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A Woman's Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World - Softcover

Beaty, Katelyn

 
9781476794150: A Woman's Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476794154 ISBN 13: 9781476794150
Verlag: Howard Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The managing editor of Christianity Today and founder of the popular Her.meneutics blog encourages women to find joy in vocation in this game-changing look at the importance of women and work.

Women today inhabit and excel in every profession, yet many Christian women wonder about the value of work outside the home. And in circles where the traditional family model is highly regarded, many working women who sense a call to work find little church or peer support.

In A Woman’s Place, Katelyn Beaty, print managing editor of Christianity Today and cofounder of Her.meneutics, insists it’s time to reconsider women’s work. She challenges us to explore new ways to live out the Scriptural call to rule over creation—in the office, the home, in ministry, and beyond.

Starting with the Bible’s approach to work—including the creation story, the Proverbs 31 woman, and New Testament models—Beaty shows how women’s roles in Western society have changed; how the work-home divide came to exist; and how the Bible offers models of women in leadership. Readers will be inspired by stories of women effecting dynamic cultural change, leading institutions, and living out grand and beautiful vocations.

Far from insisting that women must work outside the home, Beaty urges all believers into a better framework for imagining career, ambition, and calling. Whether caring for children, running a home, business, or working full-time, all readers will be inspired to live in a way that glorifies God.

Sure to spark discussion, A Woman’s Place is a game-changing look at the importance of work for women and men alike.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katelyn Beaty is editor at large with Christianity Today, where she served as the magazine’s youngest and first female managing editor. More at KatelynBeaty.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Woman’s Place CHAPTER ONE

Made to Reign
Every human being is made to work. And since women are human beings, every woman is made to work.

On the surface, these two statements are fairly unremarkable. Scripture as well as human history tell us that all people in nearly all times and places have labored to provide for themselves, their families, and their communities. And most women in our Western context work for pay for many years if not for life.

But dig deeper, and these statements—especially the second—elicit follow-up questions. Of course women are human beings, but what about gender differences? What kind of work does God give women to do? What if some women don’t want to work? What about the value of unpaid work, especially motherhood?

I wrote this book to answer these questions—to help women (as well as men!) explore God’s invitation to women to labor for his honor, for their own enjoyment, and for others’ benefit. I hope this book helps readers think about how to respond to that invitation. But before we explore how we work, we need to establish why we work.

For Christians, a good place to start is the Bible. In Chapter 3, we will look carefully at the Genesis account. Today, many sermons we hear about Genesis 1–3 focus on marriage and sexual intimacy, but in fact, the first pages of Scripture have a lot to say about work as well.

In this chapter, though, we start with a psalm (and not because that’s where you land when you casually flip open your Bible).
Crowned with Glory And Honor
Psalm 8 is first and foremost about God: his majesty, glory, and power. But it is also about humankind: their majesty, glory, and power, a reflection of the God whose image they bear. In Verses 5 and 6, we read:

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings,

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;

You put everything under his feet.

These verses come to us from King David, who ruled for forty years over the people of Israel. But David is not describing just himself or just kings. And he’s certainly not just describing men. When David says “him,” he means “man” or “mankind.” Which means that, in this passage of Scripture, David is describing all humans.

That means he is describing you.

In order to let this truth sink in, read these verses again. But this time, replace the word “him”—which here means “mankind”—with your own name:

You made [Katelyn] a little lower than the heavenly beings,

And crowned [Katelyn] with glory and honor.

The words inspire me to praise God for creating me to reflect his glory. God created the expanse of interstellar space, yet he hears me when I pray? There are currently 7.1 billion people on earth, yet he knows my own thoughts and desires better than I do? Like David, I marvel, Who am I that you are mindful of me?

You made [Katelyn] ruler over the works of your hands;

You put everything under [Katelyn’s] feet.

Verse 6 is even harder to grasp than Verse 5. And to be honest, it makes me squirm a bit. As a modern Westerner, far from the world of kings and queens, I’m uncomfortable with the idea that I am a “ruler.” As a citizen of the United States—where everyone, in theory, is equal under the law—I’m uncomfortable with the thought of having power over other people. As a woman, I’m uncomfortable with power itself, because powerful women make us very nervous. And clearly not “everything” is under my feet.

But when I consider how I spend the majority of every week—as an editor overseeing the publication of a national Christian magazine—Psalm 8:6 starts to makes more sense. I do have rule, as weird as that sounds. With a red pen as my scepter, I survey countless words and thoughts. I protect what is beautiful and true and correct what is ugly and false. When a new issue comes out, I survey its boundaries, wondering if we should explore new terrain in the next issue. And in one sense, everything in the magazine is under my feet—meaning that when one of our readers is upset with our rule, the protest goes to me.

Psalm 8 helps us to remember a bedrock truth about why we work. We work in order to live into God’s purposes for all of us: to reign over all of creation as his image bearers and representatives on earth. God intended all humans not just for relationships (with him, with others) but also for reigning—over every inch of creation. And whether you currently work full-time or part-time; whether you work out of a deep sense of calling or simply to make financial ends meet; whether you spend your days studying to earn a degree, or caring for small children, or managing a large staff; whether or not you even want to work, this truth is for you: You are called to “make something of the world.”I To take your time, talent, resources, and community and create something good, something of lasting worth, usefulness, and beauty that will glorify God, make meaning out of chaos, and bless your neighbors.

So this is why we work, in the broadest sense of the word. Before paychecks, promotions, and personal enjoyment, we work in order to properly bear the image of God.

Our world comes to us because of the work of people before us.
The World We Inherit
Take a moment to survey the room you are sitting in. Look at the items in it—a chair, a computer, a smartphone, a stack of books, a cup of coffee. Look even at the walls, the ceiling, the windows drawing your gaze to the world outside. This is the physical reality of your life. And if you traced the origins of each item, you would find that every one exists because of the labor and creativity of other people.

The items that fill our lives seem to appear ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) at Target or at our front door, in a box marked “Amazon.” But every element of our material culture has an origin story. In our postindustrial global economy, they arrive through a series of decisions, emails and spreadsheets, factory shifts, computer commands, and shipping schedules (to name a few) that are executed by people we will never know. And those people are building off the tools and discoveries and labor of people who lived before them. Our material culture spans not just across oceans but also across time.

At the time of this writing, the newest iPhone—one of the best or worst cultural artifacts of this century, depending on whom you ask—had debuted. I’ll admit that when I opened the box holding my new iPhone, I was blissfully unaware of anything (or anyone) that had gone into making it. Like a child on Christmas morning, I was aware only of wanting to play with it right away. This is true for almost every physical artifact in my life and perhaps yours, too: I rarely think of the why behind the simple what of my life.

Yet everything there has been passed down in the warp and woof of human history. Nothing is a given, and nothing is random. That is true for material culture. That is true, too, for what we might call institutional culture: government and businesses and schools and churches and nonprofits and neighborhood associations—all gatherings of people who guide and govern the way we live together, from the most intimate gathering, the family, to the most impersonal, the state. What language I speak, where I live, how I get from one place to another, what movies and music I enjoy, what I believe about voting and baptism and green bean casserole—all speak to a world that I have inherited from other people and institutions.

Few others...

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Verlag
Howard Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476794154
ISBN 13 
9781476794150
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
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