| Cathleen Falsani

Dangerous little book aims to inspire exhausted women

When I was 13, my eighth-grade Bible teacher delivered a lecture about what I now recognize as gender roles, but what he called “biblical ideals.”

That was the day I found out that it was my destiny, apparently, to be a “helpmate,” and that God’s will for me was to become something called a “Proverbs Woman.”

The idea comes from the 31st chapter of the biblical book of Proverbs, where we learn that (and I’m paraphrasing here): the ultimate woman knits and sews and cooks exotic food. She gets up super early and makes breakfast for the family from scratch — no Eggos allowed. And she’s a night owl, one of those miraculous few who need only four hours of sleep.

She gardens, invests in real estate, and is a champion shopper. She volunteers at the soup kitchen, gives money to charity, has a great figure and a stylish wardrobe. She is strong (because of thrice-weekly Pilates and Spin classes, probably), dignified and laid-back. She speaks wisely and doesn’t swear, is a model homemaker who doesn’t do down time. Her kids love her, her husband thinks he’s the luckiest man alive and tells her so.

Isn’t she fabulous?!

The Proverbs Woman is your basic nightmare, the Bree Van De Kamp archetype in a Wisteria Lane paradigm.

I am not now, nor is it likely that I will be in the future, a Proverbs woman. And I’m OK with that. Mostly. Well, if I’m going to be honest about it . . . some days I feel a little guilty. I mean, it’s bad enough to grow up in an era when we women are supposed to be a hybrid of Martha Stewart, Gloria Steinem and Angelina Jolie. Try adding a divine mandate to that mix.

I’m a child of the ’70s, when super-Christian Marabel Morgan’s book The Total Woman, which convinced a generation of church ladies that happy marriages were made of subservient wives, good cookin’, slim thighs and hot sex, was a bestseller. (Fannie Flagg got her idea to wrap Kathy Bates’ “Fried Green Tomatoes” character, a k a Tawanda, in Saran Wrap and greet her husband at the front door from Morgan). Being a modern Christian woman can be pretty friggin’ stressful.

No one knows this better than Lynne Hybels, the wife of Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, and one of evangelicalism’s megastars. For the better part of three decades (Willow Creek is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month), Lynne Hybels has lived in the spotlight as the uberpastor’s wife, spiritually, socially and physically scrutinized for her (proverbial) godliness.

“At age 10 I traded my ballet slippers for a flute because I’d been taught that dancing was a sin — but making music was an acceptable form of worship,” Hybels writes in a slim, surprising new book, Nice Girls Don’t Change the World. “From that time on, I tried very hard to make what I thought were God-honoring decisions in my life. If there were rules to follow, I followed them. If there were pleasures to give up, I gave them up. If there was work to do, I did it. I was determined to earn God’s love.”

About a dozen years ago, when she hit her mid-30s, the largely self-imposed pressure to be perfect — spiritually and otherwise –became too much. And Lynne Hybels walked away — from the expectations and from God, she says in the book that is available through www.willowcreek.com. She says she simply ran out of steam. If God wanted her to be the total woman, she didn’t want God.

“I turned my back on the God of my childhood . . . I could no longer carry the burden of such a harsh and demanding deity,” Hybels writes. “In retrospect, I see it more like this: the true God, in grace, set me free. . . I don’t believe I would have had the courage to walk away from my childhood God unless the Spirit of a different God had whispered in my ear: I understand. … Turn your back. Walk away. It’ll be okay.”

It’s an extraordinary, brave admission from any pastor’s wife, nevermind one as well-known as Hybels. For a decade she rested, worked her way out of depression and back to God, embracing a new ideal of womanhood. She went from a “nice girl” to a “dangerous woman,” which she defines as a woman “who shows up with everything she is and joins the battle against whatever opposes the redeeming work of God in our lives and in our world.” For the past few years, Lynne Hybels has been a driving force working to awaken the sleeping giant of the American evangelical church to the AIDS emergency in Africa and other social justice issues. It’s her calling, one she can hear clearly now.

Hybels told me she wrote her dangerous little book to inspire other women who are exhausted from striving for an unattainable spiritual ideal. “If you struggle with this but never face it, you just go through the rest of your life with a spiritual life that is lacking in reality. That’s not what I wanted for myself, and it’s not what I wanted for other people,” she says. “It was a long, slow journey for me to realize that that message didn’t come from God, [it] came from culture, a church culture I grew up in. Still the biggest challenge I have is to accept my limits. I cannot do it all. I am absolutely not a superwoman.”

Tawanda!