A Year of Biblical Womanhood QUOTES

1 " Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

2 " Caring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the home—these are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

3 " Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

4 " If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate and honor women, you will find them. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

5 " It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

6 " The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further? "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

7 " It is hard for us to recognize it now, but Peter and Paul were introducing the first Christian family to an entirely new community, a community that transcends the rigid hierarchy of human institutions, a community in which submission is mutual and all are free. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

8 " I don’t respect my husband because he is the man and I am the woman, and it’s my “place” to submit to him. I respect Dan because he is a good person, and because he has made me a better person too. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

9 " And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new--perhaps something better--into this world...

We are each an Eve. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

10 " We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

11 " We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

12 " The word on the street was that I had two options when it came to caring for my future baby: I could either eat, sleep, drink, bathe, walk, and work with my baby permanently affixed to my body until the two of us meld into one, or I could leave my baby out naked on a cold millstone to cry, refusing to hold or feed her until the schedule allowed. Apparently, there was no in between. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

13 " While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

14 " From the baking aisle to the post office line to the wrapping paper bin in the attic, women populate every dark corner of Christmas. Who got up at 4 a.m. to put the ham in the oven? A woman. . . . Who sent the Christmas card describing her eighteen-year-old son's incarceration as 'a short break before college?' A woman. Who remembered to include batteries at the bottom of each stocking? A woman. And who gets credit for pulling it all off?

Santa.

That's right. A man. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

15 " As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

16 " When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't fit our tastes. In an attempt to simplify, we try to force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone, to turn a complicated and at times troubling holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

17 " One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood," writes Kathleen Norris, "is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die."

I am not so brave. Far more frightening to me than the threat of interrupted plans or endless to-do lists is the thread of loving someone as intensely as a mother loves her child. To invite in to the universe a new life, knowing full well that no one can protect thatl ife from the currents of evil that pulse through our world and through our very bloodstreams, seems a grave and awesome task that is at once unspeakably selfish and miraculously good. I am frightened enough by how fervently I love Dan, by my absolute revolt against the possibility -- no, the inevitable reality -- that he will get hurt, that he will experience loss, and that one day he will die. I'm not sure my heart is big enough to wrap itself around another breakable soul.

I was once waiting in an airport next to a woman whose six-year-old daughter suffered from a rare heart defect that could take her life at any moment. In spite of mounting medical bills and the pressures of raising both a child with special needs and another younger daughter, the woman said she and her husband planned to adopt a boy from Ethiopia later that year.

"What made you want to grow your family in the midst of all this turmoil?" I asked.

"Why did the Jews have children after the Holocaust?" she asked back. "Why do women keep trying after multiple miscarraiges? It's our way of shaking our fists at the future and saying, you know what?--we will be hopeful; things will get better; you can't scare us after all. Having children is, ultimately, an act of faith. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

18 " If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it. This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not "what does it say?", but "what am I looking for?" I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, "ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

19 " I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood

20 " ...faith isn't about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time. "

― Rachel Held Evans , A Year of Biblical Womanhood