We Were Created To Stand Out, Not Blend In

I am taking a bold step by calling women to “find their voice,” and take your place to stand out.
As women we were created to be gentle, nurturing, intuitive and loving. The world tells us we must be aggressive, fight for position, and our voice does not really count. So we try through many different ways to rise above the humiliation, the low self esteem, and the feeling that what we think or say does not matter by raising our voice a little higher, by slipping into depression with feelings of hopelessness or simply allowing verbal and physical abuse to take place.

As I have wept on the inside and out for years over this question: do we as females, young and older really matter to God? Were we meant from the beginning of time to blend in or stand out? The answer God gave me was profound and it gave me hope that out of our desperate and dry times will flow streams of joy and the tears we have wept in secret will turn to rejoicing if we will do something that is so very simple. God is revealing something to us.

Today is a new day and the Lord is calling us women to a radical shift in how we go about our day in order to bring about a change in our lives. So many of us keep a deep secret wondering if what we say and do matters. When our answer is no, that’s when we see girls and woman of all ages acting out their desperate cry of significance by dressing provocatively, raising their voices, having affairs, excessive eating and spending or simply withdrawing quietly and settling for less then what God intended.

Do you want to see change in your lives? Do you want to know if you have significance and matter? Do you care that so many young girls are being trapped by sexual marketing and predators? Do you care that you do not have a voice in our nation or in our families? I do, and so I am asking you to join me in where I believe the Lord is leading us for revelation in how HE created us to stand out, to prophesy in HIS name and to lead other women and girls into a life of righteousness. And it all begins in our mind……

Therefore gird up your loins of your mind (be mentally alert, disciplined and focused) and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 1:13 NKJV

The battle is in and for our minds, as women. What we think so we are! Sigmund Freud once said “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” In other words most of the time we do not express with words the other six-sevenths that we are thinking about, but our actions and human attitudes reveal it.

Females have strong minds and we have incredible power because of our minds and what we meditate on. What we meditate on will govern our thoughts, attitudes, our perspective and our approach to any given situation. Meditating on God’s word and HIS goodness is to ponder, think deeply, to consider as something to be done, or to engage in thought. When we think about the kind and good things of God our heart begins to change.

I believe God has given us a pathway to stand out and see our prayers answered by meditating on Psalm 126 and agreeing with HIM. Here are the key phrases from Psalm 126:

The LORD has done great things for us, and we are glad.
Bring back our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the South.
Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing,
Shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
(Psalm 126:3-6)

He is saying, “Behold I will do a new thing. Now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah: 43:19 The Lord is saying, “Listen to me now for I have collected your tears and heard your cries.” Part of this pathway to joy and rejoicing is conditional and the other part involves the tears that we have already wept because of the distance between what our hearts have cried out for and what we have received. The tears that we have wept because of the injustice towards women have been sown in eternity and they will bear fruit. It is God’s promise to us. The words we must ponder, think about, focus our minds on is HIS promise regarding your tears, the times you have wept externally and internally count and move the heart of Jesus. This is proven when Lazarus died and Mary wept in John 11:33 because it says, “Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” And then it says Jesus wept. And then, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Don’t you find it interesting that in the NJKV we find the word weep 49 times, the words wept 72 times and the word lament 23 times. And yet society tells us it is a weakness not a strength to weep. For God to have given us this instruction to weep I knew that there must be a secret understanding that HE wanted to reveal to us.

Consider these findings in my research on why the Lord created us women with tears and then mentioned these words so often in the scriptures. The belief that crying has positive effects is of ancient origin;. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle theorized that crying at a drama "cleanses the mind" of suppressed emotions by a process called catharsis: the reduction of distress by releasing the emotions. Crying may "cleanse the mind" in a much more literal sense than even the catharsis theorists imagine. Crying is not grief, it is a way of getting over your grief. Water has always represented life and Gods ability to restore life is beyond our understanding. Our tears can be seeds that will grow into a harvest of joy. God has given us a way to release the burden onto HIM if we have understanding of this process and meditate on HIS greatness even when we cannot see HIM working.

Consider the words of Jer 8:19-22:

Listen! The voice, the cry of the daughter of my people from a far country:
“Is not the LORD in Zion? Is not her King in her?
Why have they provoked Me to anger with their carved images—with foreign idols?
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!
For the hurt of the daughter of my people I am hurt.
I am mourning; astonishment has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physician there?
Why then is there no recovery for the health of the daughter of my people?

Let’s take this scripture literal for a moment and see the hurt that God feels for his daughters. I do not think it was a mistake by God to use this feminine word to describe why HE is mourning and hurt. The miseries of our country ought to be very much the grief of our souls. A gracious spirit will be a public spirit, a tender spirit, a mourning spirit. It becomes us to lament the miseries of our girls, our daughters, our female friends. And much more to lay to heart the calamities of our country, and especially of the church of God, to grieve for the their afflictions.

So just as the Prayer of Jabez was a cry for many in the world, make PSALM 126 the cry of our women, young and old. This should be a prayer for perfecting of our deliverance. “Bring back our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the South.” We have been kept in silence and restrained for so long now O Lord. Deliver us from the prisons of suffering. Suffering women have sown seeds of tears all over the world. They share in the pain of human life lost or silenced and we sow in tears as we help others, because the tears of a woman are like sweet incense to God. They are as a fragrance so sweet to Him that it moves His heart. There are tears of repentance, tears for prayer, tears for humiliation, tears for the pain we suffer, tears for others sins, tears of sympathy, tears of tenderness.

As we weep with our tears we can have an expectation of receiving again. The secret is a Godly sorrow. So pray and contemplate, roll around in your head (meditate) on this word until your joy comes.

“Restore our fortunes, Lord as streams renew the desert.
Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy.
They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they
Return with the harvest.”

As women we have tried just about every method possible to gain our place, to be noticed, mattered or listened to and our way is destroying us. If you do not believe me just look at our young adults and children on television in the news and on the streets. But, the Lord is calling us to a new way of thinking and expression in this day. He is saying, struggle with me, be determined to get what I intended you to have as your inheritance. Here is what the Lord is telling us to do.

The day of the Lord is an awesome and terrible thing. Who can possibly survive? That is why the Lord says, “Turn to me now, while there is still time. Give me your hearts. Come with fasting, weeping and mourning. Don’t tear your clothing in grief, but tear your hearts instead.” Return to the Lord your God for He is merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. Joel 2: 11-13 NLT

He is asking us to give Him our hearts; rend your heart. What ever it takes to come to a place of rupturing, breaking, dissecting, slicing your heart to find out where and why you are holding back from weeping and mourning over the place where the female has found themselves. Struggle with God for your inheritance as Jacob, Ruth and Esther did and do not give up until the Lord answers. Make a promise to the Lord Jesus that you will take the next thirty days to meditate on this word everyday and mourn over the place we women have found ourselves.

Marie Wiens

Marie Wiens, 2/2/2008 6