A One-piece life

Ann Voskamp returns with her daughters from a trip to Rwanda.

And then we are only home a handful of days when some news headline bursts all pluming proud that Facebook and Apple were going to pony up to pay for the freezing of any female employee’s eggs.

And then they blare that some lovely actress, Renee Zellweger, maybe felt she had to freeze her beautiful face with a bit of Botox to find her way in a youth-obsessed culture?

When did someone start shilling that women need to be freed from the confines of their own God-fashioned biology … as if our God-formed state of growing children and growing older, is somehow wrong, as if we need to freeze the parts of us that makes us female and human and made in the image of God so we can hold some imaginary clock at 25 years of age?

Women aren’t burdened because we may birth children some decades or that we may wear the astonishing gift of growing older other decades — there is nothing inherently flawed with the way our Father formed us.

In our callings and vocations — Women aren’t called to suppress their femininity, their motherhood, or their age. Women are called to beautifully express it.

Instead of freezing eggs and faces, what if there was cultural support for family and ministry and vocation as fluid, and mothers could be with their daughters and sons, and daughters and sons could be with their mothers and witness this holistic modelling of a fluid One-Piece Life, could witness what our ministry and our service and our daily work look like, woven together, and that it wrinkles us and grows us and it is hard and it is wrenchingly beautiful — and it is not to be missed.

Women need to be free to mature beautifully and serve vocationally and mother fluidly.

Sure — Fight the cultural expectations of aging — but don’t ever fight the beauty of maturing.

Read much more here.