The weight of wings...

I just recently began reading Let Me Be a Woman by Elisabeth Elliot, and I can't get enough of it! Originally I was just going to read a chapter at night and maybe a chapter in the morning (the chapters are only about 2 pages) but it always ends up that I read a chapter or 2 at night and like 5 or 6 chapters in the morning. It's basically a bunch of letters that Elisabeth wrote to her daughter Valerie right before she got married. There are so many helpful truths in this book about womanhood, marriage, motherhood...and it's oh so easy to read ;) Here is my favorite chapter titled "The Weight of Wings"

Every creature of God is given something that could be called an inconvenience I suppose, depending on ones 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 thought 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 its 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 ago 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 here 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!' "

It reminds me of Psalm 139...He knit us together in our Mother's womb, surely no mistakes were made in that process. He even intends our limitations for our good.