Somehow, we’ve wrongfully made the home the most significant battle of biblical womanhood. We’ve taken a couple of passages in God’s word and turned them into the entirety of what it means to be a woman. We’ve taken our identities as females and caged them in Titus 2:3-5 and Proverbs 31. We’ve camped out in those passages with something to prove — either as homemakers or professionals.
A few weeks ago, a very concerned reader came across my article “What About Titus 2?”
He read the part where I said my husband had taken over meal-planning.
This reader — we’ll call him Jedediah — was not having it.
Is not getting your husband to do more work because you cannot be bothered being unsupportive?
Or are men and women just gender flexible?
Good old Jed went on to say that my husband doing housework under the guise of sacrificially loving his wife (as he asserted that husbands are commanded to do) was the moral equivalent of a man cross-dressing.
Jed’s reaction to my post was so strong that I went back to read it again. Twice. Just to make sure that I hadn’t painted the picture of Phillip slaving away in a skirt while I lorded over him on the couch, eating bonbons and catching up on America’s Next Top Model.
THE BLESSED & THE OFFENDED
People don’t usually get as uptight as Jed about a little bit of meal-planning, but I have had some pretty intense (often online) conversations about womanhood since starting this blog.
People have called me all kinds of names.
Blessedly, people have also been encouraged. I’ve been getting so many sweet emails. I’m so encouraged that my clumsy journey out of a stereotype is blessing other women who have found themselves traveling the same road.
But for those who aren’t blessed but, are rather, violently offended, I’m often tempted to pose the question: “Why so serious?”
WHY SO SERIOUS?
Well, first of all, because the Bible is serious. Attacks on any part of the Word of God are no light matter.
In fact, the complementarian battle cry rose up, in large part, because of an attack on what the Bible has to say about womanhood. However, forty years later, we’re still communicating these truths in a battle stance, teeth snarling, claws bared, and the rubber stamp of heresy ready to be popped on any offending forehead.
But not every clarification of biblical truth meets the criteria of an attack.
God’s Word warns us about the lure of being conformed to this world (Romans 12:2). The enemy is crafty enough to mask conforming to this world as “conforming to a specific cultural paradigm that we’ve confused with a Scriptural one and making any questioning of that paradigm tantamount to questioning the Bible.”
WHO ARE YOU?
When I first started this blog, I wrote a post about SAHMs vs. career moms.
Somehow, we’ve wrongfully made the home the most significant battle of biblical womanhood. We’ve taken a couple of passages in God’s word and turned them into the entirety of what it means to be a woman. We’ve taken our identities as females and caged them in Titus 2:3-5 and Proverbs 31. We’ve camped out in those passages with something to prove — either as homemakers or professionals.
I’ve realized again and again just how much stock I had put into my identity as a homemaker.
