Living as a Christian woman

This post has been stewing around in my brain for quite a while, but tonight I have decided to stop agonising over every point and just write. Believe me, I'm a very long way from having everything figured out, but this is where my thoughts stand at the moment. Feel free to disagree with my opinions, as long as you can justify your own.

This is a post about me. As you can probably figure out from the title, I have two X chromosomes, I've made a decision to follow Jesus, and my heart is still working. When you reduce everything down to those basics, it all seems very simple. However life can often be anything but.

Recently, I've been reading through some of the harder books of the Bible, including Proverbs and Ecclesiasties. Proverbs in particular I've found challenging. It seemed to have very little to say to or about women, and that it did say wasn't very helpful. The three types of women referred to in the book are the good wife (Proverbs 31) the annoying wife and the adulteress. There wasn't anything there for somebody who fits in category D: none of the above. (That wasn't an emoticon!)

After finding links from a couple of the other blogs I read, I've rediscovered the Boundless webzine. And almost every article I've read has annoyed me. I consider most of the advice offered to be too pro marriage, and some of it downright mysoginistic. For example:

• Successful women are not marrying because they out-earn the men in their peer group.
• A woman travelling for a few days to attend a conference and leaving her husband with the house and children is contrary to God's design.
• Modern women are described as 'aggressively independent'. (If it's 'aggressive' to have a job I enjoy and be able to pay my own rent, then I'm guilty as charged.)
• Women need to live with their parents (or another Christian family) to protect them from men who would take advantage of the opportunity that a single woman living alone provides.

Please tell me I'm not the only person who is annoyed by these ideas (annoyed seems too passive a word!) God has given me many gifts, talents and opportunities, and I'm not about to squander them simply because using them to the best of my ability means that no nice Christian boy will want to marry me. Is it too much to ask for a boyfriend (and maybe future husband) who is enough of a man to find my strength and success attractive rather than intimidating?
And it's just plain frustrating when all the advice about making the most of your single years is written by married people with children.

Okay - so I'm just going to say it: I like boys. While God hasn't revealed all His plans regarding my future, I'm still hoping that a husband will turn up someday. Now this may just be a problem at my church with its current demographic, but unmarried men and women aren't particularly good at hanging out together socially. Youth Group supper is a post-evening service tradition where I worship. I've started noticing of late that the guys will all sit in one big group, the girls in another, and never the twain shall meet. And that bothers me a lot. There's also a girls' social night and a boys' social night weekly for the church youth. Of course, there is a time and a place for hanging out with friends of the same gender, I feel that this has become too much the norm. This might be partly because there are a lot of high school kids in the church youth group, and very little acknowledgement of people who have moved on to the next stage of their life without picking up a spouse on the way. While I love all my girl friends from church, I think that I, and a lot of other people, are missing out on their personal growth from their limited social interactions.


I hope this post doesn't portray me as some kind of bitter single woman. Ninety-nine per cent of the time I'm perfectly happy living and working as a single woman, trying to figure out how to honour God in all aspects of my life as it is now.