Gone With the Lord or Gone With the Wind?

This article is more personal, but I feel led of the Lord to share with you in order to illustrate the power of reading on a child’s life, my life.  I was a very feminine little girl.  I loved to play with dolls, and thoroughly enjoyed doing girlish activities.  I never played with boys, and had no desire to be with them.  I knew that one day I would grow up, marry, and be a mommy—but something went terribly wrong.  By the time I was eighteen, I was still very feminine in appearance and in all mannerisms, but I was a feminist on the inside.  I felt I was as smart as any man.  Equal rights sounded good to me.

When and how did the feminine little girl change to the feminist young woman?  I prayed and asked the Lord this very question.  As always, the Lord is so good to answer our prayers when we sincerely desire to know the truth.  Almost instantly, the Lord brought the book Gone With the Wind to my mind.  I did not grow up in a Christian home, so my dad allowed me to read Gone With the Wind around the age of thirteen.  I thought it was so good that I remember reading it twice.  I began to muse about this story, trying to recall what it was that had such a drastic impression on my young life.  Scarlett O’Hara was a feminist!  At one of the opening scenes at a gala affair, all the women were resting at nap time, but the men were in the library talking politics.  Scarlett wanted to be where the men were.  She did not want to be talking about babies and motherhood, the unimportant, boring things in life.  She wanted to be where the political action was, where the discussions of war were taking place.  Men were the thinkers and shaped the world.  Women tended the children.  Her heart rebelled at being a woman.  The rest of the story proceeds to tell of her life, breaking the rules of gentile womanhood, and barging into new areas where women had not yet travelled.

From that moment on, I did not want to grow up to be an ordinary woman.  I wanted to do something more.  I began to despise the traditional role of a woman.  I felt cheated that I had been born a woman.  Well, needless to say, I grew up in the 1960’s philosophy of feminism.  What effect did this dangerous and satanic philosophy have on my life?  It nearly cost me my marriage and my salvation.  Except for the infinite mercy of God and my husband’s patience, I would be a castaway.

I always loved God, and always searched for salvation.  I knew I was a sinner, but did not know how to find my way to God.  At the age of twenty-five, I purchased a Bible and began reading through it.  I found so many wonderful things in the Word, but I also found something, which, to my way of thinking, was terrible.  God expected women to obey their husbands!  How awful!  How could God do this?  Somehow, I knew I would have to accept this Bible truth if I was to really get saved.  What a quandary!  I loved the Lord, but I was angry with Him, and yet, I knew I had to lay all on the altar.  Can you see how this one book containing the seeds of feminism almost cost me eternal life?

Well, to make a long story short, I trusted God.  If God, Who created the universe, created the miracle of human life, and planned redemption through the death of His own Son, also designed the plan for womanhood, it must be right.  Even though I could not see it, I trusted God with His plan for my life.

Begrudgingly, I was going to be a keeper at home, and it was recipes and babies for me.  I wish I could tell you that once I yielded to the Lord to be a proper wife, the change occurred overnight.  It didn’t.  I had twenty-five years to unlearn.  I used to pray, “Lord, make me willing to be willing to be willing to yield my will to my husband’s.”  Over the years, through struggles and tears, I learned to give up my selfish ways.  And now, it is with joy, that I can truly be content in being a woman by God’s design and not the world’s design.

Through one book, Gone With the Wind, the evil one ignited the spark that would awaken in my heart the same desire that Eve had.  Eve only wanted to have knowledge and to be equal with her husband.  She could make decisions as well as Adam.  A book is not just a book.  It is an effective tool to enter into the mind of another.  A book plants thoughts into our minds.  The evil one is keeping thousands of women from salvation, because as young girls, their minds have been poisoned by feminist literature.  The evil one wants to destroy the biblical role for women.  If he can succeed, he can destroy the marriage relationship and destroy the children.  

My generation grew up on the Nancy Drew Series, Little Women (Jo was a feminist.) and Anne of Green Gables.  My daughter’s generation grew up on the Little House Series.  This generation is being fed the feminist philosophy of the Mandie Series and many similar series.  Biographies of missionaries and women, such as those by Sandy Dengler, have been written to capitalize on the feminist point of view.  These books are shaping the Christian women of tomorrow.  Will there even be any Christian women of tomorrow?  Our daughters are confused—they are being pulled three different ways.  The world does not hide its intentions.  The Girl Scouts and feminists through television and literature are pulling our daughters into the direction of pure feminism.

The second pull is coming from so-called “Christian” camps who teach our daughters to be equal with men, have a career, and/or serve the Lord through a full-time ministry, which keeps a woman out of the home.  This mixed message permeates much of what we know as Christian literature and sends the same old message as Gone with the Wind—leave the keeping at home to others, and do the really important, meaningful things, such as a full-time job or ministry.  And last, the third pull, which is God’s Word.  You know, that same old Bible stuff—obey your husband, be a keeper at home, and rear the children.  God’s Word should not be a difficult choice, but when we fill our minds and the minds of our daughters with the evil one’s books, the choice does not appear as clearly as it should.  The evil one likes to mix his error in with the purity of God’s Word, and make God’s Word appear to be undesirable.

As a woman, who has felt all three pulls and has tread all three paths, I can only say that God’s way, the plain, old-fashioned Bible way of being a submissive wife, is the best way of all.  Our God knows best, and He is to be trusted.  If you have a struggle with being a submissive, loving wife and accepting a woman’s role as God ordained it—pray and ask God who or what shaped your thoughts along the lines of womanhood.  Then compare the author or character with Scripture.  Was it biblical?  If not, it was not from God.  We can and must discard error and embrace truth.  It is essential to our Christian walk, and not only for ours, but for our daughters as well.  Our daughters are looking at our walk, not our talk.  “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he,” —Proverbs 23:7.  Books put thoughts into our hearts.  And so may I encourage you to be highly selective of what you read, and may you go with the Lord instead of being gone with the wind of feminism.

Susan

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