This past Christmas (2005) someone gave me a devotional called “A Gentle Spirit, Devotional Selections for Today’s Christian Woman.” The book is compiled of various daily devotionals from a group of really well-respected and Godly Christian women. I want to share one with you that I read, which I think is very appropriate for many women I know today, especially in the context of a woman’s desire to have an intimate relationship with a man. Many woman I meet and talk to seem so desperate to meet a man and get married. It’s as if they think finding a man, having a relationship with a man, and getting married is all they need to be whole, or that their life is somehow lacking without that relationship.
Following are the words of Jane Hansen, who is president of an international, inter-denominational women’s organization called “Women Aglow”:
“She took the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. Genesis 3:6
“Right things from the wrong source constitute lust. The desire of the woman springs from this root; it is a form of lust. It is way of objectifying the man in her own way, wanting him for herself, to find her life in him. It is looking to him for what only God can supply. As long as her desire is set upon him, the needs she so desperately longs for cannot be met. Even if it were possible for the woman to grasp onto the man and somehow mold him into the image she wants him to be, it would not be enough because lust is never satisfied.
“When a woman’s heart is turned, when she sets her desire back on God, a new freedom will come. The grasping will be gone from her voice and her attitude. She will be able to move into relationship with her husband based on wholeness rather than inappropriate neediness, hurt, and woundedness. She will be able to speak into her usband’s life with more effectiveness because her worth and identity no longer depend on his response. Free now, she is able to be the help to him God designed her to be.
“When the woman stops looking to her husband (or a man) for the needs he cannot meet, she frees him to meet the ones he can: the need for intimacy and the shared responsibility for the marriage and family.”
I pray those words will encourage you to know that you are complete and whole in and of yourself. When God formed you in your mother’s womb, He made a whole person. You are a whole person, and when you enter into a relationship with someone, that person is also whole. Instead of viewing yourself as half of a person looking for another half of a person, and together you make one whole person, try seeing yourself as one whole person, looking for a relationship with another whole person, and together the two of you make one very strong union.
