femininity

today at the book/psuedo bible study we talked about femininity. my homework from last week was to define femininity. so i did. i realized that one of the main things that bothers me about this whole study is that i feel like it limits me. i feel like we are creating some definition of who i am supposed to be and i feel like the definition is way too small.

well, here is my definition. a fair warning though, i started rambling a bit. all of a sudden, i realized i was writing a blog entry.

Femininity is who a woman is. Femininity is about women reflecting and representing God's own character. If God, himself created both masculine and feminine qualities than femininity is a gift, a blessing. It includes compassion, warmth, love, charity, parts of God's own self. Authentic femininity is any woman living out of the truth of who she is meant to be, who she was created to be, a daughter of a loving God. As she lives more out of her gifts, her passions, her God breathed self, she creates femininity. We limit the fullness of femininity, when it is reduced to dresses, cooking, or even motherhood; it's a continuum. Femininity is lived out and developed in relationship with God, others, herself, and creation around her. It is in the restoration, the making of things right again, that femininity becomes synonymous with holiness and righteousness. Some may some femininity can be defined, I say femininity must be lived.

Femininity is the odd assortment that makes me love tea parties and have a nose ring or the love of cooking and the interest in poker, the enjoyment I get out of marriage and the pleasure I get from being alone. None of these paradoxes that describe me make me more or less feminine. They make me more of myself. And I like myself; I like the complexities of my inner self that make me more interesting. The thing is, I believe all these intricacies are tiny fragments making me more of who Jesus wants me to be. I like the fact that I care deeply about poverty and social issues and yet still am slightly addicted to target and port city java. I like how I can crave the spiritual disciplines and I can crave a cosmo. I like that I have been known to smoke a cigar and I pray that my friends to more deeply know Jesus. I like that I love to read Harry Potter and Eugene Peterson. I'm not afraid to ask tough questions and yet I love to hear the hearts of people. I like that it is Christ in me working all things to completion. I like that this too is part of the sanctification.


we were talking about modesty as well and my friend liz summed it up nicely,
"it's about adorning beauty not adorning body"

weddings & engagement

this weekend my friend anna got married. it was a nice wedding, simple, southern, and classic just like anna. her groom, mike was very cute and very nervous. during the vows, he jumped the gun and said "i will" before the pastor was done. better eager than delayed! it was sweet. the wedding was at the chapel on furman's campus. it was really beautiful.

last night we went out to celebrate our friends chris and leah getting engaged. they were very excited and of course had to keep repeating the story of how chris proposed.

i like weddings and engagements. when you are engaged everyone is so happy for you, everyone knows you're in love, and wants to be helpful and encouraging. then you get married and the fuss around you fizzles fast. scott and i were talking about our marriage and how wonderful it is. engagement is the fun part but marriage is the life part. not that marriage isn't fun but there is something fantastically wonderful about being married. i love when scott comes home from work and we cook dinner together. i like that tonight we have a laundry date. i love that every morning i wake up next to him. i love being married. i love that i know that scott and i will be together. it really is fantastic. i am so glad to share my life with him. i quess what i am saying is that i really enjoy the normalcy of marriage. it feels so right.

another day, another storm

here i am again...using my laptop unplugged. good thing i got one of these now that we have a storm every day. ahh, summer at the beach. more crashing thunder, more pelting rain, more cracking lightening. (does lightening crack?)

i'm sitting on my bed blogging. quite frankly i am bored out of my skull.

gilmore news: i watched 2 more episodes of gilmore girls. that makes 8 since monday by the way.

good news: i got some money donated for a lcd projector to use on campus. excellent. welcome to the technological age.

travel news: i am leaving friday morning for anna's wedding. i had a nightmare that i forgot my bridesmaid dress so i already have it hanging in the hall.

movie news: we watched oceans 12 last night. i think it's really funny. also rented the notebook and national treasure. (why didn't i watch the notebook today? it's not like scott is all that interested in it. hmm).

blog news: scott began blogging. well sort of. as soon as he puts the link on my blog you too can visit it. he is the computer techie in the family. we all have our gifts.

spell check news: is a word really misspelled if it isn't correctly capitalized? isn't that more of a grammer error? and is it really an error at all if it's intentional?

weather news: tomorrow chance of scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon.

i'm so depressed

after 2 & 1/2 days of reading the sixth installment of the harry potter series, i have finished. and i am depressed. quite a book it is, very good indeed but oh, so sad. now in efforts not to spoil the book for those who haven't made their way through it yet, i shall just say that i was surprised by the book. it moves a bit slower than the last two but the ending will get you. i am not ashamed to say i cried, and there are very few books that make me cry. the battle between good and evil continues.

i can't wait

i didn't feel like it would be appropriate to include this in my last blog so i wrote this one...


i can't wait for the new harry potter book!! :)

i am still the same

i've been going to this book study led by a woman from my church. it is about being an "excellent wife". sounds good huh? i mean, i could learn more about what it is to be an excellent wife. i'm teachable.

well how about every week i leave feeling frustrated and misunderstood. a few weeks ago we talked all about having kids and how scott and i are missing out on God's greatest blessing by not having kids...now!! i felt like everything was taken out of context from scripture and it was incredibly frustrating.

enter today: this morning we talked about our identity as wives. not as believers, not as disciples of Jesus, but as wives. apparently i am missing my God given calling by not allowing my whole identity to come out of being a wife. and no, i'm not kidding. being a wife, being Mrs. Scott Barc is all i should be. to put it bluntly, i totally disagree. my whole identity comes from who i am in Christ and who he is making me to be. being a wife is part of that, even the biggest part, but so is being a friend, and being a faithful minister (professionally and in life), making honoring decisions, and the rest of the areas of my life. being a wife doesn't define me, my relationship with Jesus does.

what bothers me most is that when i got married nothing in me died, i didn't become someone else. i would say that something in me perhaps came more alive, more to fullness but i am still the same. i still having a calling, and i still have gifts, and a brain, and i definitely still have opinions. and all those things are being transformed by Jesus and although a lot of those transformations happen through and in my relationship with scott, my marriage isn't the only place God reveals himself.

sidenote: why is it that if my husband has to ask/tell me something more than once i'm not being submissive but if i ask/tell him something more than once, i'm a nag?

what we (this small group) wrestled with today is what our calling in life is. is it about making God known or is it about being a wife?

just to clarify, marrying scott is the best thing i've ever done. i love being his wife, i'm down with the submission thing too, but marrying him didn't remove my sense of self and my "big calling" (ie: to know God and make him known), marrying scott gave me a whole new arena to live that out.

she's dying

my grandmother is dying. she has lung cancer and only told us in april. apparently it is pretty bad. i haven't seen her since april when kim (my sister) got married, also the weekend she made the announcement. she has been doing chemo but my mom told me tonight that the doctor gave my grandmother a time table for how much longer she should expect to live. she has once again chosen to leave out important details. she isn't telling us how long the doctor gave her. why? isn't not knowing worse? she has smoked all her life. i struggle with feeling angry and bitter. it's not a press release, you smoke...you get lung cancer. mimi, my grandmother had the audacity to say it isn't related to smoking. oh yeah and i was born yesterday.

and now she is dying. it doesn't feel very real to me. i have only lost one grandparent in my whole life, and that was when i was pretty young. besides my grandpa, no one close to me has ever died. i am thankful for that. my life thus far has been about celebrating life...birthdays, marriages, babies, not about mourning death. this begins a whole new part of my life and honestly i don't know how to approach it.

to make matters worse, mimi and fafa (where did we get those names?) live in ny. not exactly a weekend trip. this is ridiculous, i am complaining about visiting ny, not about my grandmother dying. maybe i am in denial.

i don't think i know how to deal with death.

the funny or maybe even ironic thing is this, when we visit mimi and fafa they have this thing that they have always wanted the grandchildren to do. there are a million of us so really it is a good idea but now seems so morbid. the things that we grandchildren would like to inherit we put a sticky note with our name on the item. always seemed smart until the day she actually told us she was dying.

i know, i know, it's been forever

now, don't ask. i don't know why it has been so long since i have last blogged. a lot has happened since then. matt moved in with us, we went to the beach with kari and mike, scott and i celebrated our one year anniversary, i had a birthday party, the family visited, we went to greensboro...man, i need to blog more.

i was reading some of kari's blog and i was inspired. she writes often. i should write at least sometimes :) thanks for the inspiration friend.

today i am taking the day off, last week i was in greensboro working and i am tired. it's nice to be home and do things here. i skipped church yesterday and scrapbooked for 5 hours. i think i am out of control.

scott and i really want to move to greensboro. we want to live in glenwood which is a pretty poor and slightly sketch neighborhood. this is scary for us in but right now our fears have less to do with the neighborhood and more to do with getting jobs. it is intimidating to think about new jobs and starting a family (in a couple of years). we haven't ever had to make decisions like these. but we are talking about a year from now and that is a long time from now.

emily, my favorite sister in law and i were supposed to go the beach today. we both have the day off, but alas it is raining. perhaps another day. maybe i'll scrapbook some more! haha!!

look, i promise i'll try and blog more but i might need a reminder or two to get back in the habit.