He's changing me!

Wow! If you prayed for me, thank you so much! I feel so much better today :)

Many of you may have heard of Jane Brocket's book the Gentle Art of Domesticity. A recent interview about it on BBC's A woman's hour is creating quite a poopstorm on her blog, yarnstorm, which I read frequently, and on the BBC forums where, to be brief, women who are perhaps more than a little put off by her ability to be domestic when they are not have attacked her and attempted to smear her for taking women "a step back," so to speak.
As you guys know, I'm fascinated by this subject and I'm rabidly interested in speaking my mind about it, so when I noticed a thread on my new favorite site-- Ravelry (sorry, I can't link, I'm a beta tester and you're not~ and if you are, you rule! :P) about the social acceptability of the use of the term "pinny porn" in ref to her stuff, or "yarn porn" in ref to pics of beautiful yarn, I simply couldn't control the urge to put in my two cents.... which rapidly turned into two million cents as person after person questioned what I was saying.

We started off discussing the terms "pinny porn" and "yarn porn." I brought up the fact that I tried to keep my life as separate from porn as possible (to include lusting or coveting over objects) and thus that the term was not one I'd use. I mentioned that calling things which are not "porn" cheapens and makes common pornography which I don't think should be made common. The word should connotate something shameful and uncommon, not something we do every day.

This offended people greatly, and I got a few responses about why women liked porn. Then somehow the conversation got turned to gender issues IN pornography and IN domesticity. Ie. whether porn was male driven and whether domesticity was only a female thing. I explained my views on the male and female purpose as per the Bible, described how I believed the household should be run, and explained what I thought about porn being male driven. (none of which is new to blog readers here, I pretty much rant about it once a month.)

Anyways, the MINUTE you use the word "Submitted" in reference to a woman or "Leader" in reference to a man people completely flip... that's to be expected because as we know from the Bible, it's a super worldly reaction. Pretty soon the poopstorm is revolving around my idea that a wife should be a helpmeet, which people think is some kind of disease, and that I didn't believe men should be encouraged to knit these days.
Not to go too deep into the knitting thing, but long story short, I made a case for knitting being culturally (regardless of it's history) a predominantly female thing. Nowadays, for a guy to fellowship in a knitting guild he's surrounded by women, which does nothing for his manhood. This encourages in him female qualities which, to be blunt, men frequently have too much of these days. I truly believe men have forgotten how to be men. (This is nothing new, I've been saying this for years. I realized a while ago that that's not the case everywhere, sometimes you have to move out of California to find a guy who knows what manhood is. I keed, but still. )
Now, if a guy went to an all male knitting group, I'd be less reluctant to say it might hurt his manhood. But as it is now, let's be honest, most guys who knit are sensitive, cry at chick flicks, and kinda make me want to puke. I can think of a few exceptions to this rule (Greg if you're reading, you're one of the manliest men I know, knitting needles in hand or not :P) and that's why Wayne says: it's ok for guys to knit. It's not ok for SOME guys to knit.

Anyways, this led to a psychotic three pages of nasty comments about how sad it was that I wanted to be a doormat or wanted men to be all powerful.
Some girls said that I was still embodying feminism because I had CHOSEN to be a housewife. Others said I was the enemy of feminism. One guy who not only knit but cried often was particularly upset that I was causing him to question his manhood. One woman with a husband who did tons of "domestic" work around the house BECAUSE she had three children tried to make a case for why she wanted her man to be those things. Actually, quite a few women did... they wanted men who were, for all intents and purposes, like them.

THEN it got into the deeper reason of why I believed these things. I cited biblical examples and said that I had needed to adjust the way I thought about things when I decided to make Jesus Lord of my life... that once I determined that I believed the Bible, I had to change my mind (or rather, let God change my mind) about the way I viewed things like women's roles, or gender issues, or how to be a wife, or mother.

This blew the conversation into a gigantic mess of people misquoting the bible and telling me that if I was going to follow the whole bible, then why did I wear clothes made of two types of fiber, or not stone people. These questions kill me because they always come from people who have no idea how to examine the scriptures in context of what Jesus did for them.... and to be honest, you just can't explain that contextually to someone who doesn't understand what that sacrifice truly meant.

Anyways, it became a debate about the value of living biblically, which I was totally not expecting but was delighted to participate in. It was like my first days in the Myspace R&P all over again, with everyone being completely shocked and freaking out at everything I typed.

What blew me away was this: people started sending me PMs. And lots of them. And they were so amazing! Mostly, they were from people who disagreed with what I was saying but wanted to "pat me on the back" for keeping my cool and being patient and kind and loving with everyone who was "Attacking" me and my ideas. This was a HUGE shock to me... I realized that God has really been answering my prayer for mercy because instead of just creating a dividing line, which I still believe is something we are supposed to do, I was able to make people feel heard and individually cared for instead of stepped on. Praise Jesus! It was such a nice change from getting hate mail for stating biblical opinions. :)

On top of that, I had three emails which really warmed my heart, from Christian women who hadn't taken their relationship with Christ to the point where they could surrender their sense of self, their views on gender, or their idea of right and wrong to Him. These really blessed me because they added me as friends and thanked me for bringing this stuff up in a way that spoke to them!! I am so grateful for those emails, because after all, that is what this is all about~ helping people to experience God's best for them, and part of that means we have to learn to die to ourselves, as painful as it is.

I think I'm growing! wow.