Tuesday, May 25, 2004

help, help, i'm being oppressed....

so, being very new to this blog thing i stumbled around html land yesterday and finally got 'extreme tracking' installed and excitedly checked it last night. 7 whole hits! i was thrilled. then i looked at the global breakdown and noticed a person in pakistan read my blog - whoa... i guess i thought that it was only going to be people who 'knew' me. that thought made me wonder all night as i slept about that person.

was it a man or a woman? young or old? how did they get here? did they read anything? then a startled thought came to me, what if it was a woman? will she come back? did she find a kindred soul, or did she just think to herself "lady you don't know what it's like to be oppressed, you think you've got it so hard?"

kind put things in perspective for me. i'm not minimizing the difficulty i and other women are facing in our attempt to serve god using our gifts and fulfilling the call of god on our lives, but really, how oppressed am i?

i have a wonderful husband who fully supports me, doesn't always 'get' me, but he supports me and never shushes or silences me. and i'm in a church that will let me teach, even elders in a small group that we're part of, but it's still not at levels where i feel like a full-fledged participant.

so please understand, i'm not the whiny serf on the side of the road in monty python and the holy grail, but i do think that my own struggle bonds me with women everywhere. so maybe for that i should be grateful? maybe for that i should praise god and be grateful i'm not birka'd and stoned for speaking to men, that being silenced and patronized and stuffed into a role that just didn't fit gave me a perspective of what it might be like for that woman i pakistan who could have read my blog?

i used to only be 'allowed' to minister to women and children - now i can't think of any honor i'd rather have. i think they are some of jesus' favorite people.

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