Angol
I am fifty-four years old and I have not figured it out.
If you came looking for a woman who has, close this and go find her. I have been looking too.
Search for what a godly woman is and you will be handed a list. Soft voice. Covered. Up before the house and down after it. Proverbs 31 taped inside the cabinet door where the coffee is.
Ida Shoulders has eight principles instead - and the first one takes the list away from you.
Do not go by the version of God you only know through what other people have told you.
What follows is not a checklist and not a testimony from a woman whose life turned out the way the testimonies say it will. It is one church woman, fifty-four years in, naming what she believes and who taught her it: the woman who kept her in a baby bed until she was eight, the one who sent her to the store so there would be a reason to feed her, the one on the block who told her what to do when she got her cycle. None of them were paid. None of them ever found out what they had done.
Inside:
- Why a woman can do every item on the list for forty years and never once talk to God
- What mothering means for a woman who never had children of her own
- The difference between leaving a thing out and putting a thing in
- How every word you said can be true and the whole thing still be a lie
- Why "be a good wife" and "do not be a fool" are the same instruction
- And the question the author still has not answered about her own life
Short enough to read in an evening. Honest enough to sit with a while.
You are not the lamp. You are the window.
