International Women's Day and the Perfect Inclusion

To be meek. A gifted teacher. Others-focused and small. What more might I offer if I harnessed my tongue like her, hushed my emotions like her, and was modest. Gentle, unassuming, lowly, and light. Running like script over the life of Jesus, these are the same words I find consequently missing from mine.

When I start to feel my heart turn cold with envy, I’m unbothered in terms of better clothes, climbing success, an easy marriage or a painless life. But I’m wracked with grief wondering – in all our uniquity – if she might have access to parts of His likeness that I never will in this flesh. It always picks back at the scab, this deep sense of loss that recognizes my imago dei but lusts still for hers.

And maybe someone else needs to hear that the image of God we see in our sister doesn’t threaten the one he’s forming in us. He may, in fact, be softening edges, teaching me joy, and nudging me to the humility of a quiet mouth, but we should take care to learn about his image in its fullness. The life of Christ is marked by more.

He is also radical, decisive, unreserved, and sure. He spoke on cliffs with conviction and felt with his neighbors deeply. And often. His words were pronounced and he drew into himself – his father – for wisdom, and he did it alone. I hope my saying this doesn’t translate as some sort of means to justify a staunch, stuck personality, but I do hope it encourages someone else that there is nothing inherently lost or wasted in them. 

However polarizing, there is a thread between humanity and him, and he’s fashioning the whole of it to draw us closer to himself. I’m sure when we get to look full in his wonderful face, we’ll see the things we can’t right now. Woman to woman, shout out to all of us out there doing it in the meantime. Thanks for letting me in on a really good work in you.

“The eyes of love had seen you as precious, as of infinite beauty, as of eternal value. When love chooses, it chooses with a perfect sensitivity for the unique beauty of the chosen one, and it chooses without making anyone else feel excluded.”

- Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved