Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity Quotes

“But a woman raising her children is not only shaping the next generation, she is also shaping little humans who are going to live forever. The souls she gave birth to are immortal. Immortal. And somehow, our culture looks at a woman who treats that as if it might be an important task and says, “It’s a shame she’s wasting herself. She could be doing something important—like filing paperwork for insurance claims.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Women need to stop being so offended about being asked to submit to an equal. Christ did not consider it robbery to humble Himself and submit to an equal, and neither should we, because when we picture that submission we are picturing the most potent form of glory that there is.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“what God has created us for is far more breathtaking, crazy, scary, and glorious than we have wanted to assume, and I don’t think any of us, if we throw ourselves into the roles that He sets for us, will find ourselves bored.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Too often we just accept the premise that a homemaker drives carpool, gets the casserole in the oven, and organizes the closets. Once those things are done, we feel like we have ticked all the boxes and now our time is our own. It’s all too easy for us to work in order that we may have leisure, rather than working because we’re convinced that we’re building something phenomenal—and that mindset makes absolutely all the difference in the world. It is the difference between the employee and the boss, the hired help and the entrepreneur, the servant and the free man.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“What impact would repentance have had on the role of women in the culture? If, in her misery and unhappiness, America had fallen to her knees instead of throwing herself into the pursuit of licentiousness, would there have been any resultant change in the way women were viewed? Absolutely there would have been. I would argue that one of the first things that we would have needed to chuck out the window would have been the idealistic, superficial, and incredibly shallow view of homemaking that was flourishing in the '50s.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“We can either copy Him in that, and attempt to use our homes to testify to God’s abundant and overwhelming delight in beauty, or we can use our homes to say the opposite—that nothing matters and it’s all stupid and nobody cares anyway.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“But I am arguing that a sloppy, lazy, underachieving attitude is not glorifying to God and is not a joyful or fulfilling approach to life.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“And women were created by God to run. To charge at things. To work like crazy.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Because we women are the glory, it makes sense that we tend to be preoccupied with glorifying. We do this innately and without even having to think about it, in the same way that our bodies can create another human inside of us without us having to stop and read a manual about how to do it. God created us for this purpose, and we beautify and we glorify constantly. Sometimes we do this in obedient ways, sometimes in rebellious ways; sometimes we revolt against our innate desire to do this at all, but this is a deeply ingrained trait that God has built into womankind, and it just can’t be completely smothered.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“So could a woman be faithfully keeping her house, in exactly the way Paul tells her to, but also have “a job”? Well, the Proverbs 31 woman was doing it—so it would be ludicrous of us to say that women may not engage in any business ventures. Of course the Bible doesn’t prohibit a woman making money. On the other hand, as I’ve written before, that’s not really the problem of our generation. We’ve got bigger questions to answer. We are a generation that needs to recover a sense of the importance of the home, and the importance of wives and mothers who are invested in their people.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“The Hebrew word for a mother’s womb is raham—and the root of this word means “mercy.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“say that you were a woman living on a farm at the turn of the last century. You have a lot of kids and not a lot of money. Winter’s coming, and you’ve got to feed them all the way through it. When do you start planning? The split minute you get through the last winter, that’s when. You pull out the seeds you saved from last year’s crop, you start your seeds, you plant your garden (and no, you can’t rent a rototiller, so you probably have to fuss around with a hoe or a horse and plow or something). And don’t forget that if that garden is going to feed the family it’s going to have to be a rather massive—cute container gardening or interesting Pinterest-worthy novelty gardens would not cut it. You tend it all summer, and you harvest. You can, you dry, you preserve. You fill your root cellar and hopefully by midway through autumn you can stand back and survey the fruit of all that labor, grateful that it all came together and secure in the knowledge that you have supplied your family with what they need. Now compare that feeling with grabbing a can of beans at the store and feeling happy that you remembered to do that so there’s some green on your kids’ plates tonight. It’s much easier, yes . . . but not quite the same in terms of satisfaction in a job well done.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“The battle is now so completely won that even many married Christians couples think of birth control almost as a sacrament, and many treat the idea of babies as an optional add-on to their relationship. We live in a society which despises fruitfulness, tolerating it only when it is a sort of self-conscious decision—a baby added on as a little garnish on top of a successful career like the small flourish of kale on the side of your dinner plate. Not really necessary, just decorative, and definitely not the point of the meal. Eve”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“God didn’t look at Adam in the garden and say, “It is not good for man to be alone, he needs something pretty to look at.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“In the notorious passage in 1 Timothy 2 where Paul prohibits women from teaching, I think it’s quite striking that he also discusses how she should learn. Everyone gets wound up in a snarl about the fact that she should learn “in silence,” but what they fail to notice is that she’s learning. Paul is assuming that women are to be students of the Word, and there’s never a hint that it’s more important for the men to be educated in the faith than the women. Women are prohibited from preaching theology, but it’s never assumed that they shouldn’t know theology.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Food, fellowship, laughter, beauty—these form loyalties that run deep.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Why does it matter that she be educated in the faith? If we can just get past our indignation about how she should learn, it might behoove us to ask why Paul thinks it’s important that she learn at all… And I do think he answers that question: It’s because when Eve was deceived and believed the wrong thing, look at the incredible destruction it caused. Eve was deceived—her intellect fell into error—but that wasn’t Adam’s problem in that moment. He wasn’t deceived at all—but he went with Eve anyway.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“As soon as women start demanding “equality” at the top of their lungs they kill the glory, because the essence of glory is dependent on difference.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Wives are told in 1 Peter that they are capable of winning their husbands without a word—and that’s because we can be compelling, powerful, and persuasive without it (1 Pet. 3:1).”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“It’s dangerous to be only a little bit educated, because when you’re only a little bit educated you don’t realize how little your education actually is, and you can get carried away with your own wisdom in much the same way that you can get drunk—except the odd part is that when you get drunk, it’s because you have partaken too much, and in the case of education, the drunkenness comes because you haven’t partaken enough. And what you’re partaking of is the fount of wisdom, which I could describe as the fount of the Muses, since they are the source of knowledge in Greek mythology. That’s the fountain from which it’s important to drink deeply in order to be sober, because if you drink from it just barely you will be drunk—not on wisdom but on your own ignorance. So the fountain of knowledge is like alcohol except in reverse.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“an ignorant woman may just be one of the most lethal dangers on the planet.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“this verse comes right on the heels of telling us that the woman needs to learn. Why should she learn? Why does it matter that she be educated in the faith? If we can just get past our indignation about how she should learn, it might behoove us to ask why Paul thinks it’s important that she learn at all… And I do think he answers that question: It’s because when Eve was deceived and believed the wrong thing, look at the incredible destruction it caused.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“We live in an incredibly privileged time, and we don’t have to kill ourselves just to survive. And this means that it becomes quite easy to decide to just float. If we don’t have to run to survive, then why would we run? Why not take it easy and do the minimum? Why not live life exclusively in neutral or, at the very most, first gear?”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“No Christian should ever really be asking, “How can I fulfill myself?”—the question should always be pointed outward. Who can I bless? How can I use my gifts to build up those around me? How can I embrace my femininity in such a way that I shine the light of the gospel into a lost and sinful world? How can I be truly excellent in the opportunities that God has placed in front of me? The answers will vary wildly, but the questions are always the same for every woman—married, single, old, young.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“every married woman is faced with a completely unique set of circumstances and must use creativity and innovation to “enflesh” the principles we have discussed: subdue, fill, help, and glorify.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“It’s all too easy for us to work in order that we may have leisure, rather than working because we’re convinced that we’re building something phenomenal—and that mindset makes absolutely all the difference in the world.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“Women who have chosen themselves at every turn in life, who have grasped, who have shoved others aside, who have put their own interests first in every endeavor, who are unable to even fathom the idea of submitting their desires to something outside of themselves . . . these are not happy women.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“He doesn’t want us to run away from the world; he actually expects us to charge at the world. To change the world. The last instructions that Christ gave to His church before He ascended into Heaven were to go and “baptize the nations.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“True freedom lies in the opportunity to pursue excellence, and that opportunity is dependent on the boundaries that define and restrict the entire field of endeavor. Basketball without any hoops or lines on the court isn’t basketball. True freedom has to recognize boundaries.”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

“True freedom lies in the opportunity to pursue excellence, and that opportunity is dependent on the boundaries that define and restrict the entire field of endeavor”
― Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity