Women of Valour

August 8/23

This year, I met Rachel Held Evans for the first time. She's already in heaven but her words and her questions live on and I loved meeting her through her books. I don't agree with everything she thought but I immediately knew she loved Jesus and I am coming to know, like her, that He is big enough for all of our worries and wonderings. 

She introduced me to the phrase "Eshet Chayil," woman of valour. 

If there is one strength I am proud of in in my life, it is that I have learned to surround myself with incredible woman. These women help raise my kids. They laugh and cry with me and they give the best council. They show strength and brilliance and joy in all different areas. 

As I started the year with some introspection and took inventory of my life, I realized that I wanted to add some women of valour in the areas that I wanted to grow into. I didn't head out to go and find them, I prayed about it and God brought them to me. 

Women who praise God through their hands, who praise God on their bikes, who celebrate him as they teach others to navigate the beauty of the wilderness around them. Women who serve in a hundred different ways and rejoice in His creation. 

All of them have one thing in common; their eyes are fixed on Jesus.

One of those women of valour prayed with me today. As we were praying she told me she saw me before Jesus and that he gave me the best set of Cutco Knives. It made me laugh and it also made perfect sense to me. He's been cutting away the rough edges and rotten parts of me. The pride and the judgy parts, the falseness and the deceptions, the addictions and the soul bitterness.

He's given me this heart and prayer:

I shall not want. I won't be distracted. Let the other things fall away.

In that image of knives, I know that God has given me His word. It's in my heart from years of hearing it, of reading it, and by his Holy Spirit in my life, it is living and active and sharper than a two edged sword. I always thought that was a sword that I would wield in an outward way but in fact, God has used it to clear out my heart, to remove painful clinging problems and to strip away hardness and harshness. He's teaching me to show up in strength and joy and truth. 

I want to become a woman of valour. Eshet Chayil.

Imagine if everyone around you was a safe person, I used to think. Now I want to be that safe person. Safe in Christ, able to see others through his eyes, through the lens of their hurt and experience and their incredible value. Through the gift of grace I've been given. 

Who are you now? Who can you be in Christ? Who can you grow into? 

Eshet Chayil, my friend.