For several years, I’ve been listening to a lot of conversations that create dualities. Self-care or self-denial? God made you with interests and passions so that you could use them for Him or the Christian life is a study of denial and hardship?

Of course, I think it’s both. I’m rolling my eyes because I find myself saying this about more and more topics. But what if we anchored a cord on each side of these discussions and leaned our weight on both? What if we took care of ourselves because we are made in God’s image and God cares about us and we can’t pour out of empty cups? And what if we practiced self-denial and put other people first and did work that maybe we didn’t want to do?

What if God made you expressly for the purpose of using the way He made you and yet that way of being part of His plan is full of difficulty and hardship? What if He intends for the very things that make you come alive to also refine you the most?

What if being disciples of Jesus meant that we are all being transformed into the image of Jesus but that it plays out in different ways in each of us? What if you are actually supposed to live a life that’s different from your neighbor, friend, or the person who sits in the pew beside you?

As I wrap up this gender series, I alternate between feeling hopeful and despondent. I feel hopeful because this is a conversation; people are starting to ask questions. There are raised hands all over the back of the room that most people are trying to ignore, but the hands are there. I feel despondent though because it’s still a conversation. There are plenty of people who are unwilling to evaluate their stance or ask relevant questions. I’m working on moving from wondering why God asked me to do something that seems pointless to praying believing that God is already working.

I realize this is culturally motivated, especially in the area where I live. This way of looking at the genders is historically grounded. Do we think this is the one thing the world has gotten right? That women are second or confined to certain spaces or somehow less than men is the one thing that we have in common with Islam, for example?

We’ve created a lot of problems and as we’re searching for solutions, we seem unwilling to evaluate why the problems exist. Why are women not equipped to teach the Bible? Why do men not read books written by women? Why are there continuous sex scandals in the church? Why are there so many weird things said about women with no pushback from leadership? We could stop and realize that our own theology often sets us up neatly for these situations.

Mark Twain said, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” I’ve seen a lot of things said about gender that just aren’t so and we should discuss a few of them.

Something that needs reframed quickly is that that story of the fall is not a story about marriage. It is relevant whether you’re fifteen, or thirty-two and single, or forty and married ,or seventy and widowed, whether you’re a man or a woman. It’s a story of the three ways we can respond to God. We can trust His definition of good and evil, meaning we obey and follow His guidelines. We can be deceived, like Eve, and sin. Or we can disobey, like Adam, and rebel against God’s commands.

The story is not there to show us that if women would just let their husband’s decide everything then things would work out fine. Adam disobeyed on purpose. Clearly the Bible shows us that men are not more likely to follow God’s commands than women are. This is not a story that teaches us that men shouldn’t listen to their wives. The Bible is full of stories where God speaks to the woman or teaches men through women (Deborah, Huldah, Jochebed, Samson’s mother, Priscilla, and many others). Maybe we could learn not to talk back to animals though.

This story, and the continuing story of the Bible, reveals that we are constantly confronted with these options. Will I let God decide what’s good? Will I be deceived? Will I disobey?