The New Eve (7 page)

Let me personalize Drucker's insight for you with the following points:

• Large numbers of women (you) now have choices.
  
• As a woman, you will have to learn to manage yourself.
  
• Most women (maybe you) are totally unprepared for how to do this.
  

Your life as a twenty-first-century woman is no longer fixed and one-dimensional, where you grow up, get married, have children, end of story. No, today your life is wide open, fluid, multidimensional, and besieged by choices and options. Pamela Norris underscored this reality when she wrote, “Women are still trying out different plots at different stages of their lives. There is no definitive path to tread, just multiple possibilities.”
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All of this shouts a huge question: How do you manage these options, choose between them, and not get burned by big regrets?

Everyone needs help when it comes to navigating this maze of unlimited choices. In chapter 9 we will offer practical ways for you to get your hands around it.

Most of the problems women deal with today spring from the five issues I have introduced in this chapter. My experience has been that many women never come to terms with them. Instead, they expend their energies battling circumstances flowing from these issues, many times with very few positive, long-term results. A better way—one that unleashes a better life—is the one that can identify these issues and find sound solutions for each of them.

This is the path a New Eve chooses to take. She is a woman who knows the issues and has discovered how to address each in practical, real-world ways that work for her. As a result, she is a woman who is able to define her womanhood with biblical
conviction, is clear about what she is living for and why, has wisdom and know-how in engaging a man and raising children, and possesses a biblical grid for making good choices and finding a healthy balance. In short, a New Eve is a woman who has learned how to manage her life. And she has done so by employing five bold moves, the first of which we will now explore.

A Gender Journey into Genesis

Y
ears ago America was captivated by the television miniseries
Roots.
Based on the best-selling book by Alex Haley, the series followed one man's riveting quest for personal identity. As a black American, Haley longed to know his family history. Where had he come from? What were his people like in their original setting before slavery and subjugation cut them off from their culture and took them away? To find answers, Haley traced his ancestral heritage to its beginnings in early Africa. The whole premise of his journey was this: unless you understand where you've come from, you can't fully appreciate or accurately grasp who you are now. The past is crucial to the present.

In this sense Genesis is to the human race what
Roots
became to Alex Haley—a helpful piece of personal history we must understand if we want to rightly orient our lives to the present. Here preserved in print are the social and spiritual roots common to every race of humans. The first three chapters of Genesis in particular offer us helpful insights. They summarize in story what the rest of Scripture labors to explain and resolve. With each
verse we discover truth about first moments, first purposes, and first life. Here at the headwaters of both history and the Bible, we grapple with the fundamental explanations behind why we are the way we are. We can believe it or disbelieve it. But here we are offered a user-friendly way of understanding what life is really all about, including God's purposes for gender. It's all here in the Genesis “myth.”

I know what you're thinking.
If Genesis is a myth, why look there to find answers for my life as a woman?
Good question. Let me begin answering it by noting that
myth
is not synonymous with
fiction
, as we often assume. Webster's dictionary defines a myth as “any real or fictitious story that appeals to the consciousness of people by embodying ideals or realities.” Did you hear that? Some myths are
real!
Genesis is that kind of myth—a real story about real people and real events.

But real or not, all myths are special. That's because they are used to establish standards for life against which we can define and measure ourselves. For instance, what woman comes to mind as being America's gold standard for feminine sexuality? What woman's sensuality is part of our cultural lore? Her posters are still found hanging in shops and restaurants, and her story is still being told in books and on TV. She courted presidents and sports stars and still fires the fantasies of men everywhere as the icon of erotica. You know who she is, don't you?

Or what woman do you think of as the embodiment of selfless service to others? Who is legendary for giving her life away as a doer of good works?

Even though Marilyn Monroe and Mother Teresa are no longer living, we nevertheless point back to them in their respective areas as standard bearers against whom we can define and measure
ourselves now. This is what
real
myths do, and this is exactly the sort of myth Genesis is. Its historic events, now preserved in story, offer us an even bigger reality. As our roots, Genesis defines life as God meant for it to be. Every word and phrase in this summary account of creation is loaded with meaning. In fact, the most vital realities of your life as a woman today can be measured against the coordinates set down in the Genesis myth.

Perhaps the most important thing Genesis teaches us is that God created everything. Life is no cosmic accident, and of all the things God created, none is more meaningful than
you.
You stand as an equal with man at the apex of God's created order. In Genesis 1:27 we read, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Here we learn that women and men were designed to reflect God's image over the rest of creation. But just as important is what lies at the heart of this design. Of all things it is gender: female and male.

The thing you as a modern woman must first decide is whether you believe this central tenet of the Genesis myth. This is a crucial first divide for living life. Did God create you special, and is your gender purposeful, or are you merely a product of random chance? Your decision here has huge ramifications for how you proceed in life and view your femininity. Of course, you can choose to believe that everything exists by pure accident and that nothing has a fixed purpose. If that's you, then you are left to create your own definition of womanhood. On the other hand, if God created the universe as Genesis says He did and you believe it, then you find yourself called to embrace a breathtaking dignity and fixed meaning to life and to your womanhood. You are purposeful, designed, intentional, and
God has put you here because He is out to achieve something in the gender He has wrapped you in.

In Genesis you find what I call universal “core callings” for every woman. By core callings I mean gender-specific purposes God has in His mind for you as a woman—purposes around which everything else you do and choose in life finds its rightful place and order of priority. In Genesis these core callings are
the same
for every woman. Men are no different. They too have core callings that are the same for every man.

The reality of universal core callings does not mean God intends for all women to be identical. Quite the contrary. One woman will always differ from another because of other factors that make up her life. The way you look, your personality, your special combination of gifts, abilities, and capacities, your wants, desires, and choices all ensure that you will be someone entirely unique. But Genesis is not about what is unique to you as a woman but rather what is common and enduring for
all
women. It embodies God's timeless standards against which every woman can measure her life and, when necessary, readjust to.

Genesis presents three core callings for women to build their lives around. One or more of them will always apply to you, regardless of which season of life you are in. These are the feminine directives God designed for you to embrace as the bull's-eye of your life. Genesis 1:28 says, “God blessed [Adam and Eve]; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” In this mythic verse God set forth two of His three core callings for you as a woman.

This core calling refers to reproduction, and though there are cases (some very painful) in which women cannot or will not bear children, most will become mothers. And here God is saying more than “Make babies.” Rather, as with the animals, He intended for Adam and Eve to replicate “their kind” (Gen. 1:24–25), which means humans who are in harmony with Him, as Adam and Eve were in their original state, and who extend His righteousness throughout the earth. God in effect is saying, “Produce God-glorifiers.” He charges the first couple (and us) to expand the power and beauty of His image by multiplying it in others throughout the earth. That this is a part of what it means to “be fruitful” is seen when the rest of Genesis and all of Scripture are taken into account ( for example, Deut. 6:7; Ps. 78:5–7; Eph. 6:4). God wants men and women to become moms and dads (barren couples can accomplish this through adoption) who rear and nurture healthy, well-adjusted, life-giving image bearers as the next generation. That's a breathtaking core assignment for you as a woman, and it will demand nothing less than your spiritual authenticity plus well-honed parenting skills and a selfless attitude.

God is also a concerned environmentalist. He wants all aspects of life on this planet—social, spiritual, and physical—to be improved by the hands of His people. Theologian John Stott said it this way: “God makes us, in the most literal sense, ‘caretakers’ of His property.”
¹
By using the word
subdue
, Genesis says the earth actually needs the rule of godly women and men if it is to be set right and made healthy, balanced, and orderly.

This truth of Genesis was illustrated to my wife and me a few years ago when we bought a home whose landscaping had been
sadly neglected. The front and back yards were literal jungles. The earth had been left to its own devices. What it produced was overgrown, unkempt, and unattractive. After my wife and I set our hands to it for several hard months, a transformation occurred. Flowers grew in place of weeds. Order transplanted chaos. We had subdued our small part of the earth, and the earth was better for it.

I believe our concern for order and beauty is God-given, rooted in the original call to subdue and rule. We have all been entrusted by our Creator to be difference makers on this planet (Ps. 115:16). And that difference making extends far beyond a well-kept lawn and garden. At a much higher level we are also called according to our gifts and talents to the more challenging tasks of helping people, improving society, enacting justice, sharing the gospel, and advancing God's kingdom in our communities. Jesus even taught us to pray this way: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,
on earth”
(Matt. 6:10, emphasis added). As a woman, you have the primary core calling to allow your femininity to grace the world with these things. God has designed you for specific good works (Eph. 2:10). Just as the earth needs the cultivating hand of humanity to draw out its greater beauty, so too society needs the gifts of the feminine heart—your heart—to make it better in a myriad of ways.

Rita O'Kelly has discovered one of those ways. Rita is not only an executive with a major investment company but also a Kingdom builder. Despite a demanding schedule, she makes time to mentor a number of younger women in her firm before work and during the noon hour with her wisdom and godliness. She has helped a number of these women achieve more than bigger paychecks; she has helped them make wise decisions for their careers and families, overcome personal roadblocks, and find better balance and direction for their lives.

Connie Phillips, a homemaker, became involved in a local public school several years ago. Seeing needs beyond those of her own kids', she helped establish a mentoring program that today reaches into thirty-one area schools with one thousand volunteers and touches more than six thousand students.

These are only two examples of what I believe God had in mind for women when He said to subdue and rule. Women hold a unique power to make life better, and in the beginning God named this as a core calling for all women—including you.

A third core calling is companionship—a deep, lasting intimacy with someone of the opposite sex. With rare exceptions God has designed you for a man, whether he's arrived in your life yet or not. You see this goal in Genesis 2:24, when God said, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” Here God created a superbond called marriage. No other human relationship can compare to it in either intimacy or durability. As I said, most women have been created for this experience. According to statistics, more than 95 percent of you will find a mate.
²
If you're not married yet, this should give you great hope during your present waiting period.

It is true, however, that some will never marry. Others will marry but then find themselves alone again because of death or divorce, in some cases never to marry again. How does the calling to leave and cleave apply to them? In a word, it doesn't. Either because of a particular life circumstance that has no remedy or by some special calling of God, this Genesis directive is set aside. In such cases your responsibility is to narrow your focus to the remaining core callings God has for you—to the goals of multiplying God's glory in your children (if you have them) and/or in
making a Kingdom impact with your gifts in the lives of people you touch in the part of society in which God has placed you. These core callings do not change, regardless of your marital state. In addition, the apostle Paul pointed out in 1 Corinthians 7 that a life of singleness or a season of singleness can actually be a special time of Kingdom opportunity for women. He wrote that the woman who is no longer married, as well as the virgin who has never married, can leverage her singleness to give “undistracted devotion to the Lord” (vv. 34–35).