I can’t remember if this is part three or part four, but I assure you it’s the last part.

I didn’t know what to expect when I began telling you my story. Your responses and support means a lot to me. One never knows if when one opens their mouth if it’ll be like the talking stain from the Superbowl commercial. So thank you for your encouragement. I’ve needed it these days.

Now we get to the femininity part, which is why I started this series in the first place. I drifted off into other things because I realized those other things affected me much more than my gender does.

Of course, my gender affects me. It’s why I married a man instead of a woman. It’s why I curse Eve once a month. But I don’t think (although God only knows the truth of the matter) that it affects how I see or do theology like my personality does. I’ve found kindred spirits in men and women in this process.

What my gender affects is how others see me. I’m not talking long hair stuff, I’m talking the assumption that I must be going into women’s ministry or that I must be good at secretarial work. To the former–I love speaking to women’s groups, teaching women’s Bible studies, connecting with other women. In fact, tonight I begin teaching a new series for a women’s group. However, I also love teaching mixed groups, connecting with other artists, book-lovers, movie-goers in general.

To the latter assumption, that I must be good at secretarial work, I will only say that I worked with many groups who assumed that I would be the secretary merely because I was a woman.

Occasionally, I received surprised reactions from both men and women when I told them which program at seminary I was in. "Oh," they’d say, "That’s really admirable. Not many women do that program." Most of the time they meant well, but it made me wonder why they expected anything less of women than of men.

I realize that I sound overly sensitive at this junction. I want to affirm that I also received support and respect from other men and women. But those other comments sometimes made me feel like I was not just working hard at the program itself, as was everyone else, but fighting for my right to be there (Beastie Boys, anyone?).

Which meant in the beginning, I spent too much time trying to prove that anything you could do I could do better (fifty points for that reference).

It’s hard to write that, to admit that. My pride. Bristling. Proving. Fighting. All for my pride. Perhaps I should have labeled today’s post "confessions." In fact, I just added it to the tags. This was not my prettiest moment.

But God is good. He put people in my life who affirmed me, men and women who interacted with me, who discussed theology and philosophy without a thought to my gender.

It came to heads at the church we attended. Our Sunday School teacher needed a substitute, and I volunteered. News that I’d be teaching traveled the vineyard and before I could say "hypostatic union" an email popped in my inbox. Thanks, but no thanks. We can’t allow a woman to teach. Instead, they drafted someone who was untrained and who didn’t want to teach.

This is an odd metaphor, but I felt kidnapped. Knocked over the side of the head and shoved somewhere I didn’t belong. A very small somewhere. And it made me claustrophobic.

To make a long story short (too late!–another fifty points for that reference), that situation facilitated some conversations between my husband and I. It also became the breaking point. Because my husband and I no longer felt that we could minister in that church for several reasons, we left. (I’d like to point out that we attempted to minister in different ways–I didn’t feel comfortable in their women’s ministry at the time; we attempted to start an Art and Theology small group but there wasn’t much of a response; Chris was involved in several things but began to feel like he couldn’t do what his heart desired in ministry.)

We began a year-long journey toward a new church (I’ll spare you those details) and found ourselves at our current church–a church that makes me feel home again with ruby slippers. This church embraced my gifts, embraced my crazy imaginative self even when I told them that Scrabbles gave me nightmares, embraced my gender. 

Maybe I only needed to click my heels in the beginning, but this is the journey that brought me where I am–an Imaginative Female Theologian Who Loves the Arts.

It means everything, and it means nothing. I’m uniquely created by God. And no matter what, I belong to Him.

I find myself asking again, what does it mean to be female? To love shopping? To be the emotional one? To want pretty colors?

We know that’s not the answer. Those aren’t bad things, but that’s not the essence of being female. In fact, I know just as many men who fit the above descriptions as I do women. We could talk about the differences between men and women. There are some, physically and emotionally. But the humanness of us has more similarities.

What does it mean to be female? Some would say that it means being a wife and a mother. Those are elements, but not a definition. After all, that would exclude people like me who don’t have children and would exclude many women who are single. Here’s what I think: It means created by God to enjoy Him, to enjoy my husband and my family and my friends and the gifts God gave us, to serve Him and to love my neighbor as myself.