Weak Women/Bold Women

Just spending a few hours in Omaha's Old Market seemed like a retreat. Five of us Miriams looked around Soul Desires, a charming bookstore, got our coffees and circled around a table for our Lutheran Women Today study on Bold Women. Deborah, the judge and prophet; the story has a bold, gory end to it with another woman driving a stake through a guy's forehead. Sometimes it takes more than a tap on the head to get men's attention. Why didn't they teach us those things in Sunday School? We decided the male dominated church didn't want to give girls any stupid ideas about becoming judges.

I could write about a bold woman judge in Omaha, who has come into our lives a couple of times through her work with families and children. She awarded us guardianship of a granddaughter and later she made that granddaughter our own daughter. It all happened so late in our parenting, that the Gma and Gpa stick on our tongues and the words are as awkward as having our sons become brothers to this beloved child, now woman, who is biologically their niece. Mental illness does really crazy things to families. In the same manner it made her mother her sister.

Bold Women: isn't that just what a Meyer's/Briggs INFP needs help with! I am not even bold enough to say what needs to be said. Yes, we do need Bibles in our pews. I need to pray for boldness as much as I do for self discipline in diet and exercise.

I cannot abide the fact that even at my advanced age, and in this world amuck, I would have the audacity to pray for resistance to gluttony. It is a sin, if I recall, and maybe it isn't any more annoying to God than anything else that I pray for, like green lights and parking places.

We humans are a sorry, sorry lot. I say we, because I know quite a few people, some sorrier than others..but all of us more or less sorry. I suspect some even pray for money, which always seemed the most impolite sort of prayer of all, seeing how money is the root of all evil. Why would God put something like that on his children?

I did do one bold thing a while ago. I wrote a letter to the editor of my home town paper in response to the Rapid City Journal article that recognized of one of the ranch women in my home county. She stayed on the ranch with her small daughters after her husband died. Bold things are always a leap of faith, sticking one's neck out, opening the self up for criticism and/or failure. The really bold women of this midwestern high plain go on ranching when husbands die or divorce them. Their boldness is incomparable, an example to the rest of us, and I applaud them for it.