antipara

an excerpt from Chapter 8 of "Let me be a woman"

by Elisabeth Elliot

Perspective makes all the difference in the world.

If you catch even a glimpse of the divine design (and who can see more than a glimpse of any part of it?), you will be humbled and awed at least. I believe a true understanding of it will make you grateful. But there are those to whom being a woman is nothing more than an inconvenience, to be suffered because it is unavoidable and to be ignored if at all possible. Their lives are spent pining to be something else. Every creature of God is given something that could be called an inconvenience, I suppose, depending on one's perspective. The elephant and the mouse might each complain about his size, the turtle about his shell, the bird about his wings. But elephants are not called upon to run behind wainscots, mice will not be found "pacing along as though they have an appointment at the end of the world," turtles have no need to fly nor birds to creep. The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitations. And as the bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird-- up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom--so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling-- wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.

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That principle can be applied to the unparalleled season of singleness.

If one sees it as "God keeping something that is good (e.g. marriage)"

then the season would be a curse.

Yet if one saw it as it is, a gift from God, then singleness will be

a blessing.

Also, it all boils down to your view of who God is and the truth about God.

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Psalm 34:8-10 (New International Version)

⁸ Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

⁹ Fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him lack nothing.

¹⁰ The lions may grow weak and hungry,
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

Romans 8:32 (New International Version)

³²He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?