The Flawed Woman

As I mentioned I'm going to recap, or at least share my thoughts, chapter by chapter of this pretty great book I'm reading. It's called, When a Woman meets Jesus.

The Flawed Woman

Being flawed is really hard for me. I like to pretend that everything is fine and everything is ok, even in the face of insurmountable evidence that it's not.
Here are some quotes from the chapter I really liked:

When the goal is "to be perfect" we can thrash around in our flaws and forger about loving others and sharing our gifts with them. We allow the desire to be perfect to oppress us and keep us in the bondage of self-preoccupation. The focus becomes "me" and the effort becomes "trying to perform perfectly"
- Adrianne Gambucci

[Perfection] is the enemy of women. I am a woman. And I have found this enemy is constantly ready to trip me up, causing me to fall into the abyss of self-loathing as I attempt, often unsuccessfully, to live up to my lofty expectations and those of others.

For days I wept, disappointed in myself. I wasn't perfect anymore. A tough lesson to learn at the age of fifteen- and even tougher lesson if you are forty years old and still comparing yourself to everyone in town. Dissatisfied and unable to enjoy anything you do because it is never quite good enough.

Unfortunately, in the war for perfection, nobody wins. It isn't even a draw. There are just a bunch of losers sitting on the sidelines. Some with their noses in the air, others with their heads hung low. Some feeling "better than," others feeling "less than." No wonder the endless toil for perfection has been called "self-abuse of the highest order."

The Broken Woman

I started reading through the book When a Woman Meets Jesus which studies the women in the bible and their interactions with Jesus. It's really good and thought I'd recap as I went through the chapters.

The Broken Woman
This chapter talked mostly about the way women are broken and how that affects the way they view Jesus and relate to Him. How so often our relational baggage deeply affects (and sometimes fractures) our relationship with Him. (Hello!) Here's one (giant) quote I loved with my parenthetical comments. (p18)

Instead of pigeonholing women the way society had, he {Jesus} looked at each woman as unique. No one ever heard Jesus trivialize one of their problems by calling it a "woman-thing." (LOVE that)
He didn't smooth-talk women, or flatter them to get their attention. And he didn't tell them what they wanted to hear- he told them what they needed to know. What's more, he did not believe what many of the women thought about themselves, because so often their own view had been grossly distorted by others. What Jesus did was to focus his attention on each woman's greatest need, and then he met that need-in ways they never expected.
Jesus taught women to look beyond their outward appearance for acceptance. He showed them they were valuable when others said they were worthless. He challenged the rules that bound them and broke down the walls of prejudice that entrapped them. Even when a woman was labeled a "failure" he believed she could be more than her broken past. Most importantly, Jesus gave unconditional love to every woman no matter what her past history, present condition, or future prospects. He was a man ahead of his time, a Renaissance man who understood what loving a woman was all about.
This is why the women stayed with him. And the longer they stayed, the more they grew to love him and to love themselves.
When you are accepted just the way you are, encouraged to reach your potential, and empowered to follow your dreams, don't you feel loved?