I hit the road at 5:30 a.m. for PCA General Assembly — very excited about connecting with people who are excited about learning, living, and loving in the gospel…So this week’s posts will be hit or miss…here’s an oldie from the archives, calling us to consider how the way we were created affects the way we live.
“You are not allowed to hit your sister. It goes against everything you were made to be. God called you as a man to protect women, to honor them and fight for them.”
So went a diatribe I oft-repeated to my eldest son when he was about 4 – 7 years old and he had a tendency to pick on or even hit his sister, two years younger than he.
One afternoon, when he was about 13, he asked me to sit with him. He had a story to tell me. He had intervened in a friend’s self-destruction. Noticing how thin she was becoming, he asked her a few questions and learned that she was eating very little. He looked up eating disorders on the internet and realizing that her behavior was serious, he confronted her about it and insisted she tell her parents. She agreed, but asked him if he would be there with her when she did so. As he finished the story, he said, “Well, I just wanted you to know because her parents might be calling you.” After he told me, I sat stunned for a moment by a 13-year-old boy’s courage and boldness in fighting lovingly for a woman’s beauty.
How we live is directly related to how we were created. Though I could have just told my son that he couldn’t beat his sister up “because I said so,” I explained why he couldn’t do harm to a woman – because as a man, he simply wasn’t created that way. When we understand how God created the world and us, we live boldy in the story of grace written into us.
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