“I do not want to have you to fill the empty parts of me
I want to be full on my own
I want to be so complete I could light a whole city and then I want to have you
because the two of us combined could set it on fire”
-Rupi Kaur 

“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” Genesis 2:20

Eve; Life-giver (Strong’s concordance)

I recently started my women’s health placement and I can’t quite articulate how amazing it is to see women becoming ‘Eves’, becoming life givers, but I am beginning to understand that it means so much more than just labour, blood and tears (mostly my own).

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Genesis 2:18

I have heard so many women wince at this verse, in misunderstanding we have withered womanhood, we have forgotten our calling. The hebrew  ‘Ezer Kenegdo’ – bluntly translated ‘a suitable helper’…but more accurately, the Hebrew word Ezer is translated as a combination of two roots: `-z-r, meaning “to rescue, to save,” and g-z-r, meaning “to be strong.” Eve was not only called a life giver but a life saver.

I have not found this life saving strength in the secularism of ‘having it all’. Womanhood isn’t about walking the tight rope of contradictions; not too fat, but not too skinny, not too loud but not too quite, driven, but not too much. It’s easy to get confused when we are bombarded with messages telling us that we are too much and yet not enough. Above and beyond all this, I see strength when I think about the selfless pangs and pushing of labour. Strength, when I think about how perhaps womanhood is the bridge where pain and love meet.

One of my favorite Sunday’s of lent was just a few weeks ago – the Samaritan woman*, once a temptress of hearts but through the words of our Savior she became so much more. Jesus spoke to her and said; “but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

Through His water, we too can become a fountain to quench the thirst we see around us.

It is no coincidence that we were created from a rib, close to the heart, enclosing it with unbreakable strength. Holding together the lungs that give the breath of life.

Woman;

An encourager of the hearts of men who have had their dreams stifled by the laughs of other men

A gentle hand to hold the fragments of men shattered by the cruel words of women

A compassionate embrace to those who are wounded in heart and spirit

A breath of air into the lungs of those who been winded with discouragement and despair

That’s who women are called to be.

“We are women, and my plea is let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.”

– Elizabeth Elliot

“To me, a lady … is gentle, she is gracious, she is godly and she is giving. You and I have the gift of femininity… the more womanly we are, the more manly men will be and the more God is glorified. Be women, be only women, be real women in obedience to God.”

– Elizabeth Elliot

“Women opened the windows of my eyes and the doors of my spirit.”
Kahlil Gibran

*http://www.antiochian.org/st-photini-samaritan-woman