About 6 months ago I started calling myself a feminist. Everyone is this year - Miley, Beyonce, John Legend, Amy Pohler. It is all around me at work, in my church, and all over the media. My reaction has been so passionate and unrestrained that it's taken me by surprise. I've found myself in departmental meetings fist pumping for new female hires, not sure if I even agree with my reaction. And in the last couple months I'm finally understanding why.
I don't want to be a girl that tries to make men and women the same. To say that we are equally talented at all things. We just aren't - my coed flag football team alone proves that. I don't want to be a girl that is waiting to pounce on anything discriminatory or unfair. I don't want those things to fester until I'm the victim and the world owes me something. But I also don't want to be the girl I was a year ago, heartbroken by my strengths I was told I wasn't created to use, and confused by the God that gave them to me.
Feminism started for me in February, sitting across from one of the most gentle men I've known as he counseled me through deep anxiety and doubt. We'd talk and then he'd ask me to write. I would stare at the blank paper knowing I'd have to read it aloud, and I'd panic thinking it had to be beautiful - the perfectly sound words of God. But in my desperation I wrote. First, sentences. Then pages filled with words that are unmistakably His, just for me. Words that are gentle and kind. Empowering. True. Words that are teaching me to trust myself and forgive myself for the ways I thought I wasn't measuring up. Words I wish every woman could hear.
Feminism for me is about knowing that I am loved as the person I am in this exact moment. It is about believing that I am strong, capable, and gentle. It is about knowing my opinions of theology, business, and the world are valuable, and trusting that what I desire matters. It is about paying close attention to the shoulds and not letting them own me.
More tactically, it is believing my commitment to a career I am passionate about does not make me less of a Christian woman. And that my disinterest in motherhood does not mean I am damaged. Because although I'm single, these expectations have released a huge amount of pain and fear inside of me. Dating has filled me with crippling anxiety as the desires of my heart don't align with who I hear I should be as a godly woman. I see a list of requirements I know I can't live up to and still be myself. I fear I'll disappear - because I've let that happen once before.
I started reading a book last week on feminism and Christianity. It provides biblical basis for some of the things I've heard God whisper to me over the last year - things that I've wept over in the past because I couldn't find them in scripture. The author refers to feminism as a redemptive movement. She argues that any movement bringing more justice and human flourishing into the world is part of the Kingdom of God moving on earth. All of me agrees.
I am a feminist. But I am nothing if not His.
"But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."
1 Peter 2:9
He has called all of us, alike.
