Let Be Me a Woman, by Elisabeth Elliot

We are called to be women. The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman. For I have accepted God's idea of me, and my whole idea is an offering back to Him of all that I am and all that He wants me to be.

Christian woman, whether she is married or single, there is the call to serve.

What this society needs is more emphasis on the need to serve others, and provide tenderness, compassion, cooperation and love.

It was God who made us different, and He did it on purpose. Recent scientific research is illuminating, and as has happened before, corroborates ancient truth which mankind has always recognized. God created male and female, the male to call forth, to lead, initiate and rule, and the female to respond, follow, adapt, submit. Even if we held to a different theory of origin, the physical structure of the female would tell us that woman was made to receive, to bear, to be acted upon, to complement, to nourish.

Every normal woman is equipped to be a mother. Certainly not every woman in the world is destined to make use of the physical equipment but surely motherhood, in a deeper sense, in the essence of womanhood. The body of every normal woman prepares itself repeatedly to receive and to bear. Motherhood requires self-giving, sacrifice, suffering. It is a going down into death in order to give life, a great woman analogy of a great spiritual principle (Paul wrote, "Death worketh in us but life in you"). Womanhood is a call. It is a vocation to which we respond under God, glad if it means the literal bearing of children, thankful as well for all that it means in a much winder sense, that in which every woman, married or single, fruitful or barren, may participate - the unconditional response exemplified for all time in Mary the virgin, and the willingness to enter into suffering, to receive, to carry, to give life, to nurture, and to care for others. The strength to answer this call is given us as we look up toward the Love that created us, remembering that it was that Love that first, most literally, imagined sexuality, that made us at the very beginning real men and real women. As we conform to that Love's demands we shall become more humble, more dependent - on Him and on one another- and even (dare I say it?) more splendid.

Psalm 144:14 says, "May our daughter be like corner pillars cut for the structure of a palace." Pillars uphold and support. This is a woman's place, and all of us need to know what our place is and to be put in it. The command of God puts us there where we belong. We know our "creatureliness," our dependence. If there is a command for us we know we are recognized. We know that we fit into God's universe, we know our relation to the rest of mankind, tot the family, and, if we have one, to a husband. Meekness, I believe, is the recognition of that place. To be meek is to have a sane and proper estimate of one's place in the scheme of things. It is a sense of proportion.

We've been cut to a certain size and shape to fulfill a certain function. It is this, not that. It is a woman's offering, not a man's, that we have to give.

Mary is the archetype of human self-giving. When told of the awesome privilege which was to be hers as the mother of the Most High, her response was total acceptance. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy word." She might have hesitated because she didn't want to go through life being known only as somebody's mother. She might have had her own dreams of fulfillment. But she embraced at once the will of God. Her "Be it unto me" ought to be the response of every man or woman to that will, and it is in this sense that the soul and the Church have been seen throughout Christian history as female before God, for is the nature of the woman to submit.

It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is the distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Woman can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we've been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single - which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.