Discover the Courage and Strength God Gave You

Posted on Aug 08, 2017 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Marilynn Chadwick

Looking back, I was bound to meet Jesus sooner or later. Some strong Christian friends were praying for me, and I am sure my parents were too. And there was the wise pastor from my family’s home church who placed a book in my hands and simply said, “One day when you have some questions, read this.”

About a year later, I did just that. I not only read Mere Christianity by former atheist and Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis, but I was thoroughly convicted. I realized that for all my good intentions, I had lived a completely self-centered life. I put the book down and gave my heart and soul to Jesus Christ.

One of the first things I noticed after I accepted Jesus is that the Bible made sense. I fully embraced the strong messages I found in the Word about the importance of marriage and the family. Quite surprisingly, I also grew to appreciate the role of the husband as the spiritual head of his family.

At that time, however, much of the teaching in the 1970s defined biblical womanhood almost exclusively in terms of a woman’s family and homemaking skills, with little attention given to her calling to serve the Lord.

During my agnostic years, I had already explored the feminist view of womanhood and found it unsatisfying, so I was ready to embrace a strong, biblical message about marriage and the family. I wanted to follow Christ wholeheartedly, whatever that looked like. But without realizing it, I tried to squeeze myself into a mold that didn’t fit with who God had made me to be. In trying to become the “perfect biblical wife,” as some had defined her, I sometimes got so absorbed with managing a home and honing my decorating skills that I forgot about pouring my life out on behalf of the hurting and broken.

Over time, as I grew in my relationship with the Lord, I began to understand the richness and freedom of womanhood as God created it. It was all right there in the pages of Scripture. I discovered challenging and exciting stories. Women in the Bible fought battles, overturned genocidal plots, gave birth to world-changing children, raised strong families, and suffered and died for their faith.

And it seemed to me that the modern Christian woman had become a little too safe and sanitized—she was the nurturer without the warrior.

One friend, who had raised her children at great risk on the mission field in Africa, challenged me with her observation about the American church. She thought it sometimes overemphasized the family—as important as family is—to the exclusion of mission. Our priority should not be to focus on the family, she commented. “It should be to focus on Jesus and His calling on our lives—wherever that takes us.”