HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO PRACTICING JOY?
I realize that while many of you have been reading for a while, some might be new. Furthermore, as my journey continues, I continue to define what my call is and how this blog relates to that call. In answer to this question, I wrote this:
As I seek to live a life that is evident of Joy and the practicing of that Joy…I am discovering that I must uncover the pain, the ugliness and the grief that lies deep within my soul. As I unpack this “junk in my trunk”, I am finding that it gives me back the power over my own thoughts, my own feelings and my own life. This positive cycle of unpacking the junk and rephrasing it in light of God’s truth continues to help me find more ways to Practice Joy even in the deep, dark, smelly places that I find myself in through out this journey. It is this Practice that I feel is saving me from going off “the deep end” completely and allows me to continue to press forward to reclaim more of myself and thus to be freely free to lose myself for God’s sake. For how can you ever lose something that was never yours to begin with?
A huge theme, if you have been reading for some time, that keeps coming up for me is gender roles. I picked up a book – Sue Monk Kidd’s book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine – and have decided to document my own journey through this process of discovery. I wanted to create a landing page for the series – so here it is!
What Does it Mean to be a Woman?
The Feminine Wound: Looking From the Bottom Up
Compensation 1: We ALL Walk with a “Feminine” Wound
Compensation 2: We ALL Walk with a “Feminine” Wound
If Men Could be Women for a Day…or a Month
Reflections on the Road to Recovery
DISCLAIMER: WHAT I AM NOT SAYING
I feel that I must pause here before I go on and address something. I know that even by saying this, there are still those that will try to read between the lines and try to make this journey about something it is not…and try to take away from my experience by saying I am trying to do things I am not trying to do. I understand this comes out their own place of insecurity in who they are and what their role is in this world.
However, I feel compelled to say it any who. So here it is, as I have said before: I do not hate men. I do not wish to bash men or to try to make myself and the female gender to be one of greater importance than men. I do not wish to participate in slamming males with my thoughts nor my words….for I would be perpetuating the cycle of abuse instead of ushering in the Kingdom of Grace.
My simple – yet complicated – wish is that women would finally be able to be of equal importance to men. That men would take a step back, a step down and allow the women in their lives to share the burden of the World, the Society, the Church and the Family with us and stop trying to bear the weight of the world alone. That women would be allowed to follow their calling based on their giftedness, not pigeon holed by the Church because of their gender. That the cycle of domestic abuse, sexual assaults and the struggle for power and control would stop here, with this generation – at least within the Church. For not until we – as both male and female, created BOTH in the image of God – join hands and move together as a united force within the Church walls, for not until we do this will we be able to conquer the battles of injustice outside of the Church walls.
