Women of Consequence

It’s no secret that I am incredibly out of shape, so when God spoke to me last night and instructed me to get up early this Saturday morning and go prayer walk around the church, I knew it wouldn’t be easy for me. Still, I obeyed. I arrived at the church and took one of the prayer pamphlets our church printed to be a guide for prayer walking. As I began to walk, I opened the pamphlet and saw all the things to pray for the first time walking around the church, then all the things to pray for on the second time around the church, and finally what to pray for the third time around the church. I can do this, I thought. Walking around the church building three times seemed like a good workout. Plus, I was being obedient to God’s direction. So I walked and I prayed. Once around the building…twice around the building…three times around the building, praying for each thing mentioned in prayer guide. As I approached the end of the third lap, I was seriously huffing and puffing. My ...

When my oldest son was a child, I made the mistake of letting him watch one of my all-time favorite movies, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry battling vampires…what could be so wrong with that? He was so frightened he started sleeping with a blanket wrapped around his neck. With son number two, I tried to be smarter. When he wanted to see his first scary movie, I decided to let him only on the condition that he covered his head with a blanket during the scary parts. He was under that blanket so long that he finally fell asleep and missed the entire movie.   Yes, I made some dumb young-mother mistakes. But at some point in their lives, both my boys reached an age where we collectively decided they were old enough to watch such movies without worries. After all, if it didn’t frighten them then it must be okay, right? Wrong again . As good parents, we try to monitor what our children see. We want to protect their little minds from the violence and sex and i...

I recently reached the six year mark at my current job. It’s significant because this is the place God provided for me when he pulled me away from a lucrative position with the state in order to focus on my writing. Now I work at a job where I make less money, have a degree I don’t use, and from a worldly perspective have made little notable progress in my writing endeavor. I confess it’s hard to see God at work sometimes when I look at those facts. How appropriate then that God has led me this week to the book of Joshua and the story about the fall of Jericho. In it, God commanded Joshua to march once around the city with armed men for six days. On the seventh day, they were to march around the city seven times, then blow the trumpets and give a loud shout. If they followed these instructions, God promised the walls of Jericho would collapse. But what if Joshua hadn’t continued to the seventh day? What if he’d given up after the sixth day? Or the sixth circle around the city? If he...

As Eve stood in the garden eying the fruit from the forbidden tree, do you think she had any idea how far-reaching the consequences of her choice would be? That her disobedience would separate her from God? Or how difficult life would be for her and her husband? Did she realize her children would know sorrow and pain and death? It’s doubtful such thoughts crossed her mind. Who would make such a choice knowing the outcome would be so severe? But the more I study Eve, the more I realize we are the same. Although I will never be the first to plunge humanity into sin, each day I awake to choices and decisions that must be made, and I face the same choice she faced—obey or disobey. We all live with the results of bad choices—debt, excess weight, strained relationships—but every choice we make has an outcome, good or bad. Becoming a woman on consequence means striving to make decisions that result in consequences that benefit instead of harm, that cause us to move forward instead of bein...