the pain. Denying these stories will not heal the pain.
Only Jesus can.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across Ezekiel 34 in which God speaks against those who have abused and scattered His flock. He speaks against their greed and self-service and warns that He is coming against them in judgment and vengeance. But to the broken, hurting lambs, He says this:
Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out... I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered... I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.
This is where you find healing. This is where you find wholeness. This is where you learn to love again. You find it in the tears that flood your pillow as you cry out to Him. You find it in the questions that you bring to Him. You find it in His love and you find it in His justice--in arms ready to hold you at the same time that they are ready to fight to protect you. You find it in Jesus, the Good Shepherd.
And when you do, when you find His healing, you may also discover that you can return to His broken, messy flock. Because in returning to His Church, you’re not so much expressing confidence in His people as you are expressing confidence in Him. And in returning to His Church, you may also find that you can point the way for other hurting, broken, dirty sheep as well.
You can point the way to the true Shepherd of their souls.
This is what has happened for my husband and me. By committing ourselves to Jesus, we’re learning to open ourselves again to the love and beauty of His people. We’re learning to trust Him enough to walk into the arms of a congregation who loves well. We’re learning to trust Him enough to receive the healing and restoration that only His body can offer. And we’re learning that even though we may walk through dark valleys, He will always come find us, and He will always lead us home.
On Bridging the Generation Gap: Listen More, Talk Less
The years were slipping by too quickly and I wanted them to stop.
But, with the wisdom that only an eight (and-a-half) year old can offer, she replied, “You shouldn’t be sad about turning 34; you should be sad that you’re not 35 yet. 35 is a good age. You can be President when you’re 35.” Our society has a complicated relationship with the years between 18 and 35. At 18, you become an adult. Sort of. You can enter the military, go to war, and die, but you can’t drink. So maybe you become an adult when you turn 21… unless you live with your parents and want to stay on their health insurance which considers you a dependent until you are 26. Then again, if you are trying to immigrate to the United States with your parents, you have to navigate the process separately if you are over 18.
Perhaps the only thing that is clear is that we consider the ages between 18-35 to be a time of continued development and maturation. Because despite the fact that you can vote at 18, even my daughter knows that you can’t be President until you turn 35. There’s a significant truth here. One that those of us in the church need to recognize. The years of our twenties and thirties should be years of development and growth, not necessarily leadership.
In this post at Her.meneutics, Pam Lau issues a call for older women to be more active in discipling younger women, to be transparent and open toward them, to find a way to meet them where they are. Part of her concern is rooted in the fact that Millennials are leaving the church at an alarming rate. She alludes to a 2011 Barna survey that reveals lower percentages of self-identified spirituality among Millennials and a growing gap between younger and older generations. But there’s a wrench in the data. According to Lau, “although 47 percent of young women do not see themselves as deeply spiritual, they still consider themselves leaders.”
Apparently a lot of us have not realized that we’re not old enough to be President yet.
So following Lau’s lead, I’d like to offer my own call. A call to my generation to recognize that even if we have reached an age where we can contribute to the conversation, we have not reached an age where we can dominate it. A call to recognize that true spirituality means listening to our elders and learning from them—not expecting them to hear us first.
Instead of waiting for older women to meet us where we are, we must be willing to go to the tea parties; we must be willing to go to the Bible studies—not because of the events themselves but because of the people we will meet there. We must extend grace and patience and love to cover the quirks of a subculture that may not entirely represent us; because if we do, we might just discover that under all the trappings and traditionalism, our parents and grandparents are people too. We’ll discover that they have loved and hurt deeply over the course of their lives, and because of it, they have something to offer us as we love and hurt over the course of ours--they have something to offer even if it comes wrapped in pink tissue paper and is accompanied by a card featuring kittens and a verse from the King James Version of the Bible.
So sit with them. Hear their stories. Listen. And listen well. In other words, honor your parents.
Usually when we think of dishonoring our parents, it immediately conjures up images of spoiled children throwing temper tantrums or--on the other end of the spectrum--detached middle-aged adults placing their aging parents in sub par nursing homes. But in the current cult of youth, in a generation defined by our narcissism, dishonoring our parents happens a lot more subtly. It happens when we presume that we understand why they made the choices they did. It happens when we abandon the Church that they have spent their lives building. It happens when we expect them to listen to us more than we listen to them.
And this is precisely what many of us are doing. We are quite literally holding the older generations hostage by insisting that if they don’t hear us—if they don’t do church our way--we will leave. I suppose I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve been wondering how my own children will relate to me twenty years from now.
Will they find me hopelessly old-fashioned? Will they be angry with how I raised them? Will they judge me?
Or
Will they love me? Will they respect me enough to listen to my advice? Will they honor what I have spent my life trying to accomplish?
I hope it’s the latter and I’ve decided that the best way to ensure that it is, the best way to ensure that they respect me when they’re 34 is by making sure I respect my elders when I’m 34. But this is not a patronizing, superficial respect that pats older folks on their heads and quietly winks behind their backs. It is a deep reverence and honor for the lives that they have lived. It is a deep reverence and honor for what Christ has done for them. It is a deep reverence and honor that believes that the One who exists outside of time can most certainly bridge something as artificial as a generation gap.
This does not mean that everything our parents have done is without fault or critique. Each new generation must make faith their own; each new generation must find their own way of embodying Christ’s call to be the Church. But as we navigate that process, we must remember that as shameful as it is for an older person to act foolishly, it is equally shameful for young people to foolishly ignore the wisdom that older Christians have gained over the course of a lifetime.
The Art of Graceful Blogging
Thankfully, there are those cutting a different path. Bloggers who defy convention and still have loyal readers. Bloggers who wrestle with the brokenness of this life and still walk away with joy and contentment. Bloggers who may doubt their own ability to love God as deeply as they should, but who are confident in His love for them.
One of these bloggers is Ann Voskamp. In this recent interview, Ann shares how she broke all the blogging rules and still ended up as a NY Times best-selling author. There’s a lesson here for us younger bloggers. A lesson not so much about the mechanics of blogging, but about the art of writing well. Of serving your readers, of bringing light to the darkness. What Ann’s writing embodies that so many young bloggers lack is simply grace. She writes with courage, conviction, authenticity, and most significantly, humility; she writes in such a way that her words embody the very grace she is writing about.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how brash, how self-absorbed, we young bloggers can be and I think we need to take a page from Ann’s book .We need principles for graceful blogging--principles that will let grace form, not only our theological positions, but our very style of communication. So in no particular order, here are mine:
- Don’t use vulgarity in your writing. It will make it… well, vulgar. Meaning common, unexceptional. When you are writing about the exceptional, when you are communicating the miraculous, you must rise above the small, easy choice of a four-letter word. You must be truly counter-cultural by not being vulgar.
- Speaking of being counter-cultural, take the time to think well and think deeply. Blogging by nature is geared toward the quick, one-off response. You must resist this temptation; you must always, always choose quality over quantity.
- As a corollary, don’t simply repackage someone else’s ideas. Do the work of creating your own. If I want to read So-and-so, I’ll go to their blog. You must have enough faith in God to believe that He wants you to think and write like yourself--not like Ann Voskamp.
- Don’t be afraid to tackle difficult subjects. If you are wrestling through something, if it is weighing on your heart, more than likely it is weighing on someone else’s too. Share your brokenness as well as the grace that you are daily receiving.
- And yet, don’t build your blog on negativity. When people are broken and hurting, you don’t help them by simply rehashing all that is wrong with the world or your particular Christian sub-culture. You help them with grace and truth.
- Don’t create blogging wars. Nothing in life is simple. And certainly nothing on the internet is either. Falling into an “Us. vs. Them” paradigm will make your writing one-dimensional and limit your ability to effectively speak to the real problems at hand.
- Instead, read and interact with blogs outside your comfort zone. Listen to people you disagree with. Blogging offers untold opportunity to engage in honest conversation and attempt to understand opposing positions--even if you don’t accept them in the end. Be quick to hear and slow to speak.
- Recognize that your conservative upbringing is not the greatest evil in the world. Sort through your baggage, throw out the trash, but have the maturity to keep what is good and beautiful and valuable.
- Recognize that the conservative church is also not the answer to the problem of evil. Don’t mindlessly parrot specific organizations, leaders, or conferences. Sort through your baggage, throw out the trash, and keep only what is good and beautiful and valuable.
- Use your blog to “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, [and] plead the widow’s cause.” Because you have a voice, because you have a public platform, you must use it for the benefit of those who don’t.
- But remember that causes célèbres, by definition, won’t fit everyone. Simply being a woman, doesn’t mean that you must blog about women’s issues. You may not be called to fight human trafficking or support World Vision; you are called to fight the darkness that God commissions you to fight.
- Look past your own context. Do not be so consumed with your own sphere of life that you don’t communicate the universal truths that undergird your daily life. Remember that the universal is manifested in the particular. Your story is only as important as it allows readers to see how God is working in their story.
- At the same time, stick to your strengths. If you don’t have a theological education, don’t pretend to. You may gain readers through sheer controversy, but you’ll end up looking amateurish and muddy the waters. Remember that you share your experience because God is in it--not because your experience credentials you to define who God is.
- Respond to criticism with grace. Answer every angry comment and every angry blogger with softness. When reviled, revile not again. Because in the end, it won’t matter how much you blog about grace, if you don’t actually practice it.
- Realize that blogging in a privilege. No one has to read what you write. In fact, most of us should be very, very thankful that anybody reads what we write. Be humbled by the opportunity that God has provided. Because as controversial as it sounds, you did not build your blog. God did.
- And because He has, accept it with humble responsibility. Your blog is not simply a place to blow of steam, to pout, or to pursue your own name recognition. Your private issues may tap into readers’ angst, but they will not propel them past it. You must use your writing to push readers beyond themselves, to push them to love Christ and their neighbors—even those who have hurt them.
Ultimately we all must rely on God’s grace to blog gracefully—if it is not flowing in us, it will never flow out of us. So that like Moses, we must acknowledge that the One who formed our mouths is the same One who gives us the words we need to speak. And because He does--because of who He is-- we can be confident that when He gives us those words, they will be full of life and they will be full of grace.
When Less Is... Less
If you’re not among the mommy set, you may not have heard about Hattie Garlick, the UK mom who has vowed not to spend a single pound on her two-year-old son for the next year. Hattie's decision is part social rebellion, part necessity. She credits a growing distaste for “kiddy consumerism” and the fact that she was recently laid off (or as our British cousins say, “made redundant”). Ultimately, her decision is rooted in the ideas of minimalism and thrift--that we don’t need what everybody says we need and what we do need, we can find more cheaply.I know a bit about this kind of counter-cultural lifestyle. I grew up in a family of seven with an extremely limited income. We gardened, canned, and wore hand-me-downs, not because my parents were making a public statement, but because they were trying to clothe and feed us. Even today with a smaller family and a decidedly larger income, I still buy most of our clothes at Goodwill, we hunt, garden, and can, and my idea of a good time is shopping at Aldi. And yet, even I am skeptical of frugality for frugality’s sake. (If I’m honest, I suppose I’m also a bit of a curmudgeon. Whenever being counter-cultural becomes trendy, I immediately get suspicious--I don’t make a very good hipster.)
Because even while those of us enmeshed in consumerism might need to cut of our hand to save our souls, minimalism can have as many pitfalls as materialism. It’s entirely possible to trade consumerism for a Gnosticism that elevates efficiency and thrift above everything else. Just because we might be counter-cultural doesn’t mean that we don’t have our share of sub-cultural baggage. See if any of this luggage is yours:
- You don’t buy what you need. You skimp. Of course, the difficulty lies in determining the difference between a need and a want, but when thrift becomes your predominant value, it’s common to overreach on the definition of “want.” Toiletries are not wants, people.
- You get angry when the manager’s special corner is empty. Another pitfall is that you begin to feel entitled to a discount. You get addicted to “the deal” and refuse to pay full price for anything. You believe that the Sunday paper exists for the sole purpose of protecting your coupons and you feel cheated when there are none inside.
- You buy cheap instead of good. While the culture of advertising does ratchet up prices, a cheap price isn’t necessarily a bargain. Not all products are equal--there are reasons why the dollar store can sell dish detergent for a dollar. Any of which might be that it doesn’t work, it was produced with slave labor, or it includes toxic chemicals.
- You never throw anything away because “you never know.” Strict minimalists will have less of a struggle with this, but it is a significant problem for those of us devoted to thrift. I once had a great aunt who washed and dried paper towels. And Styrofoam meat trays. And plastic wrap. After all, you never know…
- You hear your children talking about life in terms of money. When you are uber-frugal, you begin to evaluate things by how much they don’t cost. Designer brands aren’t your status symbols; how cheaply you bought something is. When your children see this, you teach them that the value of something is directly related to its cost. This could come back to haunt you down the road--like when they’re choosing your nursing home.
- You become cheap with other people. Once you being to elevate thrift above your other values, it’s hard to contain it to your immediate family. While I love re-gifting as much as anyone, we must not forget that giving requires sacrifice—not on the part of the recipient but on the part of the giver.
- You judge other people who use money and space differently. For me this exhibits itself in suburbaphobia—the clinical fear of suburbia. I literally shut-down in malls and hate myself after eating at chain restaurants. And yet, I have to admit that this is simply another form of elitism; it’s the snobbery of thrift.
I wonder how we frugal-types will react when we finally reach heaven and God showers us with abundance. “I’m sorry, God, no mansion-- I’ll just take that cottage over there. And I’m not sure if I can make it to that marriage-supper thingy…don’t want to have to buy a gift. But while you’re here, where can I get the Sunday paper?”
This is not a rant against thrift but a caution about not letting our thrift and minimalism become the defining factor of our lives. Because even as our budgets shrink, it’s entirely possible that our souls could shrink right along with them. Our thrift can quickly become parsimony and our frugality, stinginess. We must remember that the problem isn’t how much money we have; it’s how much we love the money we have. So that while we steward our blessings, we don’t for one minute believe that our stewardship provided them in the first place. Or that our stewardship could ensure that they will be there in the future.
Only God can do this. And He can do this precisely because He is a thrifty God—He doesn’t waste anything and has the power to make even our suffering work out for good. And ultimately, He can do this because He is a generous God—He doesn’t spare expense and has bought us for Himself with nothing less than the precious blood of his Son. And if He didn't spare Him, how shall he not with Him freely give us all things?
All God's Children
It’s been a very confusing week.
And like many of you, I find myself trying to parent through it all. Because as much as I’d like, I cannot shield my children from the world they live in. Within a matter of day, they have been confronted with our history of slavery; they’ve learned about the racism that up until fifty years ago was institutionalized in our governments, schools, and churches; and they’ve heard about a society that allows women to kill their unborn children. (And just to round things out, we also had a conversation about the restaurant Hooters this week too.)
This past Sunday as we celebrated the sanctity of human life, I finally began to fit the pieces together. Our history of racism, our present struggle against abortion. And I began to wonder if it wasn’t time that we needed to recognize that we created this. As much as we like to believe that abortion is simply the fallout of the sexual revolution, as much as we like to blame radical feminists, it’s not that simple. Because when--for over two hundred years--we chose to see minorities as less than human, we created a culture that would one day allow us to view our own children the same way. When we refused to see the image of God in our African-American brothers and sisters, we lost the ability to see the image of God in our unborn sons and daughters.
We have sown the wind and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
When we speak about the sanctity of human life, we must remember that we are not simply speaking about abortion. We are not simply speaking about euthanasia. Honoring the sanctity of human life means embracing God’s image bearers where ever they may be and whatever they may look like. True sanctity of human life means understanding that all human life--every man, every woman, every boy, every girl—is precious to God and should also be precious to us.
So that when we take a stand for the sanctity of human life, we are also taking a stand against all racism, all sexism, all elitism, all sectarianism—any ideology, any prejudice that would say that another human being is somehow inferior or somehow unworthy of our love, somehow unworthy of Christ’s love. When we celebrate the sanctity of human life, we are saying that because of Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female." There is no born or unborn.
The work of fighting abortion doesn’t begin with legislation. It doesn’t begin with marches or protests, and it doesn’t even begin with crisis pregnancy centers. The fight to sanctify human life begins in our own hearts; it begins as we root out the vestiges of pride and hatred and selfishness. It begins as we accept the fact that young minority women (who are disproportionately affected by abortion) will be hesitant to trust us when we offer them alternatives to abortion because for the last two centuries we have judged them simply by the color of their skin. It begins when we recognize that our own daughters chose abortion because they didn’t believe they could come to us without feeling this same weight of judgment.
The fight to end abortion must begin with grace. The grace to believe that all of us are made in God’s likeness. The grace to believe that none of us have any righteousness apart from Him. And the grace to believe that no matter what we have done—whether our sin is racism or promiscuity—that the power of Christ is great enough and the love of Christ is strong enough to reconcile each of us to Himself and to each other.
That Burning Fire
I also shared with you my firm conviction that the dreams that we hold dearest are often the very ones that God intends to use, that they are in our hearts precisely because He placed them there. I realize that this could have come across as overly simplistic--that it could have sounded a little too “Pollyanna/Mary Poppins/Climb every mountain”-ish—especially to those of you who are struggling through a low point right now. And yet, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the path of dreaming “never did run smooth.”
There are days when things are not working out as you planned, when you feel less than enthusiastic about the dreams stirring inside of you, when you want to pitch the whole thing and walk away. There are days when all you want is to escape your calling, and to do so, you wish that you could become someone else entirely.
There are days when you feel like Jeremiah.
The opening chapter of the book of Jeremiah contains a beautiful text that confirms that God sovereignly plans and ordains our callings. When God comes to Jeremiah, He assures him of that, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (ESV) And yet, twenty chapters later, Jeremiah curses the day he was born. The very thing that gave him comfort at the beginning of his ministry was the very thing that he wishes had never happened.
Jeremiah feels like God has tricked him—that by making him the way He did, by appointing him a prophet from birth and placing that “burning fire” deep inside of him, He has doomed him to a life of misery. So that as much as Jeremiah wants to escape his calling, for all the trouble that it has caused him, he simply can’t because God had made him that way. The very thing he is resisting is the very thing that he can’t stop doing. He calls it a “burning fire shut up in [his] bones.”
When I was in college, I attended a church whose pastor routinely gave this piece of advice to anyone considering vocational ministry: “Only do it if you can’t do anything else.” He wasn’t denigrating the value of ministry so much as emphasizing that ministry (like any other calling) is fraught with hardship, discouragement, and heartbreak. And in those moments, the only thing that will keep you going is the sure knowledge that God has made you for this—that there is nothing else you can do because you have that “burning fire shut up in your bones.”
It is so much a part of you that it is knit it into the very fabric of your being.
And if it is, there will be plenty of times that you will find yourself precisely in Jeremiah’s position—both hating the struggle and knowing that you can’t escape it because God Himself formed you this way. There will be plenty of times when it feels like a burden, times when you want to walk away, times when you will shake your fist at Him and say, “I didn’t ask for this. Why have you made me like this?”
For me, the “burning fire” has been a combination of being analytic and outspoken. It is both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. It is the very thing that drives me to write, but it is also the very thing that leads me to be overly critical, noisy, and self-righteous. And I’ve hated myself for it. I’ve always wanted to be the quiet, demure one—the girl at the party whose very presence lends an air of sophistication and elegance–and yet, I always end up being the girl animatedly arguing some political or theological point. I inevitably wake up the next morning with a mental hangover and mountains of regret. “Why did I have to do that? Why couldn’t I have just kept my mouth shut?”
Ultimately though, it’s not about keeping my mouth shut. And it isn’t about achieving some mystical balance between the extremes of not caring and caring too much. Instead, it’s about finding a way forward, about transcending that type of one-dimensional thinking, so that you can pursue a greater reality--the reality that despite your frustration with yourself and despite your disappointed dreams, you know that God has “made you thus” for a reason. You know that He is shepherding and guiding you, that His Spirit is actively maturing you, and that even in the darkest valley, He is walking beside you and will bring you back into the light.
And this is requires faith. Not faith in your dreams or yourself, but faith in His providence and faith in His goodness. This requires believing that He has made you fearfully and wonderfully, that He did knit you together in your mother’s womb to fulfill a specific purpose, and that everything about you–even your dreams--are ultimately from His hand. So that in your darkest moments, this faith will manifest itself in obedience; an obedience that some days will simply mean putting one foot in front of the other and continuing down the path that He Himself has laid for you.
Deliver Us from Evil
And while we were initially absorbed with what happened and how it happened, we are now left wrestling with the question of why it happened. Undoubtedly over the next few days, we will discover bits and pieces of the story. We will hear about mental illness, previous altercations, worrisome signs, and we will cling to these scraps as some sort of explanation for horrors that simply cannot be explained.
But even as the details become clearer, I’m afraid that it will become increasingly harder for us to truly understand. As the details take shape, we will be tempted to isolate this tragedy, to relegate it to the result of a broken mental health system or a society glutted with violence. And while we must have those conversations, we must not forget that what happened on Friday is part of something larger than any of us. What happened Friday in those now sacred halls was one more attempt by the Evil One to fight a battle that he has already lost.
Those of you who are literature buffs may remember Shakespeare’s play Henry V. The story climaxes as a young King Henry successfully leads his ragtag English army to victory over superior French forces at the Battle of Agincourt. During the battle, when it becomes apparent that the English will prevail, a band of French soldiers slip behind the English lines to do the unspeakable—they slaughter the young boys who had been left at camp.
In Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film adaptation, the fighting on field abruptly stops when the air is pierced with high-pitched screams of panic and anguish. The soldiers rush back to camp to discover their boys--their sons--murdered. Viewing their lifeless bodies, a war-hardened Henry wails, “I was not angry since coming to France until this instant!” War is one thing—that is business—but there is a code of honor, a code of warfare that is supposed to keep the innocents safe.
But as we were reminded last Friday, the Evil One does not play by the rules.
Especially when he is on the run, especially when he knows that he has been defeated. Instead, the Evil One lashes out in fits of senseless, puerile rage because he knows that the only thing left to him is the possibility of inflicting suffering as he flees. As the Apostle John recorded in The Revelation, “Woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath because he knows that his time is short.”
This is also why, despite all the coming conversations about mental health and gun control and school security, we will never be able to make sense of what happened that cold morning in Connecticut. We will never be able to make sense of it because there is no explanation, there is no reason, there is no point. When the Evil One attacks, he destroys all that is natural, all that is good, all that is beautiful, all that is just. And he does so by attacking the weakest among us.
This randomness, this refusal to play by the rules is precisely what makes him so terrifying and why it is easy for us to fear him. Deep in our souls, we know that for all our precautions, for all our legislation, for all our whispered prayers, we cannot predict where he will strike next. And so, even as we desperately pray for the Father to deliver us, we wonder whether or not He will. And sometimes in the worst of the battle, when the skies are darkest, we don’t even know if He can.
As Henry and his men stand helplessly surveying the carnage, a French herald rides into the English camp. Snapping from his stupor, Henry lunges at him, throws him to the ground, and is seconds from impaling him when the herald cries out that he is come seeking terms of surrender. Soul-worn and body-weary Henry responds simply, "I tell thee truly, herald, I know not if the day be ours or no."
Translation: I don’t even know who is winning anymore.
In this life, in the muck and mire, in the sweat and tears, we too don’t always know who is winning. It seems very likely that the Evil One prevailed on Friday. If the grief and pain in our hearts is to be believed, he certainly did. But he did not.
Instead the grief and pain must remind us that we grieve precisely because things are not as they should be; and the fact that things are not as they should be promises that one day they will be. The fact that the Evil One acts in such deranged, malicious ways proves that he is helpless; his very struggles testify to a prevailing and conquering God. Because in battle, only the winning side has the capacity to be generous, to spare the lives of its enemies; the losing side cannot risk it.
And so we endure in hope and longing. We wait not in fear, but in power and love and sound minds. Power that enables us to continue the fight against the darkness. Love that allows the pain to seep into the corners of our well-guarded hearts and break us so that we weep—deep, guttural wrenching sobs—with those weep. And sound minds that remind us that we do not despair as those who have no hope; we know this is not the end.
We know that for the all times that the Evil One tries--for all his cowardly acts of violence, for all his desperate attempts—he is not winning. Christ has conquered; the Evil One is defeated and he is fleeing the battlefield. Through His own valiant struggle, our King has made him a weak, pitiful, paltry, powerless fool; and through His own victorious resurrection, our King can give life even to those the Evil One tries to destroy.
This is all we can know. This is all we can understand. And yet, it is enough. It is enough to know that even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death and even as we cry to our Father to deliver us from the Evil One, we do not fear because we know that He is with us and we know that He already has.
Mad Men, June Cleaver, and Biblical Womanhood
For some this may sound like a confession of moral laxity; for others it’s a confession of being horribly out of touch and having lived the last five years in a cave. Still, apart from the rampant licentiousness, unchecked greed, and ubiquitous alcoholism, I have to admit that it’s a pretty engaging show, especially as it captures the glamour of mid-20th century Manhattan--the perfect pencil skirts, the tailored three-piece suits, the sleek cars, and the poolside lunches at the Astoria. In its attempt to be historically accurate, Mad Men is also quick to make (and overstate) the point that this was a world dominated men, a world where housewives were vacuous ninnies, and the only women with any sense of power were the “hens” at the office who knew how to get a man to do what they wanted.
Of course Mad Men is interesting in itself, but it’s been particularly interesting as my exposure to it coincides with the ramped up conversation surrounding traditional gender roles. With this week’s release of Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womahood, everybody and her cousin seems to be parsing conservative interpretations of gender via the late 1950s and early 60s. Evans explains how she understands conservative mores here:
"The term 'Biblical womanhood' is basically a reaction to feminism. It means a woman who stays home and submits to her husband. It's a remembrance of June Cleaver—not what we see when we actually read scripture."
Now I can’t speak to Evans’ experience, but this correlation is funny to me. It’s funny because, despite being a woman who identifies as a conservative, I’ve never once thought of myself as June Cleaver. And the main reason isn’t because there’s anything wrong with June or even with women who care for their families fulltime. (I’m a SAHM myself.) The main reason my conservative understanding of gender has never led me to recreate the 1950s is because of what was happening below the surface. In a word, June was June, not because of conservative gender roles or because she stayed at home; June was June because of what broader society was pursuing at the time—stability and comfort.
June Cleaver vs. Kingdom Values During the 1950s, the United States experienced relative peace and prosperity for the first time in over two decades. In this context, Ward and June became icons of stability, comfort, and ease; they represented a generation who had known deprivation their entire lives, who as children had endured the Great Depression, and who came of age through the atrocities of WWII. By the time the 1950s rolled along, they were also a generation desperate for “the good life.” In this context, a woman’s role was naturally reduced to being a comforter, a nurturer, a source of emotional stability the same way that a man’s role was reduced to being a source of financial stability. (Think how important it was for a man who had grown up in the leanness of the Depression and watched his mother and sisters work in the factories during WWII to be able to make enough money to enable his wife to stay at home. And think too how important it would have been for women--who only a decade before had welcomed broken men home from war--to provide them with some sense of domestic normalcy and peace.) In this sense, gender roles weren’t simply about men oppressing women as so many Millennials think—although as Mad Men is quick to point out it was very easy for selfish men to do so--no, gender roles of the 1950s were a way to work toward the societal values of rest and stability.
So here’s my question: Is June Cleaver really synonymous with a conservative Christian understanding of gender?
I grew up in a very traditional home. I was taught to respect my father as head of the family and my mother spent years at home caring for us. But despite being traditional in their understanding of gender, my parents were very non-traditional in their view of the world. Instead of teaching their children to pursue stability and comfort, they taught us to love God, to sacrifice for his kingdom, to seek heaven’s riches over those of this earth, and to never forget where we were heading. The effect was that these kingdom dynamics created a different paradigm in which I applied conservative gender norms. Instead of thinking that the greatest good for me was to marry, have children, and rear them in a comfortable suburban environment, I grew up believing that the greatest good for me was to follow Christ, to devote myself to His service. That might very well mean marriage and children, but it could have as easily meant working overseas, pursuing post-grad degrees, or relieving the sick and oppressed. June Cleaver never once entered the conversation.
So I don’t think the problem is as simple as conservative gender roles. The problem comes when we use conservative gender roles to further our own comfort, our own sense of stability, or our own sense of ease. And my guess is that this is what many of my peers are confusing when they associate a conservative reading of gender with the 1950s. Ironically, conservatives fall prey to the same mistake when they insist on shaping applications of gender after a Cleaver-esque domesticity.
No Stepford Wives Because let’s be clear on one thing: the kingdom dynamics of love and sacrifice call us to apply gender roles very differently than we would if we were pursuing lives of ease and stability. When you believe that you’re pioneering a new country, when you believe that you’re pushing back the boundaries of brokenness, when you believe that you are fighting to see the kingdom of God reign in the hearts of men, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be content as June Cleaver.
Instead your role models for womanhood will be women like Katharina von Bora, who singlehandedly managed her family estates thus enabling her husband (Martin Luther) to do nothing less than turn the known church on its ear. Your role model for womanhood will be Abigail Adams, great-granddaughter of Puritans, whose minister father insisted on her education and who by her intelligence and grace helped her husband (and son) establish the very foundations of our fledgling government. You’re more likely to look to a woman like Caroline Ingalls who sweated alongside her husband, built her home with her bare hands, plowed fields, and tamed the frontier all for the sake of a dream. And you’re more likely to model your understanding of Christian womanhood after someone like Elisabeth Elliot who rejected the opportunity to be June Cleaver and went instead with her husband to live and die in the jungles of Ecuador--all to tell those who had never heard that Jesus lives.
These were no Stepford wives.
And yet, neither were they feminists in a political sense. (As a former nun, Katharina von Bora’s most revolutionary act was marrying and having children.) No, they were simply strong women who embodied all that it means to be human—they embraced their femininity, their capacity to bear and nurture life, their minds, their husbands, and their individual callings all in pursuit of goals and glories greater than their own private issues.
Deeper Issues Today, the easiest way to undermine a conservative understanding of gender is to align it with 1950s domesticity—something that that both liberals and conservatives are prone to do. But we must acknowledge that applications of gender are simply an expression of deeper values; poor June Cleaver was really only ever a presenting issue. The deeper question is what is driving us: Are we being motivated by our own needs or our own fears? Are we looking for lives of ease and comfort? Are we willing to use others to achieve that for ourselves?
Or are we pioneers, pilgrims on a journey from this world to the next? Are we men and women working together in pursuit of the kingdom of God? Are we captured by a greater vision and a greater dream of what God is doing in the world? When our churches are motivated by finding comfort in this life, it’s very possible that we would end up recreating a 1950s context; but as we concern ourselves with service and love, as we valiantly pursue the kingdom, June Cleaver with all her niceties and comfortable stability will have little place in the conversation. Until then, let’s put a moratorium on associating her with a conservative understanding of gender; and as a first step to that end, maybe we should all watch a little less Mad Men from now on.
My Take: DIY, Pintrest, and the Rise of the New Domesticity
In the past when we dreamed of our ideal (then non-existent) house, we always envisioned a room devoted to creating--whether it be crafting, sewing, drawing, writing, or simply playing with play-dough--we wanted a room that invites you to find your inner creative muse and let lose. Instead of fussing at my daughter for yet again cluttering up her room with odd bits of construction paper and glue, I want to be able to point her to cupboard of paints and glitter and chalk and say, “Go for it.”
I don’t know if other people dream of rooms like this, but I have noticed a trend among my generation. More and more of us are devoting our time and energy to things like crafting, cooking, and frugal living. You only have to hop on etsy, pintrest, or any number of DIY blogs to know that this phenomena is larger than any one subset and isn’t contained to the SAHMs among us. Women everywhere—from university-educated vegans to crunchy conservative homeschooling moms—are embracing the domestic.
In this Washington Post piece, Julia Rothman worries that this “new domesticity” will lead to obligation and foster a whole batch of June Cleavers trying to one up each other, not necessarily with our meatloaves and kitten heels, but with knit scarves and cheese making. And while this is definitely a possibility, I think the new domesticity can actually teach us something deeper about ourselves, if we let it.
Because whether it’s being motivated by a case of burn-out in the boardroom, a commitment to staying home with young children, or simply trying to make ends meet in these difficult economic times, this renewed interest in the creative process is really about reclaiming something very fundamental to our humanity. Whether you realize it or not, it’s about reclaiming the image of God in us.
In the case of my peers, generally young Christian women, the return to crafting and baking and decorating has accompanied a renewed emphasis on the importance of family life. We see marriages crumbling around us, children struggling through cookie-cutter schools, and so for many, the solution comes by devoting themselves full-time to their families. They’re educated women with more than a heaping of gifts, but they choose to become SAHMs because they really believe that, at least in the early years, they can best care for their families there.
But the truth that many are learning the hard way is that staying at home isn’t without sacrifice. In the eight years that I’ve been at home, I’ve discovered that little ones don’t often want to discuss French existentialism or world events, and major life accomplishments have been reduced to having everyone clean and fed at the same time. It doesn’t take very long to realize that staying at home can be less than stimulating.
In her breathtaking essay “Are Women Human?,” Dorothy L. Sayers argues that this is one reason why so many women pursue professional careers in the first place (a novelty in 1938 when she first gave the speech that would eventually be published as an essay). She says:
It is all very well to say that woman’s place is the home—but modern civilization has taken all the pleasant and profitable activities out of the home, where the women looked after them, and handed them over to big industry, to be directed and organized by men at the head of large factories…
It is a formidable list of jobs: the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry. The whole catering industry…the whole of the nation’s brewing and distilling. All the preserving, pickling and bottling industry, all the bacon-curing. And (since in those days a man was often absent from home for months together on war or business) a very large share in the management of landed estates…
Now it is very likely that men in big industries do these jobs better than women did them at home. The fact remains that the home contains much less interesting activity than it used to contain… It is perfectly idiotic to take away woman’s traditional occupations and then complain because she looks for new ones. Every woman is a human being—one cannot repeat too often—and a human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world. Sayers concern was not really to define what constitutes a “woman’s” job or a “man’s” job but to emphasize that every human being—of which half the species are women--MUST be engaged in creative, productive work because they are made in the image of a creative, productive God.
So I’m wondering, especially in the case of my peers, how much of the return to domestic creativity has less to do with our need to care for our families and more to do with caring for our own souls? How many of us craft and sew not primarily because we can do it better or cheaper, but because we simply love to do it? And for women who don’t stay at home, how much of your drive toward the new domesticity comes from the fact that the modern workplace has forced us to become mechanistic, unimaginative robots, spending most of our days processing bureaucracy and paperwork, without ever seeing tangible progress for our labor?
This is why we’re seeing the resurgence of creativity, especially in the home. Ultimately, we create because He did. We love beauty because He does. And when those things are less and less present in our lives, we are driven to find a way to recover them—whether we realize that’s what we’re doing or not.
This is not a problem. Domestic arts do often allow us to better care for our families. And creative pursuits do fill a need and enable you to return refreshed to the humdrum of work on Monday. It’s also not a problem if your creativity doesn’t take the form of traditional domesticity—feel free to go rebuild the engine of that ’57 Chevy this weekend—because ultimately what’s at stake isn’t that we all become June Cleavers; it’s that we all become like our God.
In the end, we must recognize that we pin and we plant and we bake and we knit, not simply because we are women or mothers, but because we are human beings made in His image. And all the mechanization, all the industrialization, all the assembly lines in the world can’t remove that part of us that needs first to create, and then to step back with satisfaction and declare, “That’s good.” Just like He once did so very long ago, just like He continues to do every day.