The New Eve - Lewis Robert [36]
Real womanhood is about choosing wisely.
Lives Courageously
Any woman who wants to be a New Eve will find more than her share of roadblocks and challenges. All through life there will be those gut-wrenching crossroads where something prized, desired, or worked for comes up against the greater callings God has for your life. In such moments the call of obedience faces off with personal ambition, long-held dreams, or intense desires.
I remember when my daughter Elizabeth gained admittance to the prestigious London School of Economics for graduate study. It was a dream come true. What an asset this was going to be for her career and future! There was just one problem. She was in the first throes of love with a young man already set in his career in the States. Elizabeth knew two years of graduate study in England would put an enormous strain on their budding relationship.
So what to do in a situation like that? Pray? Yes. Seek counsel? Yes. Try and make both work? Yes. But in the end it came down to making a choice. And what does Scripture say is more important: a career or a lifelong companion? Elizabeth knew the answer. Faced with this life-altering choice, she courageously postponed her graduate-school dreams and chose to deepen her relationship with Brent. In doing so, she sacrificed a certain status in the process, along with greater career opportunities. It was a defining moment. But it was vision—a biblical vision of life and womanhood—that made the difference. Today Elizabeth and Brent are happily married and are the proud parents of my first two grandchildren, Drew and Maggie. Better still, she has no regrets.
Courageously following God in the crossroads of life may or may not put limits on how far your career can go, the experiences you could have had, the skills you could have developed, the fame you could have achieved, or the money you could have earned. But one thing is sure. By following a vision of biblical womanhood, you will get in the end what none of these other things could have provided by themselves: deep fulfillment and purpose as a woman who has courageously stayed true to her callings.
Danielle Crittenden tells the following personal story about trying to have too much too soon and missing the best:
At a recent party, a highly respected academic and author approached me. She knew I was writing a book about women and, having an inkling of my views, warned me not to romanticize the past too much. “I was there,” she said, recalling her days in the early 1960s as a young professor struggling to earn distinction. She told me that her husband, also a professor, wrote a book at the time that won a much-coveted literary prize. She received a note of congratulations from her own college that read, “How nice [your husband] has someone as intelligent as you to talk to over breakfast.” She bristled as she recalled this letter, still incensed by its patronizing tone. “That's what it was like back then,” she cautioned me. We moved on to different topics, and she began telling me about her daughter, now in her thirties and also an author, who was unmarried. The woman said that she was longing for her daughter to marry and have children, although of course she respected the younger woman's choices. I began to laugh, and said, “Don't you see what you're telling me? You had to put up with a certain amount of professional disrespect and prejudice, like that letter, but you got everything else-children, a husband who is still devoted to you, and, in the end, enormous professional success, albeit success that took longer than it might have [she had spent time away from academia to raise her kids]. Today, women like me and your daughter take for granted the professional respect you craved, but we can no longer expect marriage, stability,