Can we talk? Just you and me, girlfriend?
A woman’s beauty is one source of her strength. But everything depends on how you use it.
As a woman, you are powerful, beautiful, strong, smart, vulnerable, intuitive, and resilient. When God made you earth and heaven smiled, and you completely took Adam’s breath away. You are the expression of the part of God Himself that longs to connect, communicate, and nurture life, intimacy, and so much more. As John Eldredge describes it, every woman has a beauty to unveil.
In part because of your combined beauty and strength, God’s enemy has unleashed his most destructive weapons against you ever since the beginning. You have survived indescribable pain, loss, and torment. You’ve faced the worst that evil can dream up.
And yet you are still here! The assaults on your body, mind, and soul have not taken you out. You may feel down, but you’re not finished yet!
But the question is, What Will You Do Now?
You have two choices.
You can use your beauty and strength to wreak havoc on everyone around you. You DO have that power.
With your cunning you can manipulate and control. Your snide remarks and criticism and gossip can tear down, wound, and destroy. With your moodiness and dependency you can frustrate and make miserable those who might want to do you and others good. With a word or a look you can drive a knife into the tender heart of a child, your husband, or another vulnerable human being.
You can use your beauty to elicit the worst and basest instincts of men. You can give the promise of life – to a child, to a relationship, to a cause – and then withdraw your nurturing when it becomes inconvenient. By refusing your womb – physically or emotionally – you guarantee that death will strike again. Your fury, revenge, scorn, and selfishness can tear down anything good.
You could feel justified in using your beauty and strength in this way. Yes, you’ve been hurt, wounded, used and abused. You’re only taking back what they tried to take from you. You deserve it!
The Bible recognizes this truth about women: “A wife of noble character is her husband’s crown, but a disgraceful wife is like decay in his bones.” (Proverbs 12:4)
But do you really want to use your beauty and strength in this way? Isn’t the end of that road only more sadness, pain, and loneliness?
OR, you can use your beauty and strength to give life.
In some respects your ability to give life is so close to God’s giving of life that it’s almost scary. (I say this reverently.)
Your words and help and encouragement and nurturing can build up, and can provide what’s needed in the most desperate of circumstances. Your wisdom and insight can see the truth about other people when they cannot see it for themselves. The instincts you have for protection and your intuition can save yourself, your family, and many others from the destruction some may try to bring.
You can display your beauty (inside and out) such that, as Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, “You make me want to be a better man.” You can nurture life – in your children, in your husband, in your friendships, in your ministry, in your work, in your church. Life – everywhere you go. You can draw others – in your family and beyond – close to Jesus in a way no one else can.
You have the choice in how you use your beauty and strength.
God gives life. But without you to nurture that life – in every respect – what God desires to give life to will never come to fruition. It takes you – wounded, unfinished, but resilient – for it all to come to pass. You have it within you to make that kind of difference.
God needs you. Your husband needs you. Your family needs you. I need you. Your church needs you. Your world needs you.
So girlfriend, let’s stand up and own the full measure of what God has planted within us. Let’s guard it carefully and take care to nurture our own hearts in His presence first.
And then let’s offer it, invest in it, and display it to those closest to us, and to anyone else God places in our sphere of influence.
And by doing exactly that we as women will have the best revenge on God’s enemy, and find the fulfillment God created us for in the beginning.
God created you with amazing beauty and strength. It’s up to you how you use those gifts.
Your Turn: Are you using your womanly beauty and strength to destroy or to give life? How are you doing that? Leave a comment below.
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- You can use your womanly strength and beauty to destroy others or to give them life. Tweet that.
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