In every season of life, but especially in seasons of grief, the temptation to bitterness looms large! There are certain peculiar temptations that seem like the mouth of bitterness herself is engulfing. Like being swallowed by a huge anaconda. Your soul's body is enveloped by the situation.
I met a woman who showed me a particular understanding of just such a moment in the soul. I must say that I have never been blessed by one prayer so much as that of this woman's one prayer. Her posture was diminutive and she was clearly a caretaker of her family. I was somewhat surprised that she was called on to pray for this situation at a church that we were visiting. She rose from her seat and gave her "middle-school" child something to play with and then rose to the platform. I was not prepared for the vision of spiritual brutality that I was about to observe. Small in stature she was huge in voice and presence. I immediately judged her as too powerful to be submissive to her husband who was behind her on the keyboard. (that later proved to be a wrong estimation). God was showing me, as he has been since I have come to NC, the amazing power of women's perspective in spiritual warfare. It is clear that feminism hasn't blunted the power of womanly dominion in prayer down here, by any means. But it has become a brooding of mine. Greater understanding and use of the power of womanly perspective in prayer.
Her prayer wasn't full of language that impresses, but perspectives that are and were distinctly feminine. Awareness that the subtlety of the enemy to women is a sensitivity that scripture addresses, she didn't at all seem overwhelmed by this knowledge of being the weaker vessel.
She, as it were, put all of the confidence in her heavenly father and gave him all of her senses to ponder and enjoy. Praise and an exalted view of His magnificence was most definitely first. Part of the reason that it has taken me so long to write about it, was a confession of my diminished view of the power of God to understand my sensitivities as a woman.
Paying lipservice to an exalted view of God is one thing. Trusting Him to translate your feeble, lisping stammering prayer into a battering rod against the enemy of our souls is another thing. Is my rising to my prayer potential a competitive gesture against my husband or my pastor? That is on them if they think that. I am not praying to or for the fear of men! She personified this intensely!
The power of God on earth is the reality of men and women access to the throne of grace in their full potential as warriors for His glory! The mystery of "She shall be saved through the childbearing" will reveal itself if and when we accept the distinction that childbirth and childrearing gives to women in the battle against the enemy of our souls.
He first comes to us in the conception and tries to convince us all to abort the mission! Aborting her mission to raise a downsyndrom child made her a giant in prayer and I will always be in her debt to remind me of the exalted position for being victorious in that battle!
He who has spared not His own son, shall he not also give us all things?
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