Hmmm, I found this article and just really wanted to share it, because it has become the reality of my world ........ Lisa. I'm going to file this one under the ASHES .... Now I just need to trade it :)
The all-too-normal South African woman lives in a world of boys—men with a pathological immaturity that has emasculated them and shriveled them into moral and spiritual wimps. The home of the average South African woman is unmanned.
My Dilemma
The problem for Christian women is that in many cases their scenarios are no different than those of their unbelieving sisters. The men in their lives are also weak, and often these women also find themselves in the position of being stronger than their male counterparts—spiritually, socially, economically, intellectually, and morally. The Christian woman in this situation faces a conundrum that is not resolved by the woman-empowerment agenda of the feminists. Masculine weakness is not an option that is acceptable to her, but unless she is strong, she will not survive.
She also realizes that in the church of Jesus Christ, God has called her to follow male leadership. And if married she must submit and respect male headship in the home. Compounding her difficulty is the reality that she may have grown up in a Christian culture that frowns upon women taking advanced degrees, working outside the home, or studying any field besides the approved “female occupations” tradition permits for her sex. While society preaches a message of empowerment, she is confused and wonders if the message for her is “Be weak.”
She rejects the feminists’ rebellion against biblical authority and embraces the Christian woman’s role of submission, wifehood, and motherhood. She is willing to respect the men in her life, only she silently cries out for a respectable man. Little by little the average Christian woman is coming to the conclusion that the men in her life are, in the main, boys in grownup bodies. And boys cannot be trusted with grownup matters.
The Contribution of Feminism
This reluctance to grow up is epidemic in the West, but more importantly to our focus in these articles it is essential to realize that this delayed maturity is endemic to societies that have bowed the knee to radical feminism. And, ironically, it is women—feminists—who are most disgruntled with the product of their philosophy. Women who sought so long to be freed from men are now finding that there are no men from whom to be liberated!
Domesticity may have always been a feminine realm, but marriage and children were once defined as integral to the traditional gender roles of both men and women. Today it’s the woman who is cast in the role of caveman, eager to club some unsuspecting, reluctant male on his head and drag him to the altar.
About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.
“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.
And there’s more:
Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide, whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress” seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all—a baby now, my soul mate later!”
Well . . . ha! Hahahaha. And ha.
Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party. So what is a Christian woman—a strong woman—supposed to do in this culture of weak men? Our concerns are not merely sociological, but spiritual. Our warfare is not merely cultural, but cosmic. Our battles are not merely culturally consequential, but Christologically consequential. The gospel of Jesus Christ is radically affected if women get it wrong and usurp roles God did not grant to them. The gospel is also radically affected if they are not strong.
