Elliot - Let me be a woman: notes on womanhood for Valerie

T HIS BOOK was written at the height of the strong feminist movement that swept through our country in the seventies and eighties. Women were told that they ought to get out of the house and do something fulfilling. They listened, and many discovered what men could easily have told them: that by no means is fulfillment necessarily to be found in any job in ditch digging or in the office of a CEO any more than in the kitchen. I knew that real satisfaction and joy come in response to acceptance of the will of God and nowhere else. So I wrote a book as my wedding present to you, putting down in black and white the great eternal principles that distinguish men from women.

Twenty-three years ago, Valerie, you became the bride of Walter D. Shepard Jr., who grew up in a missionary family in Africa. In accord with the scriptural injunction to be fruitful and multiply, God graciously gave you the high privilege of becoming the parents of eight: Walter III, Elisabeth, Christina, Jim, Colleen, Evangeline, Theo, and Sarah. I am fascinated as I watch the dynamics between these children so different from your experience as an only child, ten months old when your father died. The Shepards mystify, nettle, and charm me. I am their greatly blessed grandmother now.

Everything I have written in this book has in one way or another, I suppose, been tested and found helpful for you, although in some ways, no doubt, wanting. I have watched you learn to be a wife, and I was with you and Walt in the hospital when you first became a mother (I dying a thousand deaths as you suffered, and Walt cheering you on). I was there years later to weep with you and Walt as I held in one hand your tiny little Joy, who died before birth.

God has assigned to you the position of a pastors wife first in the Cajun country of Louisiana, then in Mississippi, California, and now South Carolina. I have watched with awe the grace and insights God has given you in training, nurturing, disciplining, and home schooling the children.

At times we have together been asked to speak at womens conferences. Your wisdom has often helped me as I try to answer the stream of marital and child-rearing questions that come to me through my radio broadcast, Gateway to Joy. We seek to encourage women to cultivate a gentle and quiet spirit, to learn to see Christ in their husband, to love and honor them even when they may seem not to deserve it. Let us not forget that Christ laid down His life for us, and we in turn are to lay down our lives for each other. Fathers and mothers are given the awesome task of making saints of their children, but this cannot possibly be done except, first, by godly example and then (line upon line, precept upon precept), by discipline administered with love and prayer.

When you are overwhelmed by all that God has required of you when He let you be a woman, read Isaiah 41:10-11: Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand (RSV).

January 26, 1999

Magnolia, Massachusetts