“Are we going fishing? Surely, we’re not saying women are staggeringly off balance?” This was the MW USA Communications Team recently discussing our messaging around gender. One of us spoke Lizzo’s lyric—“If you feel like a woman, then you real like a woman.”—and the rest of us got an exercise for our inner poets!
It came up again in a draft invitation for the upcoming Coffee & Conversation with the Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests. Attempting to address the potentially limiting welcome of our name, we mused: Every twenty-four hours the Earth rotates on its axis in front of the sun, dividing one aspect of our perception of time into night and day. There is rich darkness, and sparkling stars, and less congested roadways and there is brilliant light with its warming rays and food for the greenery, but there is no real binary dividing them. There are only infinite gradations of magically gorgeous in-between times where the sky paints and the rays shimmer and the shadows dance. Maybe this is like gender.
Beyond our name, there’s the character of our community. MW USA expresses solidarity with LGBTQIA siblings on social media. We find ourselves similarly seeking to be as we are, following our dreams and callings apart from the expectations that serve to reinforce harmful and anachronistic power structures. So, we have posted 1 John 4:7 over an LBGTQIA flag for Pride Month in June. This particular post has gone viral more than once with overwhelming appreciation and support.
Why does a fluid embrace of “women” resonate so? MW USA has long understood ourselves to be diverse in age, ethnicity, geography and theology, and in the same way, we sense ourselves to be diverse in gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. Let’s turn to 1 John, Chapter 4, starting at verse 7 with the first paragraph of that section titled, “God’s Love and Ours” in the NIV translation with “God” replacing the masculine pronouns for God:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed [God’s] love among us: God sent [God’s] one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that [God] loved us and sent [God’s] Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and [God’s] love is made complete in us.
Here at MW USA, we operationalize love as sisterhood among siblings. Sisterhood and this scripture both require every one of us. MW USA honors everyone’s story—especially making space for stories too long ignored—because we are all created in God’s image. We also can’t gather around the Bible, share inspiring resources, hold healing seminars, listen, give, make friends or cross divides in isolation. The scripture tells us it’s not enough to remain satisfied in God’s revelation of love to us. Love is not complete until we love one another, until we give and receive the love of God that lives in each one of us. Perhaps we resonate with the social media post because we collectively know that exchanging love from our authenticity (just as we are, just as we were made) brings us closer to the source of love.
May our God, who is love living in each one of us, hear our prayer. May we complete God’s love by living like Jesus and receiving from God’s glorious diversity. Together we seek to better understand and love the infinite gradations of magically gorgeous reflections of God in humans on Earth. Together we will engage the prophetic voice of all who feel like a woman.
This Grapevine devotional was written by Suzanne Ayer Lay
MW USA Administrative Assistant + Graphic Designer
