To understand the meaning of womanhood we have to start with God. If He is indeed “Creator of all things visible and invisible” He is certainly in charge of all things, visible and invisible, stupendous and miniscule, magnificent and trivial. God has to be in charge of details if He is going to be in charge of the overall design.
We sometimes hear the expression “the accident of sex,” as though one’s being a man or a woman were a triviality. It is very far from being a triviality. It is our nature. It is the modality under which we live all our lives; it is what you and I are called to be-called by God, this God who is in charge. It is our destiny, planned, ordained, fulfilled by an all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving Lord.
I had wanted a son. I had felt very sure that every man wants a son first, and it seemed logical to me to want the eldest to be a boy, an older brother, the firstborn, the heir. So we had prayed for a son and your father was quite certain that God would give him to us.
Your father was with me when you were born. I could see his face when the doctor said, “It’s a girl.” He smiled at me and said at once, “Her name is Valerie.” The nurse wrapped you in a little blanket and laid you where I could look into your face, and your eyes—darker blue then—were wide open, looking into mine. (How does a baby know to look at another’s eyes?) A person. Separate and independent now of me. My daughter.
Later they brought you to me and I held you, and then your father took you from my arms and held you close and said, “Little dolly!” He was not given to sentimentality or baby-talk, but there was no other way to describe how you looked-pink cheeks and lips, blue eyes, a silken fringe of light hair. Even the doctor and nurse, a husband and wife who had seven children of their own, said you were beautiful.
He was perfectly contented, I could see, to be the father of a daughter instead of a son. So I was content. It was God who had given you to us, God to whom our prayers for a son had been made, and God who knew reasons we did not then know that made His choice far better.
If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things. It is we, of course, to whom things look “little” or “big.” Amy Carmichael wrote:
There is no great with Thee, there is no small,
For Thou art all, and fillest all in all.
**Excerpt originally published in Let Me Be a Woman, pp. 8-9