The New Eve - Lewis Robert [56]
When Linda came of age, she looked for love in all the wrong places. There was casual sex, thoughtless marriage, and nonchalant divorce. There were bongs and binges, communes and cult leaders. Linda's firstborn child, Courtney, picked up on this legacy of poor choices alarmingly early. At age nine Courtney was caught with pornographic magazines. At age twelve she got drunk and cut herself up. By age sixteen she was on her own, earning a living at strip bars around the world. The rest is tabloid history.
So is all this merely the work of bad genes, as Courtney's mother claims? Quite the contrary. Courtney's life is simply the legacy of lost women with no noble, life-lifting purpose to their lives, making short-sighted, self-destructive choices. And those choices were not only destructive, they were also instructive. Courtney learned from the patterns set down before her and then personally pushed those patterns to new extremes.
This is why living with the end in mind is so important. It helps you not only live a fulfilling and productive life, but it also helps you leave a satisfying legacy. That's because the way you live your life is not only about you. Others are impacted!
Hard Choices
If you take God and His Word seriously as a Christian woman, you will inevitably face hard lifestyle decisions from time to time. That's because a rich and fulfilling life—one rewarded by God-requires moments of bold faith. Bold faith.
You will need that kind of faith for the hard choice between full devotion to a successful career or downshifting that career to raise a family. You'll also need it when choosing between Kingdom work or retiring; playing it safe or taking a new, gut-wrenching career risk holding on to your children or letting them go; giving up on your marriage or courageously rebuilding it.
Hard choices and bold faith are part of the purpose-driven journey every New Eve is called to take. As you know, life can get messy. Sometimes doing the right thing causes life to become even harder. In times like these you must persevere because, despite the difficulties, you know that the path you are pursuing has eternal purpose and God's reward in it. You can draw encouragement that others have gone before you in this. Some of them faced choices and circumstances far harder than anything you're likely to encounter, and yet their end-in-mind perspective gave them remarkable courage and held them steady and true. Blandina, a slave girl who lived in Gaul more than eighteen hundred years ago, is one of the best examples I know.
We know next to nothing about her except that she was one of a handful of Christians in Lyons, Gaul (modern France), in AD 177. Christianity was still new there, but it had grown enough to become a nuisance to the locals and draw the attention of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who believed Christians were immoral and superstitious. Wishing to supply rich landlords with a cheaper means of gladiatorial entertainment, Aurelius fixed his gaze on the Christians. They were generally poor and uneducated, so he calculated that they could be rounded up and killed for sport at a tenth of what it cost to procure and dispose of professional gladiators. And so the band of local Christians was collected and forced into the bloodstained arena at Lyons, where they were presented with a stark choice: either blaspheme Jesus Christ or die. The frenzied crowd roared as first one, then another, and then perhaps a dozen others chose life over faith, but they roared even louder when dozens of the Christians chose death over apostasy.
For several days Blandina was brought to the arena but kept from harm. Her handlers believed that if she saw enough Christians needlessly die, she would renounce Christ and save herself. She watched soldiers strap a ninety-year-old man onto an iron chair that glowed red-hot. She watched animals maim and kill women as the crowd demanded more. Day after day she watched the horror, but she wouldn't give in. Eventually she was beaten and hung from a stake