No time for any fun blogging lately, too much to do before baby girl enters the world!
Right now I'm working on a talk for this weekend that I will be giving to college women at JMU for their InterVarsity Women's Conference. I am doing a "breakout session," so not the main talks, thank goodness! It's so fun to be working on a talk like this because I feel that I can really share my heart, and there is less pressure than when I am speaking for a Large Group setting. My talk is about Women in Community- our relationships as God intended them to be- our relationships with each other as sisters in Christ, and our relationships with men as our brothers in Christ. It's almost funny to me that the most common topic I get asked to speak on is relationships- I have been asked to speak on dating, singleness, friendship, marriage, community, and now women in community again! After being asked to speak on dating for about the third time, I remember thinking to myself "oh great I am that speaker now, aren't I? The one who can only talk about how to have a healthy dating relationship but can't speak well about anything deeper like the authority of scripture, or the divinity of Jesus, or the importance and practice of prayer." For a little while I just felt lame. I have so many more things to say than just "if you can't imagine heading towards marriage with this person, you probably shouldn't be dating them..."!! But, then I realized that I was the lame one- because this stuff is so important! It's so important to talk to college students about pursuing healthy friendships and to help them wrestle through God's design for marriage. It's so important to show them that our gender differences are intentional and created by God and they are good. It's so important to help them value the other gender, and even in some cases to repent of hatred towards their own gender, and to learn how to relate as the women God created them to be. So, I don't feel lame, I feel honored, and really excited to share with these women this weekend.
I'll leave you with a quote from John Piper I have been stewing over that I have fallen in love with.

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships.”

What would it look like if more women actually embodied this?