OK, I haven't blogged in a while. Actually I have but decided that I'd written things that didn't need to be posted. But today a friend of mine on Facebook asked me for my unbiased opinion about the bestselling book, "The Shack". A flood within me was unleashed and below is what came out. Enjoy...
I've read "The Shack". It took me a while to warm up to it because of the style of writing, but after I did I loved it! I think the concepts in the book reflect my essential truth, which is that we are all here for each other, to be in relationships with each other, to know each other and to love each other. And that judging and condemning each other for ANY thing under ANY circumstances is the worst possible thing we can do. Now here is my controversial opinion: I am glad that God is presented as female in several forms because that is a truth I've known and struggled with for a long time. Biblical written tradition would have us believe that all deity is male. That is a Middle Eastern social construct which snuck in and inserted itself into Biblical tradition because the authors were from the Middle East!. Hellooo....that's where women have to cover their faces! The Bible was oral to begin with - no writings. It was never meant to be frozen in time by words and stuck in the social customs of some other time and place.
Ok, now having said that, I don't mean to say that God is female. I mean to say that I believe The Bible when it says that God is neither male nor female, which means he loves us all equally.NOW as a good Christian girl I have to say that I still believe that women are the gentler, fairer sex. As such we have a calling, per se', not to declare ourselves stronger and rub it in men's faces. It is BECAUSE we are the gentler, fairer sex that we should introduce and wield the truth gently, lest we end up in the same place that the so-called feminist movement / equal rights left us which is having women to do ALL the work and ALL the decision-making. That's not how it was intended. Men are stronger in some things, women in others, but the differences cancel each other out. Women are not meant to be heads of the household, not any household, not God's nor Man's, but it is because we want men to be stronger :-) not because they actually are.
