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Beauty offers mercy.
A woman who is full of tender mercy and soft vulnerability is a powerful, lovely woman.
God does not always rescue us out of a painful season. You know that he does not always give to us what we so desperately want when we want it. He is after something much more valuable than our happiness. Much more substantive than our health. He is restoring and growing in us an eternal weight of glory. And sometimes . . . it hurts.
It is one thing to suffer. It is something far worse to walk alongside one you love who is suffering intensely and be unable to do anything about it. Many of you have lived this.
We mother each other when we offer our concern, our care, our comfort. We mother each other when we see a need and rise to meet it whether it is a sweater for a friend who is chilly, a meal for a struggling family, or a listening ear for a friend who is hurting.
A woman is not less of a woman because she is not a wife or has not physically borne a child. The heart and life of a woman is much more vast than that. All women are made in the image of God in that we bring forth life. When we enter into our world and into the lives of those we love and offer our tender and strong feminine hearts, we cannot help but mother them.
The gift of friendship among women is a treasure not to be taken lightly. Women friends become the face of God to one another—the face of grace, of delight, of mercy.
There is a fierce jealousy, a fiery devotion, and a great loyalty between women friends. Our friendships flow in the deep waters of the heart where God dwells and transformation takes place. It is here, in this holy place, that a woman can partner with God in impacting another and be impacted by another for lasting good. It is here that she can mother, nurture, encourage, and call forth Life.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it careful round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers . . .
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Redeemed women of God have tender, merciful hearts, backbones of steel, and hands that have been trained for battle. There is something incredibly fierce in the heart of a woman that is to be contended with—not dismissed, not disdained, but recognized, honored, welcomed, and trained.
Our Enemy despises relationship, hates love in any form, fears its redemptive power. This is why God sent Eve. Women are needed to protect relationships, bring them back to center stage where they belong. You might at times feel like the only one who cares. But as women we must hang onto this—that because of the Trinity, relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Let us not give way or yield our intuitive sense of the importance of relationship for anything.
There are many things God calls us to do, but loving well always comes first. And don’t your relationships feel opposed ? Of course. They must be fought for.
The World is still deeply marred by the Fall. Men still dominate in many sinful ways (remember the curse). Women who “make it” there tend to be dominating and controlling (remember Fallen Eve). The Evil One holds sway over the World and its systems (1 John 5:19).
Be here now. To live as an authentic, ransomed, and redeemed woman means to be real and present in this moment. If we continue to hide, much will be lost. We cannot have intimacy with God or anyone else if we stay hidden and offer only who we think we ought to be or what we believe is wanted.
