the ideal woman

"Here we have a picture of God's ideal woman... Faith in God that sees beyond present bitter setbacks. Freedom from the securities and comforts of the world. Courage to venture into the unknown and the strange. Radical commitment in the relationships appointed by God.... This is the woman of Proverbs 31:25 who looks into the future with confidence in God and laughs at the coming troubles: 'Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.' Ruth is one of 'the holy women who hoped in God... [and did] not fear anything that is frightening' (1 Peter 3:5-6). It is a beautiful thing to watch a woman like this serve Christ with courage…. Whatever else the great women of faith doubted, they never doubted that God governed every part of their lives and that nothing could stay his hand... Nothing - from toothpicks to tyrants - is ultimately self-determining. Everything serves (willingly or not) the 'purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will' (Eph. 1:11). God is the all-encompassing, all-pervading, all-governing reality."

-John Piper, A Sweet and Bitter Providence

(originally posted on the Girl Talk blog)

beauty's link to terrorism

The following is from Carolyn McCulley's January 26 blog post:

"One of my favorite Bible passages is from Psalm 34. Verses 4 and 5 read: 'I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.'

"I have seen that kind of radiant beauty on those whose hearts are contented in God, who are eager to proclaim all of His blessings and mercies upon their lives. I firmly believe that is the most attractive beauty there is, because it edifies and builds up others. Yet, I also know the strong pull of the cosmetic and cosmeceutical industries and the promises they make to stall or turn back the ravages of time. So I write this post with a bit of ambivalence, because I know the money I spend at various salons.

"That said, I have never been Botoxed. My dermatologist did inform me a few years ago that it was time to start, because it would keep my fine lines from becoming deep wrinkles. I frowned (deepening those lines) and shook my head. There was no way I was going to stick a neurotoxin in my face, I announced. I was sure that in 20 years, we'd discover why that was a bad idea. She looked at me placidly and said, "I hope not because I have a face full of it." Maybe she was looking at me in wide-eyed horror, but I couldn't tell.

"Likely it won't take 20 years. We're now discovering a new problem associated with the Botox craze: an increased risk of terrorism. Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about how officials fear that the toxic ingredient in Botox could become terrorist tool:

• 'In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more -- "as many as you want," he told buyers -- from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.'
  
• 'Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.'
  
• 'No Chechen factory has been found, but a search for the maker of the highly lethal toxin in Rakhman's vials continues across a widening swath of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia. U.S. officials and security experts say they know the lab exists, and probably dozens of other such labs, judging from the surging black market for the drug.'
  
• 'Al-Qaeda is known to have sought botulinum toxin. The Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization, and other groups have bought and sold counterfeit drugs to raise cash. Now, with the emergence of a global black market for fake Botox, terrorism experts see an opportunity for a deadly convergence.'
  
• '"It is the only profit-making venture for terrorists that can also potentially yield a weapon of mass destruction," said Kenneth Coleman, a physician and biodefense expert.'
  

"That last quote is important. I recognize that criminal elements can run scams on most anything to finances their ventures. In some ways, we can't take responsibility for what they choose to contort. But in an age of responsible consumerism, we also can't ignore what kind of markets our consumption creates. This article contains sobering news. I don't offer it to shame women who have had Botox treatments, nor to add one more temptation to those who are prone to fear. I am posting it because I had never heard about this potential link to terrorism. And I believe that having this kind of information helps us to consider our actions and motives from a broader perspective. It challenges us to rethink what is packaged as normal and acceptable.

"We live in an age that sells us a lie: that somehow or another we can get around the aging process. But we can't. Not in our own strength. Sickness, aging, and death are a consequence of our own sinfulness. They are inevitable consequences, but they are not irrevocable. Because there is One who paid the penalty for our sin and gave us His righteousness in exchange, this is not the end of the story. Jesus triumphed over death! His sinless life and substitutionary death on the cross for our sins has averted the Father's righteous wrath for all of our wrongs. Through this divine rescue, we can repent and receive Jesus' gracious gift of forgiveness, reconciliation with God, and life everlasting. And added to those amazing gifts is a new, glorified and ageless body."

the state of the american woman

I was thrilled to find out that Carolyn McCulley had covered TIME's latest special report. The following is from her post, which I highly recommend checking out:

"TIME magazine just published a special report, "The State of the American Woman." The Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. What they wanted to know was whether the battle of the sexes was really over, and if so, did anyone win? I guess it depends on how you define winning, because one of the more challenging aspects of this report is what was said about women's happiness:

Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy. No tidy theory explains the trend, notes University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, a co-author of The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. "We looked across all sectors — young vs. old, kids or no kids, married or not married, education, no education, working or not working — and it stayed the same," he says of the data.

"This has also been reported elsewhere. For example, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote an op/ed piece in September about the same trend, titled "Blue is the New Black." These media reports have in common the Wharton study released in May titled, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." In my opinion, the Wharton study uncovered one important reason for declining female happiness in an age that upended what feminist Betty Friedan saw as the problem back in 1963: the trapped housewife syndrome. Now that women are no longer bound by what Friedan saw as the primary problem of women, you'd think we'd all be happier. But the Wharton study noted the emotional ties to home still affect women:

Arlie Hochschild’s and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift (1989) argued that women’s movement into the paid labor force was not accompanied by a shift away from household production and they were thus now working a “second shift”. However, time use surveys do not bear this out. Aguiar and Hurst (2007) document relatively equal declines in total work hours since 1965 for both men and women, with the increase in hours of market work by women offset by large declines in their non-market work. Similarly, men are now working fewer hours in the market and more hours in home production. Blau (1998) points to the increased time spent by married men on housework and the decreased total hours worked (in the market and in the home) by married women relative to married men as evidence of women’s improved bargaining position in the home. However, it should be noted that the argument went beyond counting hours in The Second Shift. Women, they argued, have maintained the emotional responsibility for home and family: a point that is perhaps best exemplified by the familiar refrains of a man “helping” around the house or being a good dad when “babysitting” the kids. Thus even if men are putting in more hours, it is difficult to know just how much of the overall burden of home production has shifted, as measuring the emotional, as well as physical, work of making a home is a much more difficult task. "Though the goal of second-wave feminism was to severely diminish the importance of home--the private sphere of our important relationships--it is clear that this isn't possible because the feminine capacity for nurturing and bearing life still courses through us. That's not to say we don't enjoy other tasks and goals outside of the home. It means that the simplistic approach to modeling women's life structures after men's is ridiculously stressful. The home does matter and the relationships nurtured there do carry a priority.

"In fact, you can see this is the results of the Rockefeller/TIME poll. The theme of relationships courses throughout the poll and dominates the issue of priorities:

• Being married is very important to 58% of men vs. 53% of women.


• Men and women largely agree on the importance of most life goals. The biggest difference in life goals? Fifty-eight percent of men describe religious faith as very important vs. 68% of women.


• There's a definition perception gap at work: TIME reports that 69% of women think men resent women who have more power than they do; only 49% of men agree. But only 29% of men say that female bosses are harder to work for than male bosses, compared with 45% of women.
  
  
• More than a third of men over age 65 say that with the rise of women in society and the workplace, men no longer know their role vs. 25% of men ages 18 to 29.

"But most interesting of all was this snapshot from TIME:

In the 1970s, a majority of children grew up with a stay-at-home parent; now that figure is less than a third. A large majority — 70% of men, 61% of women — believe this has had a negative effect on society. Fifty-seven percent of men and 51% of women agree that it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children. Asked to rank what they value most for their own daughters, 63% of men and 56% of women put a happy marriage with children first; 17% of men and 23% of women said an interesting career; and 15% of men and 20% of women said financial success.

"If a happy marriage and children is the highest priority for more than half of those surveyed, then I believe we need to be more intentional about helping our culture achieve those goals. The timeless truth of the Bible still speaks to us today and we who know the Word should not shrink back from leading others to learn it."

elliot on the essence of femininity

(Thanks to CBMW for originally posting the following excerpt)

"Femininity receives. It says, 'May it be to me as you have said.' It takes what God gives - a special place, a special honor, a special function and glory, different from that of masculinity, meant to be a help. In other words, it is for us women to receive the given as Mary did, not to insist on the not-given, as Eve did.

"Perhaps the exceptional women in history have been given a special gift - a charisma - because they made themselves nothing. I think of Amy Carmichael, for example, another Mary, because she had no ambition for anything but the will of God. Therefore her obedience, her 'May it be to me,' has had an incalculably deep impact in the twentieth century. She was given power, as was her Master, because she made herself nothing.

"I would be the last to deny that women are given gifts that they are meant to exercise. But we must not be greedy in insisting on having all of them, in usurping the place of men. We are women, and my plea is Let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is. No arguments would ever be needed if we all shared the spirit of the 'most blessed among women.'

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

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

- Elisabeth Elliot's, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

(Access the rest of this chapter in full here.)

velveteen rabbit made of steel with a plan

A few days ago, a younger girl friend told me she wants to serve Christ wholeheartedly but is concerned about what that means as a female living in 2009. She has always been given the impression that Christian women are supposed to marry very young; in doing so, are not expected to accomplish much; and should become, in a word, weak. She's not too excited about this concept. (Wow, no kidding?)

She trusts her Savior but has always been taught that the Proverbs 31 woman is also code for Stepford Wife: living a level of perfection that doesn't seem attainable against modern standards; robotic and larger-than-life.

I love the way Leslie Ludy addresses this topic: "'Who can find a virtuous woman?' The word 'virtuous' here is actually a masculine noun that means 'strength, might, valor, and power.' In other words, the Proverbs 31 woman is a mighty, valiant woman full of strength and conquering power. It's the very same word that is used to describe the valiance of David when the Lord chose him to be Israel's mighty king: "I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is...a mighty man of valor, a man of war..and the LORD is with him" (1 Samuel 16:18-19).

"David's mighty valor was unmatched. His power was superhuman. As a boy he killed lions and bears with his bare hands and single-handedly slew the greatest giant in the land. As a man, he valiantly led armies into battle and annihilated all the enemies of the Lord.

"It's this very same heroic valor that marks the Proverbs 31 woman. She has superhuman strength. She has unmatched valor. She valiantly stomps out whatever stands in the way of God's purposes. Nothing hinders her. Her living display of triumph, victory, and the glory of God. The chief word used to the describe the Proverbs 31 woman is the word strength. It's mentioned no less than three times throughout the chapter, in addition to the 'virtuous, valiant' opening description."

I don't know where the idea that serving God from a female standpoint means turning into an unemotional slave originated. It's ridiculous. Ludy nails the real definition: "Set-apart femininity blends the classic womanly grace and dignity of an Audrey Hepburn with the sacrificial, poured-out-for-Christ lifestyle of an Amy Carmichael. It's true feminine beauty merged with absolute abandonment to Jesus Christ. It's the sparkling, vibrant, world-altering, Christlike version of feminity that your King created you to exude."

Stepford? Heck no.

"Comrades, let us be resolute. Let us, by whatever name we are called, be Soldiers, Nazarites, Priests. Some will praise us, some will blame us; let us not care too much about either praise or blame. Let us live looking up, looking on, standing true by the grace of Him who has called us." - Amy Carmichael, God's Missionary