Let Me Be A Woman
12 quotes by Elisabeth Elliot on biblical femininity
Who is Elisabeth Elliot?
Elisabeth Elliott was a wife, missionary, mother, author, and speaker who led an extraordinary life of faith.
Elisabeth married Jim Elliot in 1953 in Quito, Ecuador where they did mission work together. Jim had wanted to enter the territory of an unreached tribe and so chose the Aucas, a fierce group whom no one had succeeded in meeting without being killed. After discovering the location of the tribe, Jim and four other missionaries entered Auca territory. After a friendly contact with three of the tribe, they were speared to death. (That story is told in the book and movie, End of the Spear.) After the death of her husband, and now alone with her 10-month-old daughter, Elisabeth continued to live among and minister in Ecuador. During that time she met two Auca women who lived with her and taught her the tribe’s language.
She then went as a missionary to serve the tribe that killed her husband.
Elisabeth went on to write 24 books, speak publicly, and host a radio program for women where she opened each show with the following:
“You are loved with an everlasting love - that’s what the Bible says - and underneath are the everlasting arms. This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot . . .”
Let Me Be A Woman
This little book of 48 short essays on biblical femininity and marriage is heavy with wisdom. Let Me Be A Woman was published 1976 and is still just as relevant as it was then, if not culturally prophetic. I can only imagine the controversy this book would cause today due to to her criticism of the women’s liberation movement and her support of complementarianism and marital submission.
Here are 12 of my favorite quotes from the book:
“We sometimes hear the expression ‘the accident of sex’ as though one’s being a man or a woman were a triviality. It is very far from being a triviality. It is our nature. It is the modality under which we live all our lives; it is what you and I are called to be — called by God, this God who is in charge. It is our destiny, planned, ordained, fulfilled by an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving Lord.”
“To me it is a wonderful thing to be a woman under God— to know, first of all, that we were made (“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) and then that we were made for something”.
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 also 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 the weight of his wings. But elephants are not called upon to run behind wainscots, mice will not be found “pacing alone 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.”
“We are called to be women. The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman. For I have accepted God’s idea of me, and my whole life is an offering back to Him of all that I am and all that He wants me to be.”
“God has set no traps for us. Quite the contrary. He has summoned us to the only true and full freedom. The woman who defines her liberation as doing what she wants, or not doing what she doesn’t want, is, in the first place, evading responsibility. Evasion of responsibility is the mark of immaturity. The Women’s Liberation Movement is characterized, it appears, by this very immaturity. While telling themselves that they've come a long way, that they are actually coming of age, they have retreated to a partial humanity, one which refuses to acknowledge the vast significance of the sexual differentiation. (I do not say that they always ignore sexual differentiation itself, but that the significance of it escapes them entirely.) And the woman who ignores that fundamental truth ironically misses the very thing she has set out to find. By refusing to fulfill the whole vocation of womanhood she settles for a caricature, a pseudo-personhood.”
“It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Woman can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations. So has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.”
“One of the most joyful discoveries of life is that in recognizing, affirming, and comforting another person we find ourselves recognized, affirmed, and comforted. It is a dead-end street to set out to know yourself or to “find” yourself or to define ‘who am I?’”
“But for the couples who have in all seriousness said their vows before God and in the presence of witnesses the possibility of growing apart need not be allowed. It need never be something which ‘happens to’ them, as though they were bystanders injured by some force which they were powerless to protect themselves from. They have willed to love and live together. They stand, not helpless, but in relation to God, each responsible to fulfill his vows to the other. Each determines to do the will of God so that together they move toward ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ And, if God is viewed as the apex of a triangle of which they are the two base points, movement toward Him necessarily decreases the distance between them. Drawing near to God means drawing nearer to each other, and this means growth and change. They are being changed into the same image from glory to glory. There is no such thing as stagnation, or that relatively innocent-sounding word incompatibility.”
“One thing that makes a marriage work is the acceptance of a divine order. Either there is an order or there is not, and if there is one which is violated disorder is the result— disorder on the deepest level of the personality. I believe there is an order, established in the creation of the world, and I believe that much of the confusion that characterizes our society is the result of the violation of God’s design. The blueprint has been lost. Everybody is guessing at how the building is supposed to look.”
“…but it is grace we are talking about, the grace of life. Your equalities have been delineated: equally sinners, equally responsible, equally in need of grace, and equally the objects of that grace. That's where the fifty-fifty matter ends. You take up life as husband and wife and you start laying down your lives not as martyrs, not as doormats or ascetics making a special bid for sainthood, but as two lovers who have needed and received grace, and who know very well that they are going to keep on needing and receiving it every day that they live together.”
“The mature man acknowledges that he did not earn or deserve his place by superior intelligence, virtue, strength, or amiability. The mature woman acknowledges that submission is the will of God for her, and obedience to this will is no more a sign of weakness in her than it was in the Son of Man when He said, ‘Lo, I come— to do Thy will, O God.’”
What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, “Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be. Let me be a woman.”