In Germany with twenty-two divinity school students, all in their twenties, I heard a young man say, “Where are all the women? All my life I’ve heard of how lovely the German women are, but I sure don’t see them.” Indeed, the girls had lost touch with their feminine side and the boys missed it.
Torn jeans, Army boots, shaved heads (or green hair), tattoos, piercings, potty mouths; these were the European women.
I see this in the USA, too. Movies make men into wimps. Women are soldiers. They fist fight with men. They get drunk. They never marry, never bear a child, they dress like men.
None of this to say that women are not capable, smart leaders, or anything but special. But it is to say many of today’s women in their quest to grow and lead in society have so taken up the mantle of men that they have often forgotten how to be a woman.
They have lost what the Bible in Old Testament Hebrew calls “chessed,” a word that often translates as loving kindness. This is one of the feminine attributes of God in the Old Testament. It refers to the womb, the nurturing care of God’s love. Only a woman can conceive and bear a child. It is forever a crown of glory that no man can take her place.
So how is it women nowadays look like men, deny marriage, fist fight, and celebrate aborting a child? A verse in Deuteronomy 22:5 warns against men dressing like women and vice versa—a command not to cause gender confusion. But for years now we have done just that. Result is we now don’t even know what a female is.
Well I recall a woman in a Georgia church who had just turned 50. Though married, she chose a career over children. Now she was weeping bitterly, confessing her selfishness. Talking to the younger women of her community, she lamented,”I cannot roll back the years and be a mother.”
In my youth we used to use the word lost to describe people who knew not the Lord. Instead they scrambled through life without God and found a thousand ways to be unfulfilled and in pain. We quit using the word 35 years ago. It’s time we bring it back.
—Stephen
