The Bible isn’t the only thing that prominent teacher and speaker Beth Moore has taught in her decades of ministry. Back in the day, she taught aerobics in a church gym. Looking back on it, she remembers two things: leg warmers and women coming to know Christ.
Sarah Young, the recently deceased author of Jesus Calling, didn’t start out as a world-renowned author. The wife of a missionary to Japanese people in Australia, Young suffered from chronic illnesses that, at times, kept her in her room for 20 hours a day. Prior to that, before she even came to know Jesus, Young’s college philosophy classes had led her to believe that life was absurd, even meaningless.
It’s easy to look at prominent Christian women and think they just came into the world exactly as they are right now. Or, at least, we might think they knew from the time they were little girls that God had a great, public work for them to do. But the fact is, Jesus meets us in the places where we are—whether we are full of faith in a sweaty gym or faithless in a college classroom.
May we take heart in the stories of women whose lives are as nuanced, varied, and complex as our own, trusting that God weaves beautiful stories from threads of all kinds.
