expanding into freedom

The Christian life and doctrine is full of paradoxes that are difficult to grasp, but must be embraced in faith toward God. Jesus was both God and man. God is both three and one. to die is gain. And this one: submission brings freedom. Yes, submission to God really does, and i have truly experienced that in marriage and home life, where the Lord is gently teaching me to stop striving and giving me the courage to submit to my husband and to submit to the way He made me. The more i have allowed this to happen, the more contented, joyful, and free i have become.
For much of my Christian life, i didn't understand why i still felt so restless and discontented. I could hear a really inspiring, meaningful sermon on doctrine or Christian living, and still come home to life full of anxiety, not knowing what God wanted for me, not knowing what i wanted for myself. My entire single life i ran around frantically trying to find the will of God for my life and wishing that i just had a burning bush to tell me exactly what to do! Getting married was the best thing that could have happened to me, because it began in me a death to self and a refining process that i could not have experienced as a single with thousands of options before me. Yes, it was unexpectedly hard, and still is sometimes--that is why it is called "death"--but i wouldn't trade the freedom i have found for anything.
God does, thankfully, tell married women in every age group exactly what to do: Older women are to teach the younger women "to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed" (Titus 2:4-5). This means that younger married women are supposed to then learn and DO THESE things! And we younger women really need a lot of help! I did not realize at first that I would actually be blaspheming the word of God by treating these directives with the usual cultural skepticism. I don't want to be a blasphemer of His word! Yet how His word would be honored if the Christian older women really took that call seriously and each one taught the younger women in her life the above virtues.
I know now why the church sermons still left me with a confused life view: Because while teaching at the pulpit is indispensable, the average male preacher has not any idea about the soul and marrow of a woman's existence. It seems that most are as confused by the entrenched feminist views as we are! God knew what He was doing when he gave the task to teach women about life to older women with the necessary softness and experience. But instead, we younger women are often left out to follow the world's ideas of womanhood. I find it sad, too, that we have intimidated our Christian men, who might have a good feeling for the true order of things, into becoming a bit spineless: they concede to being homemakers as well, and feel that in order to be loving and sensitive, they must support their wife in her career (or her ministry) and her decision not to have children, or only one or two, and then to continue with the career when she puts them away into public schools.
The directions of Titus 2 are very hard to swallow in the world of today. They might sound oppressive to most modern women in the world. Yes, Satan has done a good job deceiving us and blinding us to the true potential of womanhood and motherhood by demeaning it so much that even Christians can no longer embrace the true value of it. One friend of mine wrote, "it would do God such a disservice to reduce women to a womb....a real travesty of His intention for us all..." And that is how deep the deception has gotten! That we would see the way He made us as demeaning, a reduction of value! That is truly the world's feminist influence talking. Satan is the one who wants a woman's greatest calling to be seen as dirty work, of little value, and undesirably narrow. Did God not Himself make us with a womb and call us "womb man?" That name says a lot about God's intention. It is by the womb that He chose to call us, to set us apart. It was God's own defining characteristic of women! and we are made in His very image! We are made with value and dignity. We need to open our eyes to the sad deception of the last century and see exactly how valuable we are in the Kingdom of God, as strong contenders against Satan, with the potential to raise up many more from the womb. The feminists are wrong. They shout and shout for their rights because it is "my body," and yet they do not even fully embrace the way their body is made. They cut off the very function of their womb in order to have the freedom to... to what? To become more like men! Or to merely have the freedom to entertain and pamper themselves! How sad!
Reducing? NO, to embrace the womb and the offices God gave us as women is not a reduction, it is an expansion. Our influence in the world expands, our personal peace and freedom in Christ expands, our patience and kindness expands, our wisdom expands, our legacy expands. May He lead you to embrace the beautiful paradox of submission.