I have found that most miracles are preceded by struggle. And so I am expecting breakthroughs in the lives of an unusual and phenomenal group of women God has recently brought into my Tuesday evenings.
We are women. We struggle to care about how we look, and struggle not to care about how we look. We seek to stand out even as we seek to fit in. We ask God to bless those we love, while we ask Him not to bless them to the point that we become jealous. We are insecure, confident, deafening and silent. We know more than is reasonable about everyone in our lives, and less than is reasonable about ourselves. We are reaching out even while we are pushing away. We are everything and nothing to so many people, especially those we value most. And at the end of the day, all we really need to be is His.
Since the Fall, women have struggled to be in control. I am not exempt.
There is a passage in Numbers 30 that addresses the feminine tendency to promise more than is reasonable to deliver. Interestingly, God’s provision for single women living at home and married women allows for their vows (commitments) to be released by their fathers or husbands.
Widows and divorced women have no such provision. In this day, however, there are many women who live neither in father’s nor husband’s household (I am one of them).
God never said it is not good for woman to be alone, but He never had to say so; it is implied by the order of creation. And as a woman who has vowed countless times things impossible to deliver (classic case of mouth bigger than brawn), I have to wonder: who stands in the gap for us, the women without anyone to undo our hasty and burdensome commitments?
Is this the price we pay for our so fiercefully defended independence?
