This blog comes a little late. As you know, I'm no longer on an all girl's team, but I felt like maybe that gave me even more reason to write about what I learned from being on one.
Most of my conversations with my teammate Brandon incorporate the sermons we've listened to. He's partial to Bethel podcasts, and while I do love Kris Valloten's imagery, my default is Mark Driscoll's extreme bluntness. He's a pastor that likes to talk about relationships a lot, especially the principles of biblical masculinity and femininity. Since we're spending the month with 400 teenaged boys who think that they all want white wives–we women are just slightly outnumbered here–I thought it might be helpful to listen to someone with more insight into the male brain than me.
One of the major points that Pastor Mark makes– and one that I’ve struggled with for a while now–is that women are innately afraid of marriage (gee, thanks Adam and Eve). What’s more, not only are we afraid of it, we have legitimate cause to be so. When a woman gets married, Driscoll reminds us, she is entrusting the entirety of the rest of her life to this man. She trusts that he won’t cheat on her, won’t leave her, won’t abuse her or their children. He promises that he will love her all her days, in sickness and health, in plenty and want, makeup done or not, no matter what. And women have seen enough men break this promise to be honestly afraid that their man won’t keep it. That he’s going to run at the first sign of trouble.
Driscoll doesn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about this point, but it was the part that really got to me this time around. My life is a very good example of a good woman who has been damaged by a series of bad–or, at the very least, unintentional–boys. No Sissy-Stuff Sams. Sturdy Oak Owens. Little Boy Larrys. My girls have had the same run of it, as have many women I know. We’ve had more than our fill of Hyper-Spiritual Henrys and Give ‘Em Hell Hanks. (If you don’t know what I’m referring to, then you really REALLY need to watch the sermon.)
We are examples of what happens when bad boys hurt good women. We are examples of the hearts broken, the emotional doors closed, the angry outbursts of temper, the semesters and years of rebellion and walking away from God that follow the exit of a particularly awful boy who made us question everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
And while I think that the boys are completely responsible for what they did to us, the careless way in which they handled our hearts and our self-esteem, I believe that we now have a choice.
We can stay in the heartache, waiting for him to change into a better man or apologize or just come back. We can become jaded and blame every man for the incompetence of a few. We can shut down and bury ourselves in the lie that we don’t really care if we even find love or not. And while I think that this will numb us for a while, I know that after a time, numbness becomes permanent. We turn into Ice Princesses, as incapable of love as the men who broke us.
But there is a different way.
I propose that instead of sitting in our hurting, we shoulder it and make a journey. We pack away every insult, every body critique, every day he abandoned us, every time he pushed us sexually, every time he said “I love you” and it was a lie. We pick it up and start walking towards the hope that there is someone who won’t treat us the way he did.
And we don’t look back at him. And we never go back to that kind of relationship. And in the process of letting go of him and clinging onto Jesus, we grow from girls to women. We don’t go gently, but brokenly, humbly, expecting to be redeemed and loved. When we are, we become the faithful, passionate, enticing, intriguing, glorious women that God intended us to become.
A word of caution for the men, written in love. Women of God have tender, merciful hearts, backbones of steel, and hands that have been trained for battle. We are a prize. We are precious. We know our worth. We won’t relent. We will challenge you to be a better MAN.
Loving a woman, after all, is a MAN’s job. Boys need not apply.
PS- If you want to see the sermon, I've included it below. Be warned, Driscoll is not for the faint-hearted. Maybe that's why I like him so much.
