Today I am guest posting for Esther Emery. I cannot express how much I adore having her in my life. She is asking all the hard questions, and speaking light into darkness, and being generally amazing and prophetic every day of her life. We are partners in our writing class, and you need to be totally jealous of me because I get a glimpse of the early version of her book and it is stunning. I would be completely jealous of her talent, but we are on the same team! So instead I just root for her like a maniac.

I am a feminist who is a member of a Southern Baptist church, in the buckle of the Bible belt. I have big feelings about submission. Put me in a pew, the preacher mentions submission and I start checking for the exits. My ears listen to every syllable as the heat rises in my neck and my skin itches. If the wi-fi works I start scrolling through my twitter feed. What box are they going to shove me into today? Please, just make it stop. Why is it that the wives submit part gets preached far more often than the submit to each other part? Those two passages are on the same page, just inches from each other.

Maybe it is because the wives part is easier; it is more controlled and containable. If the husbands say and the wives submit, then the traffic only runs one way, and no one runs into each other. If we are all submitting one to the other who knows when to stop and to go? How do we manage that? Won’t we all be stepping on each other’s toes all the time as we both go and then halt and then go and then brake like a bunch of newly licensed teens at a four-way stop? If everyone is submitting one to another, surely no one will get anywhere. An accident is guaranteed. One way traffic means far fewer accidents.

Read the rest here. And then poke around a little bit. You will not be dissapointed.