The New Eve - Lewis Robert [7]
I believe the freedoms and opportunities women like yourself have gained in this past century are wonderful assets. Everything is in place for you to excel. However, history shows that the freedom to excel also brings with it the freedom to bind yourself to greater evils and new sorrows.
What's a Woman to Choose?
Freedom always comes with forbidden fruit.
Many modern women already know this reality firsthand. Many others—maybe you—are starting to feel the tension that comes with unlimited freedom and opportunity. Gone are the days where there was one prescribed path for women to follow. Now there are endless options and lifestyles from which to choose—some good, some bad, some disastrous, but each promising the same thing on the front end: life.
So how do you discover what's best for you? Where is the help that can cut through the fog (especially for young women) to help you decide how to live smart and well? Unfortunately today there is a lack of “life coaching” (the kind mentioned in Titus 2) that offers trustworthy navigational guidelines to assist women in discerning which choices are best and which, however alluring, might be empty promises or tragic dead ends. All of this leaves women asking, “How do I know on the front end which choices deliver the most out of life? And how do I avoid major mistakes and lifelong disappointments?” Such are the questions constantly circling around today's woman.
What adds additional anxiety is knowing that any choice you make for something is also a choice to miss out on something else. As Caitlin Flanagan said, “The unpleasant truth [is] that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities.”22 Without some kind of assurance, the haunting questions within each life choice are these: “Did I do the right thing? Was this the best for me, or did I miss the best?”
Looking back on their lives, many women wonder, What was I thinking? For instance, choosing to participate in the sexual revolution seemed liberating to many women years ago. But now that the kids have come and many dads have gone (nearly 40 percent of all children growing up today are fatherless; 50 percent of children born to mothers ages eighteen to twenty-four are without dads) and now that STDs and AIDS have come and stayed, how liberating was it? What about the hidden abortion or the sexual flashbacks? Liberating or enslaving? Is this the direction you want to offer your daughter or a younger woman as the way to a fulfilling life? Surely not. And yet everywhere—in movies, in music, and public role models—this forbidden fruit is still being advocated and glamorized as part of a new and improved womanhood. Many of today's young women are quick to take the bite.
Recently, a major advertising agency polled five hundred men and five hundred women, asking them at what point in a relationship they thought it was OK to have sex. The majority of men said on the fourth or fifth date. The women said between the first and second.23
Many women also continue to buy into one of the oldest pickup lines in the book: “You can have it all!” Like their great-ancestor Eve, they embrace this forbidden idea (Gen. 3:3–4) with passion, believing they can have everything without missing anything. They soon discover that this seductive promise is nothing more than the big, painful lie it has always been. This is especially true in the very sensitive subject of children and career. Can you have both? Of course. Can you do both well? That depends on a host of factors—your use of wisdom and an honest accounting of your limitations being chief among them. But you can't have it all in the absolute sense. Something or someone always gets left out or deeply hurt when you try.
Maria Shriver, a celebrated TV commentator and the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has learned this hard truth. In her book Ten Things I Wish I'd Known—Before I Went Out into the Real World, she offers the following