Chapter 8: The Weight of Wings
THE WEIGHT OF WINGS
PERSPECTIVE makes all the difference in the world. If you catch even a glimpse of the divine design (and who can see more than a glimpse of any part of it?), you will be humbled and awed at least. I believe a true understanding of it will also make you grateful. But there are those to whom being a woman is nothing more than an inconvenience, to be suffered because it is unavoidable and to be ignored if at all possible. Their lives are spent pining to be something else. Every creature of God is given something that could be called an inconvenience, I suppose, depending on one’s perspective. The elephant and the mouse might each complain about his size, the turtle about his shell, the bird about the weight of his wings. But elephants are not called upon to run behind wainscots, mice will not be found “pacing along as though they have an appointment at the end of the world,” turtles have no need to fly nor birds to creep. The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitations. And as the bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird —up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom —so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling —wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.
You have heard me tell of Gladys Aylward, the “Small Woman” of China, whom I heard speak many years go at Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta. She told how when she was a child she had two great sorrows. One, that while all her friends had beautiful golden hair, hers was black. The other, that while her friends were still growing, she stopped. She was about four feet ten inches tall. But when at last she reached the country to which God had called her to be a missionary, she stood on the wharf in Shanghai and looked around at the people to whom He had called her.
“Every single one of them,” she said, “had black hair. And every single one of them had stopped growing when I did. And I said, ‘Lord God, You know what you’re doing!’ ”