This One’s for the Girls

Sarah and Jasmine. So much love for these girls.

This post is one I’ve been struggling to write for some time now. I knew the message behind what I wanted to say. I wanted to make sure that our graduating girls know that they are “girl enough” to do whatever they want to do and go wherever they want to go. I wanted to drive home the message that God has already made them into the beautiful, incredible women that they ARE.

I tried to start this many times but felt like I kept coming up short on what I really wanted to say. Then I came across a blog post by Rachel Held Evans that reflected much of what I was trying to get out of my heart. So, in the name of full transparency, my post below was, in part, inspired by this post by Rachel. Read hers, too. Obviously, I think it’s great.

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This year I have the distinct privilege of speaking to a senior class of only girls. Girls who have been faithful members of our church and youth group. Girls who love God and love His people. Girls who consistently stand in service with arms outstretched, worshiping a God that made them beautiful, kind, graceful, funny, loving, generous, and holy. He made these girls to be all that they are. Not all that they one day will be; but all that they ARE.

We live in a world that bombards young girls every day with ways in which they should be measuring their worth. Any look through any magazine provides a wide array of advertisements and articles that question our beauty, body image, hair quality, eye color, personality, intelligence, and anything else that makes us question our overall worth. And it really doesn’t take much for us to start believing that these marketers are right. If we take what the media has to offer us (which, in all of its glory is material and shallow) then we begin to buy into the thought that our bodies must look like the airbrushed girls on the magazine covers and that our lives must reflect the perfect balance of humor, wealth, and romance played out in any number of movies and tv shows.

But as our graduates take this next step in life, my wish for them (and, all of our girls for that matter) is that they will turn away from what the media tells them they should be measuring themselves against with the full realization that they are already all that they need to be.

Proverbs 31 lays out a guide for us, as women, to strive for throughout life. It is the flawless picture of what a virtuous woman looks like. A woman who is trusted, takes care of her family, does good works wherever she is needed, sacrifices sleep in order to meet the needs of her household, manages and invests her money wisely, and keeps her mind and body strong. She knows how to work with her hands and uses those talents to keep her husband’s buttons sewn on and her kid’s pants patched up. She actively participates in community service projects and consistently meets the needs of the poor around her. When it snows, her family is clothed in warm coats. When it rains, everyone has rain boots on their feet and umbrellas in their hand. Her husband is well-known and she makes sure he is prepared when he leaves the house each day. She is wise, kind, honourable, funny, and productive. And through all of this that she does for others, she makes sure that when she leaves the house, her hair is fixed and her clothes are pressed. In short, she encompasses all, more perhaps, that any woman could ever hope to be.

Overwhelmed yet? Feeling “less than”? Even the Bible gives us a picture of womanhood that, if we took it in its whole form of things we must be doing, is impossible to measure up to.

But, let’s not forget that this Proverbs 31 lady that we use as a descriptive model of the woman that we should be is nameless. There is no woman in the Bible that we can look to as an example of someone that actually achieved all of this in her lifetime. The first verse of this chapter tells us that these were words given to King Lemuel by his mother. The kind of woman his mother told him to look for. Perhaps knowing he’d never find this lady, she gave him this description as a means to keep from having to give her son up to another woman. And honestly, as I look down the road to another girl taking my place in Vaughn’s life, I kind of like ol Lemi’s mama!

Judaism teaches that Abraham wrote verses 10 – 31 as a poem for Sarah’s eulogy. In this case, it’s a lovely remembrance of how he viewed his late wife. However, we know from their story that Sarah didn’t quite measure up to this, either. I’m pretty sure that her asking her husband to sleep with another woman because she was growing impatient with God (and then throwing that woman and child out on the street) removes her from the list of eligible candidates in the running for who this passage describes. In the end, Sarah may have been a good lady, but she wasn’t the Proverbs 31 lady.

My point is, this passage of scripture is a lovely list of ideals that we can strive for, and I don’t want to diminish the importance of any of these attributes, but all too often we get caught up in the minutia of Proverbs 31 and forget the message at its core: Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. It all boils down to this: We can be outwardly beautiful and have favour with those around us but what truly matters in the end are the efforts we pour into our walk with God.

This nameless Proverbs woman receives the high praise of “woman of valor!” and often we leave it at that. Because she received such high praise, this is who we think we should strive to be. But here’s a lesser known fact. Ruth is also a woman in the Bible that received this high praise of woman of valor. She is actually the only woman in the Bible noted to have been called this. And Ruth did NOT fit the bill of the Proverbs 31 woman.

Ruth was a foreigner, which should have prevented men from seeing her as a potential wife. She was a childless widow. And she was poor. So poor that she went into the fields every day to collect scraps of food that could serve as some kind of meal for her and Naomi. It’s also notable that while Ruth went into the fields looking for scraps, she was also hoping to gain notice from the field’s owner, Boaz. This desperate act to be noticed is one that certainly would never have been needed by our lady of Proverbs.

By all accounts, when you look at her from the outside, Ruth was nothing that resembled the wealthy, well-dressed, surrounded-by-a-happy-family woman that Proverbs 31 lays out. The real beauty of Ruth’s story is that God called her a Woman of Valor before she achieved status as a prominent woman of wealth in her city. She didn’t need to get married or be a mother or make a name for herself through material acquisitions before God saw fit to call her great. She was a woman of love and grace that left her family behind to commit her life to serving the mother of her late husband. Whatever it was that she lacked in the world’s eyes didn’t compare to all that she was in God’s eyes.

Rachel Held Evans recently wrote about being enough and her post reminded me that “the brave women of Scripture–from Ruth to Deborah to Mary Magdalene to Mary of Bethany” serve as examples that “there’s no one right way to be a woman, and that these images of perfection that we are confronted with every day are laughable to those of us who are in on the big secret: We are already enough.”

And so, to Sarah and Jasmine – You are enough as you step into this new chapter of life because God says you are enough. Because even through the small acts of kindness that you might think insignificant, God sees greatness. He sees a woman of valor in the girl that stops to help someone pick up the pile of books they just dropped. He sees a woman of beauty in the girl that woke up late and rushed out the door wearing a shirt that isn’t freshly pressed. He sees a woman of love and grace in the girl that offers a smile to the outcast. He sees perfection…in you…his child.

My hope today is that you see that perfection, too. That you take this next step with confidence that this world has nothing of lasting significance for you. That God created you as you are. And, though He does have great plans for your life and wonderful new adventures in your future, all that you are right now is enough. In fact, it is more than enough to take on all that He has in store for you.

Congratulations to our beautiful graduating class of 2012.

Defining My Words

I’ve run into a snag in parenthood. Trying to define the words I use is making me stumble awkwardly down the path of educating through dialogue. I believe in open communication with my children to the point where I even bore myself sometimes with all the communicating. You see, Vaughn, the butterflies come into our garden because of the nectar-producing plants. Nectar is a sweet juice that…zzzzz. I find myself in moments of explaining why or how something happened and realize I don’t know what words to use. Having to stop my explanation to my 4-year old of why people are mean sometimes to define words like kindness and forgiveness ends up losing us both on the many rabbit trails I find.

So last month I decided to focus on a new word each week. Figured it would be good character-building to introduce patience, grace, generosity, etc in at-home speak and it will help my kids keep up with the conversation when I’m in the car trying to explain why we need to be kind to everyone, even when we feel like screaming and hitting (like you just did to Timmy). You know, visions of me explaining, and them absorbing everything. Most likely it will be me explaining, and them zoning out completely. But my vision wins for now.

Anywho, I started with patience. My definition was “to wait with a happy heart”. I was so stinking proud of that one. Off with a bang! Over the course of the week I found so many opportunities to tell Vaughn, “I need you to be patient right now. And that means to wait with a happy heart”. And he bought it! That would stop him in his whining tracks. I actually started finding other things to do when he asked for something just so that I could give him an “exercise” in patience. You want a peanut butter sandwich? I realize it may look like I’m just sitting on the couch watching RHONJ for the 3rd time this week but I was actually just about to fold this laundry that’s been sitting here for two days so, “Hang on, son. Be patient for mommy. Wait with a happy heart.” (of course, I didn’t actually do the laundry) A little sick, I know. But I was character-building.

Week 1 done. Patience learned. I’m such a great mom.

That was last week. This week I chose grace. Definition: sharing or giving with a loving heart. I made a mental note to have all of my definitions circle back to the heart. The big lesson at some point down the road being that character is made up of things we do with our heart as our guide. Man, I am good. Mental note #2: maybe next week’s word should be pride. Nah.

Monday: I started by telling Vaughn that the iPad belongs to Mommy and I love it. I use it a lot and it’s something that is very valuable (rabbit trail here to define valuable) to me. I have games, books, and movies on it for you because I love you and I want to share this valuable thing with you.  I allow you to use it because I love you. And it’s with a loving heart that I share this thing with you. And that is an act of grace from Mommy to Vaughn. He smiled and said, “Ok, can I play with my iPad now?”. Um, I think you may have just missed my point. We’ll try again later.

Before bed that night I took one of Vaughn’s silkies (little silk blankets he’s slept with since he was a baby) and tell him about grace once more. I explain that this silkie is something that he loves and it would be a big act of grace to let Ellie sleep with it tonight. To share something you love with her and have a loving heart while doing that would be very graceful of you. He said he would think about this during story time. Side note: I looooove this age. Watching the thought process and reasoning happen is incredible to me in such a young person. I look at him as a baby still and then he has these moments that remind me of his personhood and I fall in love with him over and over again. Fast-forward to end of story time. He tells me that he loves his silkie and he loves his Ellie and he wants to be grace. (We’ll work on how to use these words later. The point right now is what it means, and CHECK, he got it!) He hands her the silkie. I’m blown away but try not to show surprise at this huge act of love. It doesn’t matter that there are three other silkies laying beside him. What matters in this moment is that he chose grace. I really want to be all ram-in-the-thicket and give it right back to him saying it was all a test and YAY! You aced it! Because honestly, Ellie has silkies of her own and doesn’t really know the difference yet between hers and his. And I’m just so darn proud of him. But I let it stick and put Vaughn’s silkie in the crib with Ellie.

This morning, however, he came to his senses and saw her with it, promptly forgot all forms of grace in his morning stupor and snatched it out of her hands. A work in progress. All of us.

But I realized that this exercise of word defining is teaching me more than Vaughn. Over the past two weeks, I’ve sat in waiting rooms (there’s a reason they are called waiting rooms, not patience rooms. I DO NOT have a happy heart when I’ve been sitting for an hour after my appointment time with no end in sight. There is waiting with a happy heart and then there’s waiting. BIG difference.) and had my patience tested more than I would have liked. But because I’m consciously trying to teach these things to my kids, I’m trying to live them out as well. Teaching a word and living a word is also two vastly different things. Mental note #3 to write about that sometime.

I also had the opportunity to extend grace to my new friend, Faith, this week with my Monkees and she began telling me of a community service project she got involved in last week as a result of the help she had received from us over the past month. She said, “Everyone needs something. And everyone has something to give. It doesn’t matter who you are. We are all called to be faithful servants of God’s love. And that means that we give His love consistently to everyone we meet, no matter who they are. Rich or poor, healthy or sick, man or woman, child or adult. It’s not our call to judge; it is only our call to love.” Faithful servants = loving consistently. Hmmm…

I’m astounded at the ways in which God is teaching me how to love. I may have a little bit (a lot) still to learn as I try to parent my children to be givers of love but I’m so thankful for people like Faith that have been brought into my life to teach me. To show me that no matter how I try to define all the “big words” of life for my kids, the only words that truly matter are those that circle back to the heart.

Next week’s word: Faith. What better way to teach it to someone else than try to learn it myself?