Decades ago, a woman about my own age surprised us both when she cried out, “You’re trying to do everything for everybody!”

We were working together to host a party for the women’s Sunday School class I taught. “You’re right,” I told her, apologizing.

How often do I do that? I wondered, truly wanting to know.

How often since then have I realized? I’m doing it again. Several years ago, for example, I was praying. And complaining. “Lord, I’m so stuck! And so exhausted.”

I could take other matters to God, and hear his counsel and, by his Spirit, find the way forward. But in this matter, I could make no progress at all.

“Why?” I asked him. “Why do I keep being defeated by this thing?” His answer, Spirit-to-spirit within me, hit with the same force as the words my friend had cried so long before.

You do not have grace to carry
what belongs to someone else.

Carrying what is not ours

Our responses to responsibility matter. If we refuse or deflect what is ours – or if we take on what is not ours – those choices have major consequences.

Factors within us can skew us, one way or another. For example, empathetic people tend to take on other people’s stuff. So do oldest daughters, and people-pleasers.

Factors outside of us can skew us too. Especially generational factors.

What the adults in a child’s life do with responsibility, can profoundly affect that person’s choices, even when grown.

What’s more, peer pressure is a real thing for adults, as well as children. In her book, Emotional Blackmail, Susan Forward describes one type of pressure adults may face. In a nutshell:

A person or group creates a FOG of “fear, obligation and guilt” – to get someone else to carry what is not theirs.¹

One grievous type of emotional blackmail affects who-knows-how-many women in the church. In short, our church cultures often load women down with responsibilities that people expect of us – but God does not. And the fog can hide the reality, keeping it just out of sight.

Of course, religiosity can, and does, put oppressive burdens on people of both genders. In Luke 11:46, Jesus is speaking to religious leaders (as opposed to truly godly leaders) when he says:

You load people down with impossible burdens and you refuse to lift a single finger to help them. CEB

This post focuses on an impossible load often put on women in the church because we are women.

FOG alert: Where we may think this thinking has changed – but it is still deeply embedded – it can still do immense harm.

The helpmeet view of women’s responsibility

Church rhetoric about “godly womanhood” often focuses on this handy summary:

Men have the authority – in the church, in the home, wherever.
Women have a responsibility to submit to them.

The mindset that speaks of men in terms of authority, and women in terms of responsibility, tends also to use the word helpmeet – and to hold to the belief:

A woman’s place is in the home. That’s where her real responsibilities lie.
Of course, even in “woman’s sphere”: Man is in charge. Woman is the helper.
He has the final say-so. She does all the heavy lifting.
Emotionally, spiritually, physically, the welfare of her home and family are all on her.
And man? Oh, each one is unique, with unique gifts and callings.

This view of man and woman may be explicitly stated. Or, it may only always have been implied.

Either way, it’s often attributed in part to God’s speaking to Adam in King James English when he said,

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. (Gen. 2:18 KJV)

“An help meet” – or, “a helper suitable” (NIV, etc.). Either English phrase indicates someone lower than, who assists one “higher up” – a subordinate who does what the person in charge assigns.

Pressure on all sides

Suppose this view has surrounded a woman, like water pressure does a deep-sea diver. She may not know that it constricts her. Yet, it presses her on all sides.

And if something occurs in her home or family that her church frowns on? Those who police such things (including other women) may “pray for her,” bless her heart, reproach her, avoid her, or otherwise convey to her: “It’s all your fault.”

The covert and overt shaming, aimed at the one, serves to remind everyone else what’s expected of them too.

So what is this woman to do? The church and the Bible both seem to tell her: “God created woman to know her place and stay in it.”

Even if it’s never said aloud, even if the expectation just hangs in the air, how many ways does it put impossible pressure on her life?

How many words does it put in God’s mouth?

One over the other, or two of a kind?

The Hebrew words God did say to Adam when he declared, “It is not good for the man to be alone,” are ezer kenegdo.

In this phrase, kenegdo is typically translated “suitable” or “meet.” It means “counterpart.” It pictures someone of the same nature as man, standing in front of and facing man, as an equal.

Ezer means “helper,” yet it does not imply “less than” or “subordinate.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Ezer occurs only 21 times in Scripture. Twice, it refers to woman. Three times, it refers to a person or nation from whom someone in distress seeks help. Sixteen times, ezer refers to God himself:

He is our help and our shield. (Ps. 33:20)

Who rides the heavens to your help. (Deut. 33:26 NAS)

But me? I’m poor and needy. Hurry to me, God! You are my helper and my deliverer. (Ps. 70:5 CEB)

In a post titled, “What Does ‘Helper’ Really Mean?” Kat Armas has written:

… if one argues that woman as “helper” denotes man’s elevated position in relation to her, then the same would be implied for God – which we know isn’t true.

God helps [his people] because he has the power to do so, and because [we] can’t do it alone.

Thus, ezer kenegdo in no way describes a one-size-fits-all womanhood that requires half the human race to live in one-way submission to the other half. Instead:

Ezer kenegdo pictures woman
in a one-anothering relationship with man –
a relationship in which authority, responsibility and full humanity
go both ways.

What I learned the hard way

Most of my life, I would have told you my close relationships were mutually honoring. Then, my heart shattered, I visited two counselors, in two states, within the same year. They did not know each other and did not know me, until I showed up in their respective offices.

Yet both told me the same thing, in almost the same words: “It doesn’t sound like you’ve ever been allowed to live your own life.”

Oh.

I lived where the helpmeet view ruled, yet I had told myself it did not.

Now I know: This view sets up human mediators between a woman and her Lord. In the name of God – who created every person in his image, made every one unique and offers full redemption to all – it:

• Strips a woman of adulthood.
• Violates her womanhood.
• Ignores her personhood.

Yet church cultures that espouse this view insist it is godly, scriptural, good.

When our survival tactics backfire

When the church openly or subtly forbids a woman to seek the life the Lord created her to live, how might she respond?

She is human. And unique. So she may respond any number of ways. But:

When people we love and trust
expect of us what threatens to crush and erase us,
we tend to keep trying to survive
and to belong,
and still, somehow, to be who we are.

Problem is: Many of the survival methods we adopt can be less than healthy. Suppose, for example, that she:

• Tries with everything in her to do what’s expected of her.
• Focuses on keeping up appearances, so that outwardly the family always looks good.
• Acts out. Repeatedly. Sabotages herself, trying to sabotage the system.
• Rails against such a system, and spends untold energy trying to change it.
• Goes along to get along, keeping a low profile, doing just enough to satisfy the powers that be.
• Learns to game the system. Uses manipulation to get away with murder, so to speak, while deftly playing the part of the good Christian woman.
• Gives herself over to resentment, and ultimately hatred, of everyone she sees as complicit in her captivity.
• Escapes – but all too often, into more of the same.
• Gives up, stops trying, dies within.

What can happen as each of these choices runs its course?

Working from a place of rest

If you have ever felt, or seen, overwhelming false responsibility loaded onto the woman in the “good Christian family” picture – that millstone did not come from Jesus.

Our Lord cries to anyone stumbling beneath an oppressive load:

Come to me,
all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you
and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy
and my burden is light.
(Matt. 11:28-30)

The women and men in the New Testament who came to Jesus found his words true. Their stories show us how it can look to lay down the backbreaking burdens religion wants to put on each of us, and to take the yoke our Lord offers to all.²

Still today, each time we come to him, who died for us and lives in us, he shows us what is ours to carry. The responsibilities he assigns us are as varied as the people he has created. They are weighty with substance and value.

They challenge us, but they are not onerous.

And Jesus lifts way more than a finger to help. Day by day, his presence, his power and his grace strengthen us to lift what we cannot carry alone.

We serve, not by rote, but by love. We work from a place of rest. Step by step, we learn how to share the load – and how to carry our own.

Learning loving living

The night before his crucifixion, the same Lord who said, “Come to me,” said five times, to those who do:

Love one another.³

As strongly as possible, Jesus stressed:

The lifeblood of my kingdom is my love. The work of my kingdom is to love. And so I am creating a people who relate, not by hierarchy, or pigeonholing or forming gender castes, but by loving one-anothering.

Sharing one another’s load

Paul wrote in Galatians 6:

Carry one another’s burdens and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (v. 2 NET)

Thus, Scripture urges all the Lord’s people to learn one prime means of loving one another.

Sometimes the helper, sometimes the helped, sometimes lifting together as one –
always prompted by God’s Spirit and propelled by his love –
each of us learns to share
what is too heavy for any one person to carry.

No one person, for example, can carry a whole family. Instead, loving living for each family member involves learning day by day, season by season, how to share the load. In addition, loving living in the greater family of God includes helping (not judging) when a family’s load overwhelms them.

Carrying your own load

Paul also wrote in Galatians 6:

Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that … Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life. (vv. 4-5 MSG)

Thus, Scripture stresses that the call to “carry one another’s burdens” does not mean, “It’s your responsibility to take on false responsibility,” or, “It’s fine to put off on others what you don’t want to do.” No:

Each of you have to carry your own load. (GNT)

Notice, dear one! Truly loving living includes carrying what God has entrusted to us to handle – and declining what he has not.

Seeing the truth through bewildering fog

You do not have grace to carry what belongs to someone else.

When we try, we don’t truly help anyone.

→ We enable people who will not admit, or take, their own responsibility.
→ We rob others of the challenge, and delight, of walking neck-and-neck with Jesus as he teaches them to carry their own stuff.
→ We miss out on the loving one-anothering of sharing each other’s loads.
→ What’s more, when we spend all our strength carrying what is not ours, we cannot carry what is.

And yet the bewildering fog may swirl around us, trying to convince us that:

• Refusing false responsibility is “selfish.”
• Taking false responsibility is “the loving thing to do.”

Crying to God our help

When it seems wrong not to accept false responsibility, what’s a woman to do?

Jesus says to all people, women and men alike, “Come to me. Take my yoke on you. Learn. From. Me.”

Our gentle, humble Lord, teach us loving living.

→ Help us see – and carry – each responsibility you give us, by your superabundant grace within us.
→ Show us day by day how to share each other’s load.
→ And every time we need it, help us see – and release – what belongs to someone else.

---

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

More about women, the church and truly loving living

• Whatever happened to loving one another?
• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• Case of the battered boundaries
• Bucking the system: Shunning, submission, Jesus
• “Burned out on religion? I will give you rest”

• Waylaid by God – and his good news for women
• Where have all the women gone? Why women may seem invisible in Paul’s letters.
• Mary Magdalene stuck her neck out
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now
• Women, prophecy and the church

Books you might find helpful

• What about Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé
• Return to your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey

Footnotes

1. I learned much from Emotional Blackmail, by Susan Forward, about how such manipulation looks and the tactics used to accomplish it. Regretfully, I did not find helpful the advice the book gave as to what to do when someone routinely uses fear, obligation and guilt to exploit you. ↩︎
2. My book, Return to Your Rest: A Spirit-to-spirit Journey, explores the stories of four women and four men in the Gospels who came to Jesus. The blog post, Mary Magdalene stuck her neck out, tells one of their stories. ↩︎
3. Jesus said, “Love one another,” three times in John 13:34. Then he said it twice more, in John 15:12, 17. Twice in the same verses, Jesus described how we are to love: “as I have loved you.” ↩︎