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.
he hung the moon 