Welcome back, friend. I am Morgan, and this episode kicks off the first of a new series called Resurrection Women.
As we near the Christian calendar’s observance and celebration of Christ’s resurrection, I wanted to talk to a few women who are doing the hard and holy work of empowering women – not with some manmade or culturally prescribed sense of power, but a power that is traced back to the life of Christ, the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ – and what his life and his death and the power of his resurrection mean for women. By redeeming and restoring what has historically been lost or stolen from many of us as women, my prayer is that the conversations and reflections that we have together in this Resurrection Women series will fill you with a joy and a peace as you trust in God, or learn to trust in God again, so that you may overflow with a HOPE that can only given to us by the POWER of the holy spirit.
My first conversation in this series is with Tiffany Bluhm, and we talk about when silence is not spiritual and the importance of us as believers and as a church to be able to welcome the honest and uncomfortable stories of women and our shared experiences with another – and actually be believed. Sadly, the church has a long history of silencing us and that must change. Tiffany has written a book that I’m praying will start to shift the conversation in how we honor and dignify the voices of women. Because the church, of all places should be a place of refuge and of healing, and not a place of harm. And the church body, of all people, should be a safe people to bring our whole selves and our whole stories to, a people who value our voices rather than silence them.
Tiffany is the author of multiple bible studies and books, including one that just released this month called Prey Tell: Why We Silence Women Who Tell the Truth and How to Speak Up. Tiffany is the cohost of the podcast Why Tho and speaks at conferences and events around the world. Tiffany is committed to encouraging people of faith to live with conviction, substance and grace. As a minority, immigrant woman with an interracial family, Tiffany is passionate about inviting all to the table of faith, equality, justice and dignity.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Prayer:
God of Tamar
And of Hagar
And Of Dinah
God of Lot’s daughter
And an unnamed concubine
And Bathsheba
We cry out in grief for what has been stolen from your daughters.
For the fear that they must have felt.
For the pain that was brought upon them in their powerlessness.
May we be sad.
May we be angry.
May we lament.
And may you make your presence known to us and with us as we sit with the knowledge of the abuse of so many women who have come before us. Bring those women to our mind now as we pray.
Now bring to mind those whose stories we may have downplayed, or not taken seriously. Those whom we have doubted. Those whom we did not want to believe.
Forgive us God.
May we have the fortitude to better love them. To lift up their voices. To advocate wrong to be made right.
And to better love you and your children as we do.
May we look to you, Jesus, as we seek to love one another better.
May we look to you, Jesus, as we make room for the history of our foremothers.
May we look to you, Jesus, as we learn to listen to our sisters.
May we look to you, Jesus, as we seek to raise up our daughters.
Jesus, born of a women
Jesus, who waits for the Samaritan woman at a well
Jesus, who let’s a lesser woman touch his feet
Jesus, you see the silently suffering. And you meet us.
You see our anguish and you believe us.
You see us wounded and limping, and you heal us.
You see us reaching out for help, and you stop. And you look for us.
Jesus. Your banner over us is love.
We give thanks to your love, oh God.
We give thanks for the breath you have breathed into our lungs.
Breathe life back into the voices of your beloved.
So that we, too, can practice resurrection. And practice resurrection.
And keep practicing resurrection again and again and again.
And to the one’s laying hopeless and lifeless,
May we be perpetual slingers of hope
And bringers of this resurrection life.
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