Then the conference is over. We head back to our routines and our cooking and our daily lives. We have lunches to pack, our men to take care of, and kids to feed. What many haven't realized is that we haven't hit anything below the surface and so we also head back to affairs, and porn addictions, and secret drinking and drug use.
You don't walk into a women's retreat to find tables on how to deal with porn, or how to deal with anger towards your children; or how to, with scripture, deal with the inability to be satisfied in your sex life with your spouse. You don't see tables on how to manage your home well, and in love, or how to effectively talk to your teenage son who thinks he might be gay. You don't see single moms standing behind tables with information and resources on where to go for help, or healing, or even just to talk.
It's a tragedy. Women's ministry has become a big "how can we make you feel better today," program. What many women's directors and Pastors have failed to see though is that making these women feel good in the moment isn't going to help how they've felt for a lifetime. The pain from their past, the shame and dirt they feel is smeared upon their sinful faces. Who is going to help them recover from addictions, or help them trust a spouse who has hurt them or help them flee an abusive relationship? You sit in a service and you see beautiful woman talking to you and many of these woman in this service say privately to themselves, "I can never fully be that, because I can't even fully tell anyone what I'm really going through."
So. I stand before you asking you to take up the cause with me. Lets break this. Lets revamp women's ministry. Lets go to the heart of issues and go away with the roses and the tutu's. Being beautiful is not about fancy tables or overpriced merchandise, it's about wholeness and an intimate relationship with Jesus and those God has placed in our lives to walk with us, like our spouses. It's time we look beyond the make up, beyond the pretty blouses, and pray for one another, deep prayers. Prayers of healing and restoration. We cannot continue to open wounds, bring up topics, and then not deal fully with them. Many women need counseling and daily encouragement and accountability - we have to help them better.
Jesus understood the importance of a woman's heart. In John 4 we see that Jesus went out of his way to go through Samaria, and it says in verse 6 of John 4 that "being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour." It was around noon time. And if you study scripture you know that women went to the well together in the early morning. Possibly to catch up on town gossip or simply because that was custom. Regardless the woman at the well, came hours later, because she was ostracized from the other women. She was a social outcast, forgotten, and most likely mistreated; and so she avoided people as much as possible. One day though, at this meeting at the well, she could not avoid a man who would not allow her to avoid her past.
Not only was Jesus waiting for her there, sitting there, but He spoke to her. Normally men did not speak to women in public. Jewish men did not speak to Samaritan men let alone Samaritan women. Jewish men would also have nothing to do with a woman known to be living in sin. Yet Jesus broke all barriers, all rules, to speak to this woman about eternal life. He saw her. He believed in her and He knew that His father and Him had a gift to offer that she didn't even realize would change her life.
Jesus dug down into this woman's heart and brought her sin into the noonday sun. She had been married five times and was currently living with a man who was not her husband. She had experienced love and loss, and it seems she had turned away from marriage completely, preferring to live in sin because the thought of another loss of marriage, another hurt from a man that didn't seem to want her or even just another marriage ending, was too much to bare. But Jesus taught her about Himself, Herself, and how His living water could change her life forever.
What if the women in her city would have dug a little deeper? What if those women would have asked the hard questions, tugged the heart strings, and helped her deal completely with her pain and sin. What if we would step out of the normal rules and regulations and love and live and boldly deal with issues like Jesus did.
The woman at the well; I am her. You are her. We all have dealt with sin or hurt so deep it seems that we must hide ourselves in the noonday sun instead of being vulnerable in the morning to one another. I know personally that before I realized the importance of vulnerability and of true authenticity that those "feel good" women's conferences helped for a weekend. A week after. Even sometimes a month.
But I also realized quickly that I needed more than just a quick fix. I need open heart surgery and the tender touch of a surgeon so lovely and detailed that He puts my heart entirely together again and doesn't leave my chest open and exposed; and my body bleeding.
Lets be different in how we handle women's ministry. Lets break the barriers and start dealing with issues, completely. God desires to see women free, women whole, and I desire the very same thing. My heart hurts for you ladies. My heart yearns for you to experience the beautiful healing that comes with vulnerability; and I am here to offer help.
In His Love,
Meg
{ for questions or comments please e-mail me at megbailey22@gmail.com }
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