When You Want More But It Scares You

I have a degree in Women's Studies. I've been to a handful of Christian women's conferences. I've held a lot of birthing mama's hands on both sides of the Atlantic. I've brain-stormed and worked in sticky African heat to help women rise from the ashes of war and poverty. I'm a girl mama. I've learned from women young and old what it means to internalize the Gospel and live it out.

I believe in the beauty, power, and uncontainable tenacity of women. 

I've been craving more. 

More for myself and more for us all. All of us who have met Jesus at the well and are intent on drinking from His water of life from now until eternity.

There is a stir that is happening in this generation of women. I feel it down deep in my bones. We are weary of tidy looking women's ministry and exhausting and exhausted debates on gender.

We see past sterile cookie cutter neat and clean church life to a world that is broken busted and bleeding out. We are the broken, busted and bleeding out and we we want to be the ones to push the pressure, to hold the surrender flag out to one another and to the world to say, "...But Jesus..."

I read about the idea last week and it spoke right to my core.

Women. Gathering. Jesus.

I was excited and then...well, then...I wasn't.

You see what is happening isn't safe. The goal isn't to have a bunch of women that look a certain way and ascribe to certain rules of spiritual law. Nope, it is to gather women from across the Christian spectrum to think, storytell, dream, relate and actively hope in Christ.

That all sounds a bit utopian if you ask me.

I don't go around shouting my opinions (which are many) on this blog because I truly desire to live in grace and let this blog be an extension of that journey. A blog can be a powerful mouthpiece and I don't trust myself to have the grace and self-control to use it with restraint. Don't get me wrong, I don't fault anyone who does use their blog to exposit their thoughts on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness- truth is that I admire you because all to often my rabid fear of conflict keeps me from speaking up. 

Over the course of the past few years I've started really listening to other women and their journeys and going again and again to Scripture to iron out of it's pages what Jesus had to say about us, the female gender, the Daughter's of Eve.

The one thing I know for sure is that we have value to God. 

He had a purpose in making us women and that purpose was not simply so we could clean house, cook supper, birth babies and show a little leg. We are part of His redemptive story and every mundane thing that we do to love those who live with us, down the street from us and on the other side of the world matters.

I want to be a part of a group of women that gets that truth and embodies that calling- even if it gets messy along the way. Because it will get messy along the way. We are more alike than different and it is that alike-ness that is the very likeness of God, His very image etched into every curve of womanly beauty.

Even though I am not sure about what I think about this movement, this rushing wave not of feminism, but of God-sized redemptive hope, I'm still going to join it.

Maybe you should too.