For the Sake of these Women: Bekah Beck
As an intern, I am endlessly learning to be grateful. Luckily for me, the Wesley offers plenty of opportunities for me to be taught. I have learned to be grateful for the presence of students in our building when there are no events. I’ve learned to be grateful for the funny videos and song recommendations that students send me at seemingly random times. I’ve learned to be grateful for the times they lean against my office door and tell me about their classes. God is opening my eyes to see the wonder that’s present in all of these small, everyday occurrences. In this year, specifically, I feel God opening my eyes to see the wonder present in womanhood.
The women at the Wesley this year are nothing short of incredible. It truly feels like God is showing me something significant through their collective witness. Historically, I have held nothing but disdain for the way God made me. My experience of womanhood has been marked with feelings of utter weakness and powerlessness. Over this past year, though, God has graciously begun the work of untangling the knot of my self-perception, and it began with the dove in Genesis 8:11. This verse in the HCSB version reads, “When the dove came to him at evening, there was a plucked olive leaf in her beak. So Noah knew that the water on the earth’s surface had gone down.” The use of the feminine pronoun “her” for the dove arrested my attention when I first read it. So, I read it over and over again. A few weeks passed by before I was able to meditate on any other passage. Even then, my mind consistently rolled around the odd specificity of the dove being female. “Why can’t I stop thinking about this?” I would wonder.
One day in June 2021, as I spent time praying over this persistent language, I felt something inside of me break, and I started crying. The realization that God considers the dove and does not hold her femininity against her hit me in the chest. Somehow, the fiction that my womanhood made me deficient – that God would much rather work with someone who wasn’t like me – had taken root in my heart. Though I had internalized so many lies about the value attached to my personhood, it was in the simplicity of Scripture that God kindly let those lies be seen for what they were. He celebrates the womanness found in me because He put it there. This work of learning how to be grateful for my womanhood – to celebrate it – has been my chief task over the past 8 months.
This celebration has felt like a great upheaval in many ways. God is actively reconstructing the way I view myself and the women around me. Instead of feeling shame, I feel intense joy and pride. Instead of always being hyper-vigilant about the power structures in the room, I am at peace with the places I occupy. My desire to consistently prove myself is waning because God Himself has already sealed me with His approval. This discovery of my womanhood is somehow making me more attentive to the gifts of the women around me. Akeena is gentle, Camellia is wise, Kaylee is faithful, and Mallory is steadfast. Courtney is trustworthy, Shay is patient, Emery is openhearted, Danielle is zealous, Essence is curious, Jamie is kind, Maddie is bold, Melissa is joyful, and Rachel is discerning.
It’s for the sake of these women that I feel even more compelled to recognize the gift of my own womanhood, and I am only now beginning to understand the witness of those Wesley women who have gone before me. How they were the embodiment of what I most deeply wanted – to be a full and whole Image Bearer. I give thanks for Kaiti, Alana, Khalilah, Laura, Emma, Chlese, Sarah, Emily, and so many others who have honored God by treasuring the way He made them. So, praise be to God who is kind and patient. Praise be to the One who will not leave me tangled up in falsehood. Praise be to the Master of the universe who has kept these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to His little daughters. Amen.
Bekah Beck (second from the right) currently serves as an intern at the Louisiana Tech Wesley Foundation. She loves sunshine, podcasts, and being a woman.