My Thoughts on Nasty Women

Ah, the low-hanging fruit of a political debate.

Donald Trump comments that Hilary Clinton is a nasty woman and Elizabeth Warren embraces the label as a title to wear with pride. “Nasty women vote!” she proclaims. Seriously. I mean, I get it. It’s a comeback that writes itself but, as a woman, I find it embarrassing. No matter who gets your vote this season, don’t jump into the basket of this hot air fueled balloon.

As a woman, I encourage other women to rise above all this nonsense. As women, we were made for so much more.

God created women in His image.

In Christ, there is no male or female.

We are equal in the eyes of God. Equally fallen. Equally in need of redemption. Equal recipients of grace through Jesus Christ. Equally adopted into the household of Christ.

Redeemed women are not nasty and we don’t embrace nastiness. We step into our freedom. We embrace our place as daughters of the Most High God. We carry ourselves as the royalty we are because of the cross. We are warrior women in the battle for souls. We further the Kingdom of Christ with our choices, our prayers, our obedience, our sacrifices, our faith. Love of Christ emboldens us and frees us from fear and from self-seeking ambition. We have received mercy and grace and so we seek to dispense mercy and grace to those God places in our lives.

Redeemed women follow Jesus into troublesome situations without fear. We speak the truth – to power, to the powerless, to ourselves. We defend the unborn, the unwanted, the unlovely, the untouchables. We speak for the voiceless. We minister to the rejected, the lost, the wounded, the messed up, the addicted, the deplorable, the homeless, the friendless, the displaced, and the untolerated.

We serve wherever God leads us and put every effort into our calling – from the nursery to the boardroom, from our homes to the public stage, through our relationships and through our creative work, by staying with those we love or by leaving them for foreign lands. We work hard. We worship hard. And we rest when He calls us from the fray.

Women of God don’t envy our brothers in Christ nor do we seek to tear them down; we stand beside them and partner with them in this kingdom that is more real than the one the world has designed. We seek to model Christ and we aspire to more than to mimic the worst in men by proving we can be as ruthless, as crude, as blindly ambitious, and as self-seeking.

Our power comes, not from a spirit of snark and snipe, not from proving we can form an “old-girls’ club” that will outplay the “old-boys’ club,” and not from using our amazing minds to sink to the level of men who call us out with grade school taunts. Our power comes from our connection to the source of all love, from minds that are unpolluted by this world, and from eyes that look forward to a city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.

As women of God, we embrace faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love. We maintain a sense of humor and humility about ourselves because there is much we have to learn and further we have to grow but we reject bitterness, arrogance, meanness, and nastiness as weapons of this world. Our lives are marked by laughter because our God invented joy and so we spread that wherever we serve Him but our laughter is not at the expense of others, it’s more inventive and creative than that.

Women are unfathomable ideas from the mind of God and each of us has the potential, through Christ, to make our eternal mark on this world. We’re not waiting for a world leader to set us free. The Master of the Universe has already done that. We live and love from within that freedom now.

So, I get it. Nasty women vote. Godly women vote, too, but we don’t imagine that vote will change the world more than how we conduct ourselves every day. Our votes matter but so do the choices, characters, and examples of the most obscure, unknown women who belong to Christ. We affect eternal change and we don’t need polls to build us up, Christ does that.

This post isn’t about politics, loved ones, it’s about keeping our focus in a nasty world. Let’s be better than the headliners of the day because we are free to more.

Thoughts on #Nastywomen https://t.co/fHS7iuvwXD surviving the rhetoric of this #PresidentialElection #evangelicalvote #riseabove

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) October 27, 2016