A Woman's Highest Calling
The Bible is the big and comprehensive story of God and his people, containing characters who—in vastly different ways—live the story of brokenness, repentance, delight, forgiveness, redemption, and fullness.
There is no one way to be a woman or wife or a mother or a man or husband or father. There is no one occupation or vocation that is the highest call on a man or woman's life. There is no way of raising children who turn out well or alright or good enough or perfect. There is no one way of finding a spouse that is without risk or trust. The Bible is full of farmers and Pharisees, prophets and poets, thieves and murderers, apostles and apostates, the greedy and the impoverished, the healers and the healed—all navigating the story God gave them to live so that his glory would be made manifest in their particular life.
If you're a part of any institution (church, seminary, school, family or community) that promotes one way to bring glory to God and uses a few verses from Scripture to defend that position, and it feels suffocating to you, your gifts, the life God has given to you, I just want to say to you that it doesn't have to be that way.
The highest call for your life is to live the story he's giving you to live today, to navigate it with a particular grace and trust he gives to you for the day.
I share this because for most of my childhood and into my twenties I thought the only way to bring glory to God was as a wife and mother, and that just wasn't the gift God gave to me. But my greater mistake was believing that Scripture was clear about this and so I believed I was defective for not having that portion, that I wouldn't ever be as valuable to God or the church unless I was married or a mother. I believed that a few Bible verses about mothering were more important to God than the rest of Scripture where God used women in a myriad of ways. But when I started reading the whole of Scripture, and seeing the whole picture, I realized I wasn't defective, I just had a different story that God wanted to bring his glory through.
One of the lessons for my life, knowing my propensity to hear how one person lived and absorb it as prescriptive for my life (which may not have been their point), was to keep an eye out when leaders used the same Bible verses over and over again, or taught on the same passages again and again. If all I thought about women was that they were to be "keepers of the home," it's no wonder that's all I thought women were good for.
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (II Tim. 3:16-17).
One of the enemy’s tactics to keep us bound up is to keep us from reading the whole of Scripture for ourselves. Instead we attend endless Bible studies, listen to sermons, follow people on social media, and subscribe to a myriad of words about the Bible. But you can read it for yourself. Believe me. For whatever reason, for a long, long time, I didn't believe I was capable of reading and understanding more about Scripture than what I heard from leaders. But all of the Bible is for all people. It's God's message to the whole of us for the wholeness of us.
The next time you hear someone offer a prescriptive way of living, go get your Bible and look up the operative word of their prescription (wife, mother, father, shepherd, pastor, money, marriage, children, etc.). Read every verse on it just so you can see the array of stories God's people lived out. It doesn't mean you will live like them, but it will mean you have a more informed view on the kind of people God loves and uses.
God's plans for you aren't limited to the plans he had for someone else.
