Introduction: Lost
I was lost and I didn't know it. I was the pastor's daughter and literally grew up in church. "Lost" was the last word I would have used to describe myself. I belonged to Jesus. I was in the fold-one of the "found" ones. I knew my way around the Bible, felt at home in the church, and had a clear sense of my calling as a woman. I knew where I was going in life. But I got lost along the way.
The only girl in a family of four children, I, like most of my friends, was raised by loving parents to become a wife and mother. My life plan was clear. I would be the next in a long line of women devoted to husband, home, and hearth, volunteering countless hours of ministry in the church.
Everything I heard and observed within the church and read in books addressed to young Christian women reinforced these ideas. Nearly all of the women I knew walked the church's center aisle and said "I do" to marriage and motherhood. This was God's purpose for women-a plan as old as the Garden of Eden- the plan He unveiled when He created Eve to be Adam's wife and helpmeet. And then I got lost.
Wedding bells didn't ring for me after four years at a Christian college. Unlike many of my friends, I graduated without an engagement ring and no prospective husband on the horizon. In my heart, I held into the belief that marriage and family were God's destiny for me. Then one year turned into ten, and I never felt so lost.
As the decade rolled agonizingly by, I entered into the workforce, earned a seminary degree, and set up an apartment for one.
This wasn't the life I expected. I felt lost as a woman and bewildered about God. What had gone wrong?
Had he forgotten me? I played by the rules, dated only Christians, wasn't wild or rebellious, read my bible, prayed and faithfully served the church. Yet, instead of building my life around a husband and children,
I was on my own, protecting and providing for myself. Who was I as a woman and what was my purpose in life if I never married or had a family? Had I misread the Bible's teaching about women or was something wrong with me?
God was challenging my ideas of him, something he continues to do to this day. But there was another side to my struggle that took longer for me to engage, for he was also challenging my ideas about myself with basic questions that might never have troubled me if my life had unfolded according to plan. What does it mean to be a Christian woman? Is there a right way and a wrong way (or a best way) for a woman to walk with God? What are we supposed to do when our lives don't follow the map, either because we march to the beat of a different drummer or, as in my case, things simply don't work out?
Do we, as one woman put it, "miss the best life has to offer a woman"? Or, what if we marry and have children and then something goes wrong- we lose our husband or our children don't turn out right? What then? Has our womanhood fallen short?
Some might expect those questions to go away after marriage, but when I got married, they didn't. As a matter of fact, a whole new set of questions emerged. Instead of allowing me to pick up where I left off after college and settling me into the role of stay-at-home wife and mother, God worked through my husband and circumstances we faced together to challenge my paradigm even more.
My husband appreciated a fine meal as much as any man. But he wanted more of me than cooking, cleaning house, and raising kids. He wanted (he says "needed") the experience and knowledge I brought into our marriage. He sought and valued my interaction in his work, my counsel in his decisions, and my collaboration in tackling the problems that came our way. He wanted a partner, not a dependent. Instead of rendering my career temporary, unnecessary, or possibly a threat, marriage gave my vocation, gifts and contributions a new sense of mission.
During those early years of marriage, we battled against infertility and lost. God gave me marriage (albeit a little late in the game), now motherhood seemed out of reach. Fortunately what I had learned about God through my earlier struggles as a single saved me from another spiritual nosedive. I discovered later, God has more than one way of creating families. Still, according to the biblical model, I was doomed to miss out on childbirth, which many believe is the point in life when a woman experiences her highest sense of self-fulfillment. I had run head-on into one of the major threats to a woman's identity that is exacerbated, not relieved, by prevailing Christian views on how a woman finds fulfillment and meaning in life.
Many of the churches we attended were inquisitive and eager to employ Frank's gifts, but showed no interest in mine. I'm embarrassed to admit this didn't bother me at first. I thought this was how things were supposed to work. My husband was the focus of attention now and my job was to promote and encourage his ministries. He couldn't have disagreed more. He was interested in my calling as a Christian too and challenged me to develop and use my gifts. Certainly, if we take seriously the New Testament statements about the Holy Spirit giving spiritual gifts to each member of the body of Christ, then every believer who crosses the church's threshold is bearing vital gifts for our spiritual welfare.
With Frank's urging, I ventured out into new territory both in my computer career and in ministry, where I discovered gifts and abilities I didn't know I had and certainly never expected to use. I was learning, growing, and flourishing. We worked together to nurture and raise our daughter, along with tackling the challenges of work and ministry that God brought our way. Our marriage relationship was richer than anything I could have imagined. God opened amazing opportunities for us both, and we marveled (still do marvel) at how he was weaving our lives together at so many different levels.
Looking back, I wouldn't change places with anyone. Still, whenever I consult the traditional blueprint, pr something someone says reminds me I'm out of step, that old lost feeling returns with force. The truth is, I'm not a typical wife, I don't have a typical family and my marriage isn't typical either. God gave me my heart's desire-a husband and a daughter- but in ways that shook up all my preconceived Christian categories.
Its a terrible thing to admit, but I had to lose my way before realizing how many other women feel lost too. Everywhere I go I find women struggling because their lives turned out differently than they expected. What are we to do when we don't or can't fit into the mold? Or when in public we look like we have perfect lives but behind closed doors its a sham? And what about the gifts God entrusted to us? Does he intend for is to use them or will they get us into trouble?
No matter what view we take on debates over Christian womanhood, we want to know how to live faithfully as followers of Jesus Christ. We don't want to waste our lives.
The ground has shifted under women today. We are not living in the world of our mothers and grandmothers. Ans our daughters' world will be different from ours. Like generations before us, most of us are wives and mothers. However, many of us-more than ever- are alone, not simply through the death of a spouse but often because we never married or are divorced. Many are single parents. We are better educated and have more career opportunities than any previous generation.
As Christian women, however, we face a conundrum. When we look at what the church is saying about women in contrast to the message coming to us from contemporary culture and from circumstances we can't control, it seems that either we are out of step or the bible is. Given the vast opportunities, demands, and realities we face, not to mention our differing gifts and personalities, the Bible's message for women seems to be wooden and strangely limiting. The pattern for women handed down to us in the church simply doesn't fit all sizes and shapes that women come in these days.
A whole wave of talented women who are valued and sought in the workplace for their training, expertise and leadership skills are walking away from the church because it seems uninviting to them. Tragically, the message they're picking up is that the church will clip their wings and has nothing hopeful to offer them. Even those of us who stay- women deeply committed to the church- are baffled when the church doesn't always seem to make the best use of (or even show interest in) the gifts and talents we offer.
Today when we pick up our Bibles, we want to know how to be better wives and mothers. But we have other questions too. We want to know what the bible says to those of us whose lives don't follow the traditional formula. Is there only one biblical track for women, or does God intend to take delight in our great diversity? Are women second-class citizens in God's family, or does He value us as much as he does our husbands and brothers? Does God have large purposes for his daughters, or does His word limit our options? Is the Bible relevant for women in the third millennium, or have we outgrown its message? I am not a prophetess, but I suspect even women who do not struggle with these questions for themselves will in time be asking them (along with a lot of men) for the sake of their daughters.
If there's any truth to the notion that Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, its undoubtedly in a woman's readiness to stop and ask for directions as soon as she realizes she's lost. That so called female instinct drove me back to the Scriptures with my questions to look again at the women in the Bible to see if they had any wisdom for me today.
Changing winds of culture, long held traditions of the church, private opinions, and impassioned arguments concerning women must, in the final analysis, yield to the authority of God's Word. Little did I expect to find that the women in the Bible felt lost too.
Admittedly, their stories (which I thought I knew as well as my own) didn't offer much help to me at first. Most of them seemed out of touch with my circumstances and the struggles women are facing today. These women in the Bible had some painful struggles, but unlike many so many of us, their lives almost always turned out well in the end. Furthermore, their stories usually followed the wife and mother model and reinforced the idea that God prefers to do His most important work through men. Still, a lot of things weren't adding up.
Looking closer, I began to see many women who, like me, didn't fit neatly into the traditional paradigm. Strong women like Tamar, Rahab, Deborah, Jael, Priscilla, and Junia have always posted problems for interpreters because biblical writers clearly admired these women and held them up as outstanding examples of godliness even though their conduct broke with the accepted convention. They were daring, took initiative, and courageously exercised leadership, even in their interactions with men. To resolve the conflict this poses, biblical interpreters often downsize their contributions to leave a more "suitable" impression or else reclassify them as "exceptions", thereby removing their portraits from the gallery of acceptable role models for Christian women. (In the case of Jael, I must admit driving a peg through a man's head probably is not a good Christian example. But even Jael has something important to say to us and deserves more careful study).
Upon closer inspection, I discovered many women in the Bible had trouble fitting into the wife-and-mother definition of what it means to be a woman.
They clearly embraced traditional expectations and tried desperately to live within those parameters, but ultimately found it impossible. Naomi in the Old Testament and Anna in the New enjoyed ideal lives at one point, only to lose everything through the premature death of a husband. Sarah didn't become a mother until she was ninety, which was considerably worse than my experience of delayed motherhood and hardly any woman's dream. Hagar's and Esther's lives were hopelessly reconfigured- actually sacrificed- to serve someone else's agenda.
Neither woman had a voice in events trampled underfoot her private hopes and dreams. It is not often noted, but many stories of women in the Bible make no mention of husband or children. Although singleness was exceedingly rare in the ancient Hebrew culture, no one knows if Miriam, Mary and Martha, or Mary Magdalene ever married. In a jarring break from the culture (and without diminishing family),
the New Testament anchors a woman's identity and purpose to her relationship with Jesus rather than her parentage, her marital status, or her children.
As I continued to study, new details emerged that brought fresh clarity to me as a woman. To my relief, I found I was traveling a well-beaten path. Women in the Bible were quite familiar with roadblocks, disappointments, and feeling lost. They knew what it was like to hit bottom when their lives veered off in unexpected directions or when they didn't seem to count for much in the eyes of others. They were honest disclosures of anger, frustration, doubts about God, and deep insecurities about themselves.
Many were thrown into circumstances that took them completely out of their comfort zone and compelled them to take a stand or fight a battle they undoubtedly expected someone else (presumably a man) to handle for them. Their remarkable honesty freed me to be honest about the complexities of being a woman in a man's world and more importantly, to be truthful regarding the state of my own heart before God.
Time after time, they put God to the test, and He displayed the greatness of His heart for women in powerful ways I'd never noticed before. Under their tutelage I learned God has a larger vision for women than I realized, a vision that encompasses the vast diversity of all our lives and that calls us to be more. I
t was clear, as I believed all along, that the Bible strongly affirms our significance as wives and mothers, but I was stunned to learn God values us just as much when our lives follow other paths. Their stories gave me the freedom to embrace the life God was opening up for me.
My excitement over what I was finding was tempered by a sense of grief that the strong voices of women in the Bible are silent at a time when women inside and outside the church are searching for answers that can withstand the pressures and challenges confronting us today. Crucial dimensions of the ancient stories have been muted, forgotten, or passed over. It made me thankful, in a strange sort of way, that I got lost and had to search for answers myself. As I studied, I discovered I was part of an exciting trend in biblical studies that is galvanizing the study of women in the Bible and recovering the Bible's lost message for women.
**I'm excited to read this book...
This is what the girls are doing right now. They came in my room a few minutes ago and asked to borrow my bible and a notebook so they could read and take notes. God in them is just blowing me away!
