God is divine, eternal, self-existent, self-sufficient, omnipotent, merciful, all-knowing…..oh no! Not all-knowing! What do I do with the knowledge of THAT? If He knows everything, EVERYTHING about me, where can I go? Where can I hide in my shame? What can I do when my sin eats at me and causes me no sleep?

“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.” (Proverbs 15:3)

If God knows all, from creation to eternity, when we are born, how we will live, when we will die, what we will have for dinner tonight; how do I respond to that?

For those who believe in a God of the universe but do not have a personal relationship with Him it is understandable that this would be a scary thing to deal with or just go into denial about. If the view one has of their earthly father has warped the name of Father for them then it might be doubly difficult to find this a desirable attribute to contemplate.

When I began to have an on-going, worshipful, intimate, childlike relationship with the God Who loves me so much He sent His Son to die for me while I was yet a sinner, this concept became more and more a mainstay of my faith. It causes me to relax and enter into His all-loving presence even in my darkest hours and know that He knows everything about me and still loves me, accepts me and cherishes me as His very own. My sin will not hinder me, my weakness will not stop me, nothing will keep me from running to Him as I begin to correctly grasp the full weight of this attribute of God.

Psalm 139 is probably the most well known of the passages that declares God’s knowing of me. He knows when I sit and stand which means that He must know what I had for breakfast today. He knows my going out and my lying down which means He knows all about my child’s concert I went to last night and that I came home and went straight to bed. He knows the words I am going to speak, which means that He was aware of the big argument I had with my child the other day, even before we had it. He knew me even when I was in my mother’s womb being formed and He knows the day that I will die and come to be with Him.

He says that there is nowhere I can go to get away from Him. His Spirit is in the heavens and if I make my bed in hell He will be there too. In agreement with the Psalmist I will declare

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”

I accept by faith what God has declared about Himself but I readily affirm by experience what He says about me. I know that I cannot, until the day I see Him face to face, know or understand all of His ways completely. Many times, even the small glimpses He gives me are too big for me to comprehend wholly.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8)

I totally agree with that statement in faith and in experience.

God’s knowledge is original. Nobody taught Him anything about anything and He cannot learn anything about us or anything in the world because he already knows it all. His knowledge is pure and undefiled. 1 Samuel 15:29 affirms this,

“And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man, that He should repent” (NKJV)

Even though God is knowledgeable about sin there is no sin in Him that He would be affected by it. His statutes are easy to understand, if not also to accomplish in our sinful state. His ways are infallible; He will not question Himself the way an earthly parent might question their actions toward their children. Lastly, He will not forget. If He knows everything about our ways and never forgets anything about us (except our sin when we repent) how much more will He remember His own ways and His own laws?

Stepping out on my own here I would like to add that I believe that God’s knowledge is also creative. He is not a stagnant God that requires us to live under the heavy rod of rules without giving us outlets for expression in Him. I believe that as we enter more and more fully into His plan for us He reveals more and more for us to do and gives us His creative power to do it.

Reiterating the early part of my paper; what a pleasure it is to know that the God Who made the universe, the One Who rules and reigns in power and majesty not only knows every little thing about me and still loves me! While He may not condone everything that I do and He is diligent to work those things out of me. He never abandons this work of His hands and will bring to completion what He started in me until the day of Christ Jesus.

What desire for Him wells up in my heart when I allow myself to meditate on this! What excitement to follow in His perfect will floods my soul when I realize that He will never do anything that is not in my best interest or abuse me in anyway.

“The Lord is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
The Lord is good to all’
He has compassion on all He has made.” Psalm 145: 8,9

When a husband and wife marry they promise to be faithful to each other, “until death do us part”. If they are REALLY in love they might promise “till forever and eternity!”

When my husband and I were first married, I was so insecure that I pressed him for repeated affirmations of his devotion, maybe because he was so quiet, or maybe because I was so needy. I didn't need gifts or any such wonderful proof that the world would tell you to give to your loved one. I needed to hear the words. Alot. Since he is a man of very few words, I was not getting what I needed. In exasperation one day, he said to me, “I guess I’ll just have to prove it to you over the years because nothing I say will ever be enough to convince you”. As the years have flown by I have lost my anxiety and have allowed myself to relax in the arms of my love. So it is with our Heavenly Father. As winter becomes spring and spring becomes summer, God’s faithfulness and blessing become more apparent with time.

In my life God has not only allowed me to see His tremendous faithfulness to me but has also helped me to understand Himself as my Father through my role as a mother. Beyond that, He has empowered me to show His faithfulness to those in my life as I remain steadfast to Him and to them through the normal trials, tribulations and temptations of everyday life.

My self-destructive behavior in those early days caused me to seek God with a vengence as I sought to overcome the sin that so easily entangled me. As I witnessed God’s redemptive work in my life it became easier over time to believe in His heart for me. He cleansed my mind by the washing of His Word, He cleaned up my actions by giving me the desire, and then the power, to live as Jesus lived and He set my feet on a straight path.

After a while, however, I developed a subconscious theology that God would take care of me and mine no matter what and that nothing bad would ever happen to me or to them because I had committed them to Him. The first part of that statement is absolutely true. God will take care of me and mine. The second part was faulty. By believing this I had lulled myself into being very lazy in the Spirit. This half-truth did not oblige me to pray very hard or to press into God for my own walk or that of my family. Granted, I was distressed that my husband and children did not appear to be strong in the Lord and were not excited about the things of God, but I came to what I thought was a hyper-spiritual place, as I said, maybe just in my head, “Don’t worry, be happy, God will take care of it”. Underneath I was a quivering mass of fear and unbelief. It is the only time I have ever experienced insomnia in my life. Anxiety flowed through my veins like blood.

Around that time a 15 year old boy in our church died, as a direct result of his own parental rebellion. He had been taking his parents car out (with no drivers license) late at night after they went to bed. He was drinking and partying. There was an accident. He was the oldest of four children, the son of a very well-known missionary in our community (they were so well-known that the story was written up in Charisma at the time), this family was a pillar of our church and they had given over their whole lives to the Lord’s work.

It took the wind out of me. I struggled under my false doctrine and my half-baked ideas about God and His ability to care for my children even if they walked in lukewarm rebellion to Him and to their father and me. If this thing could happen to this awesome, godly family, how much more could it happen to me~~a seeming nobody in the scheme of things?

When I cried at this boy’s funeral, I wasn’t only crying for his parents who had lost a funny, beautiful, creative, first born child. I didn’t just cry for his grieving classmates, my own two daughters included, who would miss their friend, and I didn’t just cry for my church family who sat in stunned disbelief that something like this could happen to one of the best, the brightest and the most promising.

I sat there and cried for myself. For my loss of comfort and security. For my loss of naivety. For that strange, disquieting feeling that was settling in my spirit. The feeling that I really didn’t know this God that I had claimed to know so well for all the years before. That my knowledge of Him, limited as it was, wasn’t true, and I felt almost like I would have to start over from scratch in my quest to really know God. Arthur W. Pink sums up my dilemma in this:

“There are seasons in the lives of all when it is not easy, no not even for the Christian, to believe that God is faithful. Our faith is sorely tried, our eyes bedimmed with tears, and we can no longer trace the outworking of His love. Our ears are distracted with the noises of the world, harassed by the atheistic whisperings of Satan, and we can no longer hear the sweet ascents of His still small voice. Cherished plans have been thwarted, friends on whom we relied have failed us, a professed brother or sister in Christ has betrayed us. We are staggered. We sought to be faithful to God, and now a dark cloud hides Him from us. We find it difficult, yea, impossible, for carnal reason to harmonize His frowning providence with His gracious promises”

My trust in God for me and for my family’s safety, even in my oldest daughter’s own increasing rebellion, had to be whole. It had to be big enough to encompass the bad as well as the good. I had to believe, in spite of unanswered prayers that I knew for sure were His will. I had to believe His promises to me against all the hordes of hell itself that wanted me to cry out and blaspheme my Father for not answering me when I called and for allowing me to almost drown in my own sea of confusion.

I HAD to believe! Where else could I go? I identified with Peter in John 6:68, “Lord to whom shall we go? YOU have the words of eternal life”. Perhaps I could have walked away from my faith, but at that point, in many ways, I had already seen and tasted that the Lord is good. What was I to do? I sunk to my knees, inwardly and outwardly, and humbled myself, under the all loving and harsh hand of the only true God, the Maker of heaven and earth, God Almighty, Christ Himself Who lives inside me, and I cried. I committed myself to Him anew and begged Him to let me know Him as He is, not some figment of my limited reasoning and imagination.

Tozer declares:

“We can hold a correct view of truth only by daring to believe everything God has said about Himself. It is a grave responsibility that a man takes upon himself when he seeks to edit out of God’s self-revelation such features as he in his ignorance deems objectionable.”

Tozer presses past the theological ramifications for believing that our God is faithful and allows that we need to acknowledge His faithfulness in our hearts to keep us from fainting in the desert of our own doubt:

“The faithfulness of God is a datum of sound theology but to the believer it becomes far more than that: it passes through the processes of the understanding and goes on to become nourishing food for the soul.”

The faithfulness of God, indeed, is the axis that all the other attributes rely on. If we cannot lean on this one true thing about God; this thing, that if it could be violated would cause us to question the sincerity of all the rest, what do we have to stay ourselves upon? Where is our rock, our shield, our fortress in our moment of desperation?

Even an unbeliever might believe in a God who is all-powerful but that alone does not convince them that God is good and faithful to those who love Him. Hitler and Stalin had almost absolute power here on earth but no one in their right mind would ever say they were loving, good or faithful. Many people might believe that God is loving. That attribute alone might cause one to agree also that God is faithful, but then, as with me, when the hard things come and His love seems a distant memory lost in the cloud of discouragement and doubt, what then becomes of my neatly packaged doctrine of His faithfulness? Only as we can see His faithful hand stayed on us in ALL things, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the just and the unjust, in the dark and in the light, can we truly be able to know God aright and say with Moses, who lived never seeing the promised land:

“He is the Rock,
His works are perfect
And all His ways are just.
A faithful God Who does no wrong
Upright and just is He.” Duet. 32:4

Faithfulness. What does it mean? Webster’s Dictionary does such a poor job of defining the quality of being faithful that it would not even be worthwhile to include that definition in this essay. Most people would associate the word faithfulness with the marital relationship, asserting that if the husband or wife is faithful sexually to their spouse all the days of their marriage, then they were faithful. That is, to be sure, one picture of faithfulness and a wonderful one at that, especially in this day of rampant immorality, however, I believe it is a stunted one at best. When you contemplate the faithfulness of God, the concept instantly becomes so wide and so vast that one realizes anew the limited nature of our ability to truly know God in all of His glory while we are yet looking through the mirror darkly.

I believe that the ability to comprehend the faithfulness of God comes almost completely in hindsight. Remembering my own mustard seed of faith many years ago, I am reminded again how restricted our ability is to believe in that which we cannot hold, cannot see, and cannot know completely. Our fear of the unknown blocks us from fully grasping that which we cannot discern in the natural realm.

When we come to Christ and accept Him as our Lord and Savior we are inundated with promises and truths of the Scripture that seem, at the time, too deliriously incomprehendable. God loves me in spite of my sin! Jesus died for me even when I didn’t care if He was real or not! I can stand righteous before God and I don’t have to be a slave to my evil desires anymore!

In our supposed “maturity in the faith” we sometimes take these truths to be self-evident and forget the wonder of them. However, along with our growth in the Lord, we are able to look back and see the awesome hand of God firmly leading us along the path of our salvation with no shadow of turning, no hint of leaving us stranded. As we walk the sometimes dark corridors of our pilgrimage here we are able to look back, almost like viewing a videotape, at the many trials and temptations, nets and snares, that He has saved us from and saved us out of, after we have carelessly fallen along the way.

The young believer, whether young physically or spiritually, usually finds it difficult to totally believe, particularly in this world of selfishness and greed, that even God will do all the He has promised to do. Why should he? There is no point of reference! Even the most faithful father will, at sometime, fail to keep his word to his child, even if unintentionally. The most faithful spouse may occasionally entertain the thought of another and even swift repentance negates not the unfaithfulness of that split second thought. Who, tell me, WHO, born of human will and flesh, can say they have been totally faithful ever moment of their lives or has ever known anyone that has never gone back on a word, even one said in haste, all of their lives? Where can we begin to develop a true concept of God’s faithfulness?

I believe that only in a living, breathing, soul-searching, on going relationship with the One who is called Faithful and True, are we able to begin to grasp some inkling of the real meaning of the word. So….,having just expounded on my inability to fathom the faithfulness of God I will now attempt to try!

In all my reading over the course of my life I have yet to find, apart from the Bible and other Christian books, very much written about the quality of faithfulness. We all understand that it is a desirable quality to have and we all want to find it inherent in the ones we involve ourselves with on a daily basis whether that be family, friends, co-workers or even our pets. However, it is not something that we give much thought to until we are presented with the Scriptures. God’s Word is replete with references to His faithfulness to His people and commending our faithfulness back to Him. A total of two pages in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is devoted to the words faith, faithful, faithfully, faithfulness, faithless and unfaithful. Upon careful study of the Scriptures you cannot help but be overwhelmed with verse after lengthy verse and character sketch after character sketch proving the faithfulness of God to His chosen ones. The NIV translation assures us in very plain language that, “if we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown His own.” (2 Tim. 2:13)

What clearer picture of this do we see than the story of Hezekiah’s son, born after he begged God to let him live another fifteen years? According the account in 2 Kings 21 and confirmed in 2 Chronicles 33 Manasseh was the most evil king ever to rule over Israel. He ascended to the throne at only twelve years old and proceeded to commit horrible evil in the sight of the Lord. He rebuilt the altars to Baal that his father had torn down, he delved into astrology and even sacrificed his own son to an idol. He was involved in witchcraft and sorcery and caused many to fall away from the Lord. Verse 6 of chapter 21 is clear, “He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, provoking Him to anger”. Yet, after all this, God remained faithful even in His anger. Almighty God, faithful to His purposes, His Word and His covenant sent prophets to warn Manasseh and let him know of His anger so that he would repent. When Manasseh failed to do that, God, in His faithfulness, turned the screws some more. He allowed the Assyrian army to capture Manasseh, put a hook in his nose, bind him with shackles and take him away to Babylon. Finally, in Manasseh’s great distress he sought God with all his might and begged him to save him.

Oh, the faithfulness of our God resounds in verse 13 of 2 Chronicles 33! “And when he prayed to Him, the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea; so He brought him back to Jerusalem and to his kingdom. Then Manasseh KNEW that the Lord is God”. Verse 20 is read with a touch of incredulity and a sigh of relief. “Manasseh rested with his fathers and was buried in his palace”. God saved him from a certain hell, even after all he had done, simply by His faithfulness to the one who repents. And oh, how sweet that word “rested” sounds! How precious to know that will all our sins piling up before us day by day, God’s grace in our repentance is so great and His faithfulness to His Word in 1 John 1:9 is complete. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”.

How stupid it must be to the unregenerated mind that God would forgive a murderer, but allow our elderly grandparent to go to hell after they lived such a “good” life. As a young believer I struggled in my heart with this concept. “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Romans 3:4) is now my fervent cry. Whatever I believe that is false about God because I cannot entirely understand Him, may it drift away from me like so much vapor in my ongoing search for His truth and His mercy. God’s faithfulness to Himself, His purposes and His Word go on in spite of our feeble attempts to comprehend it. A.W. Tozer asserts in his book, “Knowledge of the Holy”, “God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfillment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began”.

Another wonderful account of God’s faithfulness is found in 2 Samuel II in the oft-repeated story of David and Bathsheba. David was not as difficult to deal with as Manasseh and his heart was not as hard. When God sent Nathan to correct David and warn him of His judgment due to his adultery with Bathsheba and his arrangement to have Uriah slaughtered, he immediately repented and God forgave him, even calling David, later on, “a man after My own heart”. Rather than needing to judge David in his sin, which we all harbor in our hearts, how comforting to know that God is faithful to us and to Himself in the midst of it. No wonder David, each time he came to his Lord and God in repentance, could state so emphatically, “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, Your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep” Psalms 36:5

Not only did David acknowledge God’s faithfulness in His love toward him but also in His righteous judgment. David knew he deserved God’s wrath, not His awesome forgiveness. If God is not a just God, who exacts punishment on the evil of the world then He would seem to us like an overly permissive parent who can be manipulated and turned by the wind of our desires. David understood what Manasseh struggled with. That even in God’s punishment of his sin He was still being faithful. Not only to His Word, which says, “The soul who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekial 18:4), but to His love, as expressed through Moses in Exodus 15:13, “In Your unfailing love You will lead the people You have redeemed, in Your strength you will guide them to Your holy dwelling”. David, somehow, even without what we would term the infilling of the Holy Spirit, but with the Spirit’s help nonetheless, was able to move past the fear of God that permeated the hearts of God’s chosen people at that time and enter also into the love and forgiveness of God. Earlier, in Psalm 35:9,10, David, knowing for sure that God would rescue him in his distress, sound almost exuberant in his surety of His Heavenly Father. “Then my soul will rejoice in the Lord and delight in His salvation. My whole being will exclaim, “Who is like you, O Lord?” If he was writing on the blogstream can’t you just see an exclamation point and a rollie face after that verse?

All the attributes of God should be important to us. Again quoting Tozer, “To have a correct understanding of the attributes it is necessary that we see them all as one. We can think of them separately but they cannot be separated.” What makes the faithfulness of God so important to all the rest is that it is kind of like the axis that the rest spin on. We can believe that God loves us, but, what if His love is like the human kind? What if it depends on what mood He is in that day? What if it vanishes if we do something really, REALLY bad? We need to know that God will be faithful and that His faithfulness reaches to the sky and is new every morning. It is our humanness that needs to prove the faithfulness of God to ourselves over the span of our walk with Him because it is the one quality that only time will tell.

I know I promised not to comment on politics again, but technically this is not politics. This is about women, our choices as women, our lives as women. I know, I know, this is still a little too ‘current events’ for my normally high tower philosophical oblivion to the masses, but I will try to make this short. Ummm, well, at least worth the read. If nothing else it will be truth. Okay, let’s clarify that too. My truth.

There was this woman. She was a smart woman. She was a smart American woman. She was a smart Jewish-American woman who was born February 4, 1921 in Peoria, Illinois. She graduated valedictorian from her middle America high school and Summa Cum Laude from Smith College in 1942. At a time when women were generally not encouraged or expected to do well in school or go on to higher education.

My premise of this essay was to compare myself to this woman, but see, right there, as of that last paragraph, I have to beg off and say we are nothing alike. It’s the whole valedictorian, summa cum laude, Smith College thing. I’m not Jewish either. And I’m a boomer, not a WWII generation woman. Well, at least we’re both American. And female. Okay, let’s build on that.

After college she married a man named Carl Friedan and lived in the suburbs of New York. Hey, I got married too...well, it was after high school, not college, but I live in the suburbs! Or at least in a split level in a neighborhood that pretends to be the suburbs of the rural town I live in. Close enough.

She dropped her maiden name when she got married. I could look it up but I guess it doesn’t really matter, right? After women got married back then they took their husbands name and lost the name they used for all those years before that. She was forever thus, Betty Friedan. I always wanted to hyphenate my married name with my maiden name when I tied the knot in May of 1972. I almost did. My mother-in-law got offended though when I brought it up. My husband did too. I dropped the idea and never brought it up again.

I wanted to keep my first last name though so I dropped my middle name and put my maiden name in place of it. My mother and my grandmother did that too so I guess I was under the misconception that it was a long standing tradition and lot's of women did it. Until one of my daughters didn't want to keep our last name as her new middle name and she and others told me that keeping your maiden name was a 'boomer' thing to do. I tried to tell her about her grandmother and great grandmother but it fell on deaf ears.

Well, for me anyway, that people pleasing tendency reared it’s ugly head again and my name is definitely not hyphenated. Hasn't been for almost 34 years. I never stopped thinking about it though. It felt like part of me was gone.

Betty Friedan died last month. To quote Ana Veciana-Suarez of the Miami Herald, “the current generation has skipped out on it’s debt to Friedan”.

I agree.

What, you say? Me, the one who believes in God, home, family, and let James Dobson and Kevin Leman help raise her children, agrees that Betty Friedan was important to our society? That we as women would have been less but for the fact that she was here for 85 years on this earth? Like I said, I never claimed to be uncomplicated and I never fit well into boxes.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not consider myself a feminist. Not in today’s version of the word at least. I did buy Gloria Stienums Ms. Magazine for a while back in the seventies though and I also bought Marlo's 'Free to be You and Me' LP. Well, I do believe that I even had Helen Reddy's anthem to womanhood....hear me roar! I think I still have those around somewhere. But when 1973 rolled around and the abortion issue became part of the package, I had to bow out. Not that anyone missed me. I was 19 1/2, almost 20, newly married, and pregnant as all get out. Yeah, I was never a feminist in the pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage, man-hating, homemakers are losers, definition of the word.

But then again, neither was Betty. The co-founder of the National Organization of Women was not a feminist in the sense of the word as we mean it now either. She was pro-women though. She sure was. Her big fight wasn’t to get women out of the home and into the workplace. It was to give them that choice. Her great regret she said, besides her divorce after many years of marriage, was that so many boomer “women who had shunned marriage and family to pursue careers and equal footing with men now blamed her for the fact that they missed opportunities and had a sterile womb.” I don't think she meant for them to sacrifice their desire to be a wife and mother. She just wanted them to know that they were not limited to that. Maybe her stridency was louder than her heart. I can identify with all of that.

A column, written by Betty Rollin, a Betty of my generation, in an issue of AARP magazine two years ago, alluded to this as she wrote about her own struggle to come to terms with the choices that she made in her life. She wrote how she embraced the woman's movement, did not give in to the maternal instinct, traveled the world and had all the freedom, choices and self-awareness that she thought she always wanted. Yet, she has mourned some of those choices as she looks at grandmothers her age, women like me, playing with their grandchildren and envies the look in their eyes. The relationships that she is missing out on because of the choice that she made not to have children.

I wrote a piece in response, telling her that I lived her alter life. That I live for that look from my grandchildren, yet sometimes I’ve wondered, even if just for a minute, what my life would have been like had I made other choices. That sometimes I envied HER, with that freedom to travel, that lack of people hanging on her all day, every day, dishes constantly piling up in the sink, and that ability to be alone with her husband whenever she wants to be. It was never printed and I don’t have that essay anymore but it doesn’t really matter. The gist of it was that women have had choices in this generation that other did not. Betty Rollin made her choice and I made mine. For both of us it was a choice. I was handed, on a silver platter, whatever I could achieve in life. My father made sure of that. I still chose motherhood over all the rest. Professional motherhood. Betty Friedan, for better and for worse, had a lot to do with the fact that this was a choice for me and not a forced sentence, and for Betty Rollin having the option to get self-aware.

To quote her book, The Feminine Mystique, “a century earlier women had fought for higher education, now girls went to college to get a husband” That was in 1963. I remember girls in 1971, when I was going off to college, saying that they were only going to get their M.R.S. degree. I always was something of a social misfit. M.R.S.? What’s that?

When they told me I was literally floored. In my family of five girls college was a given....and we weren't told to find a husband there. We were told to study, to do our best and to have a career. If my Dad had anything to say about it we were going to go to college, "come hell or high water". I guess for a Nixon Republican he was pretty liberal for his time. Or maybe he just saw through the haze of rhetorical, semantical society that we were growing up in and knew that girls, especially his five girls (think Fiddler on the Roof~my parents always loved that movie), were just as bright and capable as anyone else and he was going to give us every opportunity to prove it. I don't know that I always did my father proud but it wasn't for lack of trying on either side. Yeah, my parents gave in and didn't force me to finish college when I wanted to marry at 19, but plan A was always for the degree and I never heard anything about getting a husband there. Not anything.

I live in a community with a high percentage of Christians. I have actually heard fathers, even in the last ten years, tell their extremely bright daughters “girls don’t need a college education”. Wait a minute, in what century are we living? Where does this thinking come from?

This same man's daughter graduated in three years from high school on the National Honor Society. That was over five years ago. She has done no more than a year of community college and a year of Bible College. Last I heard she is a secretary at the school making less than minimum wage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denigrating secretarial work. I just think this girl, with her high science and math skills should be doing something more than typing someone elses letters for wages less than a bag boy in a supermarket makes. You can say this was her choice and to a certain degree it was, but I still think that her father, who didn’t think girls NEED to go to college, had a lot to do with it. It’s not like she is married even now. This is a lack of guidance and support on the parent’s part. I don’t understand it. Isn’t this what Betty fought for? Not that we HAD to go to college, but that we could…..and should...especially if we can.

The irony about ol’ Betty is that, like me with the conservative Christians I live around, she never fit in with her liberals either. According to Susan Brownmiller of the Associated Press, to the more radical and lesbian feminists Friedan was viewed as “hopelessly bourgeois”. Betty told a college audience in 1970, “Don’t get into the bra-burning, anti-man, politics of orgasm, school”. I'm sure that irked some of those ardent women libbers out there with their bra in hand and the fire stoked, didn't it? In the 1990’s she said, “For a great many women, CHOOSING motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice”. Thanks, Betty. I agree. I was always about making my own choices even if I made the wrong ones. I believe I made the right choice for myself, but my choice to leave my teaching degree behind for motherhood, was my choice. Society did not decide for me and neither did my parents. It did make it liberating, Betty. It did.

Betty and I were born into two different generations. Mine is the one she hoped to reach. Isn't it ironic that she reached such a one as me, the common little Christian housewife, with her traditional marriage and nine kids and missed some of the ones that more readily would have listened. I asked my 20-something son this morning, before he left for school, if he had ever heard of Betty Friedan. He thought I was talking about some woman I knew from town. Oops, my bad. Maybe all of our bad. This generation doesn't even know who she was and she hasn't even been dead a month. Betty and I are from two completely different educational backgrounds, and she was Jewish. I am decidedly not. She was politically active and I, for the most part, shun even the dialogue of that. She believed in the womans right to choose in the area of abortion and I believe that right is flat-out murder. She was well-known all over the world, and I am well-known solely in my tiny little town.

But ol’ Betty and me, I think we have one big thing in common. We are both for women. We are FOR women. We both respect our gender. We both believe that choice is good. I will beg off on the choice to murder our offspring, but other than that, choice is very good. Even in that situation though I would back my words up with action and help that woman through her pregnancy and if she doesn't want to keep the child I would help her find a good home. When it comes to babies though, it is my contention that nine months is not a long time to 'inconvenience' oneself for the good of another human being. For God's sake, I have taken in difficult foster children longer than that.

For good and for bad, God gives us free will. What is that if not choice? As much as I like to counsel my children to make wise decisions, I still allow them choice.

One of my teenage girls has her heart set on working at Wal-Mart in the CD department. She has wanted this all the years I have known her. School is hard for her and she doesn't want to go to college, even community college after graduation. I will not force her. Yet, I see that she has a gift with children and would make a great paraprofessional in the school so I make her take Early Childhood and Development at the Vo-Pro program half a day and I am looking into a full-year, half day internship with the elementary school for her senior year. While she admits to liking to work with kindergarteners, and apparently they think the world of her, she still has her heart set on Wal-Mart. Okay, work at Wal-Mart. Far be it from me to tell you otherwise, but I am still going to insist on getting as much, especially free, training that you can get in other areas, just in case you ever change your mind. Just in case you want to make another choice.

It’s all about that. Betty and I both believe that women should be treated the same as men in the workplace. I bet, if I could talk to her right now, that we would also agree that the current obsession teenage girls have with obtaining the perfect body has become a serious problem that needs to be addressed in a louder voice than it is. All the wannabe Britney Spears, Jessica Simpsons, Paris Hiltons out there. I guess it never ends. As long as men look, women will do whatever they can to catch the gaze. They are the antithesis of the women’s movement, not me.

I think that Betty and I would agree on this whole obsession with sex at the middle and high school level and that it needs to be dealt with differently than ever before and that condoms don’t work. At last count, two out of three sexually active teen girls are walking around with an undiagnosed STD. They don’t, or won't, go to the doctor because they are “afraid” and “don’t think that anything bad could happen to them”. And they are still afraid to tell their parents. Lot's of teenagers tell me stuff, more than my own kids will. People tell me that it's because I am so open...but I think it's human nature ....or something....not to be able to talk to your parents when your 15. There's always the exception, but it's a far and wide exception. How have we changed from when I was raised in the fifties and sixties? I think it's a vicious cycle that may never change.

Maybe Betty's and my answers to the problems would be different, maybe our dialogue would be fraught with loud debate, as I have read that she, in turn, could be brusque and engaging, just like me, but I agree with her original contention, put forth in her book way back in 1963, “a baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor~with or without makeup~is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity”. Just think, me and the valedictorian who went to Smith College. Me and one of the celebrated women of NOW, standing together, locking arms, for women.

Well, far be it from me to deprecate the role I have chosen for my life, but I’m with ya Betty, ol’ gal. Not only do I agree with that, but I contend that Jesus does too. But that’s another post.

God gave me these scriptures a while ago, in this order, during a time of prayer:

"All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" 2Timothy3:12

"You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ"
2Timothy2:3

"Remember that Jesus Christ, of the seed of David, was raised from the dead, according to my gospel, for which I suffer trouble as an evildoer, even to the point of chains; but the Word of God is not chained" 2Timothy2:8,9

"After you were illuminated you endured a great struggle with suffering partly while you were made a spectacle both by reproaches and tribulation, and partly while you became companions of those who were so treated" Hebrews 10:32,33

"You have need of endurance" Hebrews 10:36

"We are not of those who draw back to perdition but of those who believe to the saving of the soul" Hebrews 10:39

"Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt...look to the reward." Hebrews 11:26