Yes, this week is Book in a Week, and I am working on the novel. It’s coming along and my plot is developing. I didn’t get as much done yet today because my Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, came in, and I was paging through that. They made so many needed updates. It’s wonderful! Yes, I’m a geek.
Okay back to my urban fantasy.
Change is a given in life, yet it’s not easy for any of us. So strap on your seat belts and let’s talk about it:
1. Share, if you wish, the biggest change you experienced this past year.
I got married! (See picture.)
2. Talk about a time you changed your mind about something, important or not.
I decided to go decaf this year after years of saying I never would.
3. Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote a controversial book called “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Setting aside his ideas–what kind of changes would you like to see in the Church?
Real equality for women and more working for social justice, especially in the unfair social structures in this country that keep so many people “in their place.” For my denomination I would like to see pastors taken care of, and the General Budget guidelines redone, so small churches are not paying in 20% of their income to the General Church.
4. Have you changed your hairstyle/hair color in the last five years? If so, how many times?
My hairstyle gets changed a couple of times a year, and my hair color is always changing because I am easily bored.
5. What WERE they thinking with that New Coke thing?
I don’t like pop, so I wonder what they were thinking with that whole pop thing. 🙂
In Does It Really Mean Helpmate? we saw that God created man and woman to be equals in every way. In Genesis 1 both male and female were given the mandates to procreate and to have dominion over the earth. The human had been placed in the garden to tend it and guard it, and one assumes the male and female continued to do what the human was created to do, and they fulfill the mandates given in chapter 1 together and as equals. There we saw that complementarians try to subordinate woman under man because man was created first, and she was created to be an ezer cenedgo, a word that is normally mistranslated “helpmate” instead of its literal meaning: a power equal to.
Another tactic complementarians use is that women’s subordination is due to the Fall. When God said that a woman’s desire would be for her husband, and he would rule over, God meant it for all time. It doesn’t matter that the rest of curse is not meant for all time: we have made farming easier through machinery, we have diminished labor pains with drugs, and we normally don’t actively look for snakes to mutilate. Complentarians seem to think that the only part of the Fall that is for all time is the a man ruling over his wife.
Earlier this week I linked to Sally because she had some beautiful art work up. Today I am linking for a creative writing piece. Last month I posted The Samaritan Woman. We looked at the first evangelist in the Gospels. Sally has a wonderful reflection written from the Samaritan Woman’s (does anyone else want to give this woman a name?) point of view when she met Jesus: Woman at the Well. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.