Friday, January 04, 2008

Becoming Jane

At one time, a very average little girl lived on a very average little street in an average little town in the United States. We will call her, “Jane.” Jane was born with talents, strengths and weaknesses, much like other children. However, unlike other children, Jane had no parents.
It’s not that they never existed. She had them at one time. But the day she decided she didn’t like the rules they gave or the broccoli her mother served at dinner, Jane quit the family. She wanted to decide for herself who she would be.

Jane decided to treat her friends the same way. Although Jane managed to make friends with her talents and personality, she rarely was asked to play hide and seek or jump rope because she’d never adhere to the rules. She preferred to make her own.

Years passed and Jane grew. When she was a woman, she was very much the same as when a child (except a bigger version.) While as a child her main rebellion was concerning broccoli, as an adult Jane revolted at the idea of abiding by the laws set by God. Jane wanted to decide for herself, as always. The older she grew, the more headstrong and demanding she became.
One day, as Jane sat in church, she heard the pastor speak of God having different, specific designs for men and women. She learned that God had created her with a certain purpose in His mind. This angered Jane. It was yet another set of rules she’d have to dodge. Jane ditched church and decided that if the Bible contained such restrictive rules for women, it must not be true. Orthodoxy, to her, was extremist. The only religion she followed devoutly was the adoration of herself.

This was the way Jane lived every moment of her life. She never married when she fell in love, because she knew marriage involved submission. (More rules.) When she was pregnant, she refused to be chained to motherhood, so she aborted her child. (More rules.) Finally, one day, she found that she wasn’t happy to be female.

So Jane forgot she was, which was actually what she was trying to do all along.

Jane is, sadly, a true story. She’s a personification of the feminist movement, through which every woman has been encouraged to become a Jane.

If there is one thing that Jane despises, it is orthodoxy. The idea that there are Biblical roles for women, and that God really instated them, is a dagger driving at the heart of Jane’s philosophy. Unadulterated Biblical truth is her kryptonite. She can’t stand absolutes.

Having seen much of Jane in myself, I am on the verge of making a very politically incorrect absolute statement: There’s no place like home. The statement (albeit cliché) is ever so true. Even for organizationally-challenged (I.e. naturally sloppy) people like me, a tidy, cozy home in which God is held at the very center, is something to savor.

I’m not the only one. However uniquely individual women have been designed, with varying arrays of talents, I believe unshakingly that every woman was created to love the home. There was a woman Carole Mayhall wrote of in her book, Come Walk With Me, who emanated this love: A missionary wife who traveled constantly with her husband in the bush, migrating from hut to hut, she had no steady house. Yet it was so much a part of her identity to make a comforting environment, that everywhere she went, she carried a set of silver candle sticks. She’d set them on her makeshift table in an effort to turn every hut she lived in into a home.
Like the missionary wife, all women have the capability to cultivate homes that are refuges, nurturing godliness. Although it may not be a woman’s only calling, she is told by Scripture to fulfill this task. (See Proverbs 31 and Titus 2.)

In the midst of a culture radically adverse to any sort of distinction between men and women, my persuasion is a part of a minority (and a minor minority at that). George Bernard Shaw, a bitingly agnostic socialist wrote, “Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.” Thus is the common perception of homemaking. (Jane wears the quote like a t-shirt…in fact, it may be on a t-shirt.)

To an extent, I agree with Shaw; the home can certainly be a prison and workhouse. Likewise, any kind of rules concerning a woman’s nature can be seen as imprisonment-- from one perspective.

From where Jane is standing, the home doesn’t look like all that and a bag of chips because work is tiresome and rules plead for obedience. But the grass is always greener on the side of disobedience, until we reach that side and look back at the lush plants where we were. With a right, Biblical perspective, knowing full well the freedom that comes with obedience, home is less a cage than a stage to display God’s glory.

I like what Touchstone, the wise court jester in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, observed about contentment. Upon arriving wearily to the forest of Arden, he declared, “Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content.” Only when we find our identities in the locations God places us do we discover contentment.

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