Privileged Reinforcements

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“Which of the ten unchangeables that God has created in your life do you wish you could change?”  My small group leader at a children’s program I attended around age ten asked.  The list of the ten unchangeables we had been learning about included things like parents, gender, and mental capacity, but the question received not a pause for thought from me. 

“Time in history,” I answered matter-of-factly.  “I wish I’d been born in the olden days.”  The ‘olden days’ denoted some limitless era long past which was far better than the modern state of affairs—after all, everybody knows that hoop skirts trump indoor plumbing any day. 

My opnion hasn’t changed much in eleven years, especially when I dwell on the steam feminism has gathered in the last decades.  Women are fast growing extinct, and girls are a dying breed.  If only the feminists of the 1960s could have known that in asserting the superiority of womankind, they were obliterating women and womanliness and setting the future of the human race itself in jeopardy.  What the feminists didn’t understand and continue to ignore is the truth that the title of “woman” is so much more than a gender label: it carries with it our God-given design, purpose, role, drives, and instincts.  Titus 2:4-5 says,

“That they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.”

This is why I have come to realize that I am able to be and in fact must be grateful that God counts me worthy to be a woman in the 21^st century. 

God could have put me in the 18^th century—I would still have had temptations and struggles and discontentments, but at least my very femininity wouldn’t have been at stake, right?  But God didn’t put me in the 18^th century—why?  I ask that question again like the two year old who has just learned the word: Why didn’t God place me in the 1800s, when feminism began to really roll in the United States?  Why didn’t I grow up in the early 1900s?  Could I not have accomplished so much more for God then?

In a word, no.  The only time in history in which I could glorify God to the full extent that He desires is this brief span from the 20^th to the 21^st centuries that is called my lifetime.  God chose to drop me into this bedlam of iniquity that our current culture is, but not to be conformed by it.  God chose this time, this moment to place me, when true women are being derided into extinction and the mission of motherhood is being scoffed as “not enough” and girls must seemingly choose between the extremes of becoming immoral objects of desire or the androgynous boy-girl creature. 

I did not happen to be born in this time in history when the battle seems all but lost and the enemy is crowing their victory chant—God placed me here and now rather than during any of the other 6,000 years because He has a plan.  You and I are the reinforcements in this battle, and if we feel this is the most depraved time in history, we should also feel all the more grateful that God deployed us here.  If we feel the dreadful onslaught of the world and the old feminist lie wearing us down until we cannot stand anymore, we should also feel the more powerful grace of God, for even when the need is the greatest in history, we still cannot find the end of God’s grace.  If we feel the darkness is simply too great for our weak, frail selves, we need to realize that our tiny flame of light that feeds off the oil of the Holy Spirit shines the brightest that it ever has in contrast to the pitch blackness of the surrounding culture. 

It is no chance that I am a woman living in 2011 when true women are going extinct—it is a miraculously spectacularly planned point in God’s Master plan.  Nor is it a punishment that I am a woman living in 2011 when true women are going extinct.  It is the most awesome privilege that I am counted worthy by my Lord to fulfill the Great Commission in times that are not full of spiritual wealth, to experience His fathomless grace in times that are not brimming with ease, and to know His strength and power behind my light in the midnight, not just the midday.  We are privileged, are we not?