Still Striving

Today's passage:  I Corinthians 11
     Have I said this before?  I struggle with the Pauline epistles.  Maybe you have noticed that my posts have not been as regular as before.  It has not been because I have not been reading.  Sometimes I read the same verses for a couple days, really trying to absorb what is there.  Of course the ever changing sleep patterns of my boys does delay the process a bit too. 

The Virtuous Wife
Taken from Treasures of the Bible
By Henry Davenport Northrop, D.D.
International Publishing Company, 1894

     I don't like to write about what God can teach other people.  I want God to crack through my thick coconut head, revealing to me not just the sweet milk, but the yummy meat.  The whole reason I started this blog in the first place was because I found as I wrote things down, God would show me something more.  I want more.  I don't want just a surface level understanding.  I want God to challenge me in my thinking.  I want those light-bulb, a-ha moments where my eyes have opened up and I see something in a fresh light, something that I never saw before, although millions before me and since had already seen it.  But for me, it was new.  I haven't been getting those lately, and I get quickly discouraged when they don't.  Lately, it has been a lot of conviction.  It is hard when I am convicted day after day about all the things I am doing wrong.  It gets overwhelming.   I'm not even going to start on this passage that gives a clear hierarchy of God-ordained leadership.  I fail so much here, that I want to duck for cover as soon as I see these verses.  My husband is my head, yet I always want to make sure that head is screwed on straight.  That saying about the woman being the neck turning the head is not Biblical by the way.  I know sometimes it is said in jest, but sometimes it is not.  If I am the one doing the turning, then my husband is just a figurehead and that is not how God intended it.  I find it interesting that women want to take charge and be equal with men.  If God wanted it that way, wouldn't he have made woman first?  Paul says that the woman was made for the man, not the other way around.

     I know I am not always the person I should be.  I know I am not always the wife or the mother God wants me to be.  I am not always the friend, the daughter, the sister, the church member I ought to be.  I have to wonder sometimes if I am getting anything right.  I don't say this to garner sympathy.  Sometimes we all need a spiritual check-up to see how we are doing.  I've failed several of these spiritual tests lately.  I'm not proud of it.  I want so much to be the woman God wants for me to be, but every day I see how far I need to go.  I am striving to be that virtuous woman, and I don't know if I will ever get there.  On that note, I have a house that needs cleaning, a darling boy who needs some mommy time, and a heart that needs some encouragement.  I'm going to put on some good gospel music and allow the words of those songs and songwriters banish the blues.   A little weepy today, for no good reason.  Just one of those days, I guess.