Lisa Hensley - Page 4 of 78 -

Posted on February 25, 2019February 24, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith

A Woman’s Place and the Implications of our Theology

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.

Posted on February 11, 2019February 28, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith, Marriage

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Tracing Marriage Through the Bible

If you start talking about marriage in the Bible, most people are going to pull out Ephesians 5. The Ephesians 5 passage is beautiful and applicable; but it is not the first time marriage is discussed, nor is it the only passage that talks about marriage.

Let’s start at the beginning and work our way through the story. It is the same story that Paul is actually retelling in Ephesians 5- because God is always telling a cohesive story throughout Scripture- but I think we miss that because we rarely look at marriage anywhere else.

Right after God makes woman as man’s “ezer,” He proclaims the story of marriage. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This is fascinating to me because Adam didn’t have a mother or a father. But Moses wrote this hundreds of years after it happened in a context where all men getting married did have a mother and father. (Do a little digging into patriarchal cultures. Women were just absorbed into their husband’s family.) Instead of a woman losing all that she could be, the man was supposed to leave what he had and hold fast to her.

Posted on February 4, 2019February 28, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith

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The Things We Know That Aren’t So

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?

Posted on January 28, 2019February 28, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith, Womanhood

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The Joint Mission of the Sexes

I want us to go to the Bible. I want you to be able to handle the Word in explaining what you do and do not believe. If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine; God will not be asking you about that when you stand before Him. But I do want you to look at the questions and the topics from all angles, using all of the Bible. The Bible is supposed to inform how we live, and if we have weird theology we do one of two things. 1. We ignore the theology and live in a way that makes sense. That is clearly a problem. It might be because we know that the theology is wrong but we don’t know how to show that from the Bible. It might be because the theology opposes things that we can see in real life. God is intensely practical. (And no, I do not mean that He always makes sense to us.) 2. We try to live by the theology and then wonder why it’s not working out very well, especially for certain groups of people

I’m going to be doing Instagram stories about this and saving them in a highlight. Some of this is much easier to talk through than write about and I’ll also be addressing questions and things I see on the internet. Follow me there to stay caught up with those.

I’m going to try to blog about this in some sort of order. That would, of course, be easier if I wrote it all out beforehand and rearranged it. I won’t be doing that. I’ll do the best I can with the time I have.

Women and God: why this conversation is even necessary

Posted on January 22, 2019February 28, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith, Womanhood

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Women and God: why this conversation is even necessary

I want the Bible to be my guideline. Of course, I don’t live that perfectly, but it is my goal to constantly be growing as a student and practitioner of the Word. If you know me in person, I think you know that. If you follow me on Instagram, I think you know that. If you read my blog, I think you know that too. So my questions of how I’m supposed to show up in the world as a woman are shaped by what the Bible says about being a woman.

But the stories I’ve heard about being a woman have always had holes. I’ve had questions that no one has answered; questions it seemed no one else was asking. And, let’s be honest, the questions weren’t welcome either. I’ve spent years sweeping the questions under a mental rug and moving on. But the questions got bigger and bigger and then I added in questions about how I was supposed to raise my boys as men. Avoiding the questions wasn’t a feasible way to do life anymore. So I brought all the questions back out. Truth can handle questions. Truth isn’t intimidated by my questions. I put down all the stuff I was reading that people had to say on the topic (all complementarian, by the way, and raising more questions), and went to God.

I did a lot of reading. Most of it was not about what the Bible says specifically about women. I went right on with my normal Bible reading, but my heart was pulled toward the topic so I saw relevant connections everywhere. I started taking notes. I started comparing passages. I prayed over what I was reading and what was happening in my heart and what was taking place in the world around me. I expected my reading to fill in the gaps that I was finding in the story I was told. But instead I found the holes were there because of the story we were telling.

How Stories Shape the World: why good fiction matters

Posted on January 16, 2019January 15, 2019 by lisah Posted in Faith

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How Stories Shape the World: why good fiction matters

Remember that movie Runaway Bride? I haven’t seen it in years but I want to watch it again. There’s a scene where Julia Robert’s character realizes she doesn’t know how she likes her eggs because she’s always adopted the preference of her significant other. We should know how we like our eggs. We need to know who God made us to be.

A friend asked me a few weeks ago what my favorite movie genre was. My answer was swift. Action. I love action movies. I elaborated on my answer because that’s what I do. I love stories of danger and heroism. I love epic tales of adventure and daring. This is how I look at life.

I envision life as a battle. I’m not just training my children to help others and not hurt them. I’m teaching them to swing a sword and a tend a wound. I’m not simply protecting their minds and hearts from evil; I’m chasing away monsters that would carry them away in the darkness. I’m not just continuing to serve God in the mundane of life; I’m living glorious adventures. I’m in a epic tale of challenge and love and the triumph of good over evil, or at least that’s what I’m hoping for. Some days it feels like I might not make it. It seems like evil may win. It feels as if I will be taken out by the enemy before I can finish my mission.

Pick the Adventure Your 80-year-old Self Will Be Proud Of

Posted on January 11, 2019January 15, 2019 by lisah Posted in personal essay

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Pick the Adventure Your 80-year-old Self Will Be Proud Of

I’ve talked about getting my nose pierced all year. Actually-hold that-in spring of 2017 I went to a homeschool conference with a friend and we had a long conversation about my getting my nose pierced. Another friend and I tossed the idea around at the beginning of the year because she wanted to pierce her ear cartilage. But I let it drop even though I’ve wanted to do this for three or four years.

I hadn’t thought about it seriously in months. The day after Christmas I walked by the mirror while I was picking up the bedroom and “you should go pierce your nose” seemed to be written in all-caps on the mirror. I stood and stared at my reflection in the mirror and, for some reason, felt certain that if I did not go pierce my nose then, I would never do it. And if I never did it, it would start a trend of not doing things and I would have a long list of regrets when I was an eighty-year-old woman looking back at my life. I grabbed my friend and went two days later.