TLP 488: Girl Defined | Kristen Clark Interview

Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting.

I'm your host, A .M. Brewster, and I never thought we'd reach the place where a high-profile group of people would be incapable of defining what a woman is. Well, we are there. In fact, what is a woman is a question that is making some people and breaking others.

And as Christians, it's a question that we absolutely need to be able to answer because God was the one who created women. And that's what my guest and I are going to do today. Kristen and her sister, Bethany, head up a ministry called Girl Defined, and I believe Kristen's and my conversation today is going to be very helpful as you help your daughters define themselves the way God does, not the way the world does.

And speaking of defining things God's way, I encourage you to check out the Celebration of God podcast. Visit CelebrationofGod .com and make sure you subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast service.

You're not going to want to miss a single episode. And while you're online, be sure to head over to TruthLoveParent .com, where you'll find resources to help you better worship God in your parenting. And now, what is a woman?

So welcome, Kristen, to the show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. And I love how you made sure to keep all the guys around. And I will tell you that we have had guys read this book, dads and young men, because they're like, I want to learn more about women because I'm going to either marry one or, you know, I have sisters or I have a mom.

And so, hey, it can be a book for everyone.

Girl Defined and the Calling to Understand Womanhood

It is. And I'm about to tell a story here in a couple of minutes that will show you how I kind of ended up reading this. So you guys listening, like, why is he reading a book called Girl Defined? There's a reason.

It's a funny reason. I'll tell you in a second. But first, Kristen, I'd love for you to tell us more about yourself, about your sister and about the rest of your.

Family. Yeah. So Girl Defined is a ministry of my sister, Bethany, and I founded back in 2014. And our passion from the beginning has been to help young women understand God's design for womanhood. And so it started out as a little blog.

We had no idea what we were doing. We're like everybody back then, I'm going to start a blog. And so we started it with this passion to help young women understand God's design as we were still learning and growing in it.

But we just saw the beauty and impact that understanding his design had in our lives. And we were so compelled to want to share it with others. We are the oldest of five sisters. I guess I'm the oldest right below me.

So just, you know, we're a family of girls and the girl issues. And I remember what it's like being young. It's so hard. You struggle with so much. You're longing for answers and you just want to know, does God's word have anything to say about the things I'm facing right now?

So that's where it started. And it started out as a blog and then ended up turning into a YouTube channel. A publisher found us, some books came about. We recently launched a podcast, a conference. It's just cool to see what God does with the meager efforts that we bring and how he just multiplies.

So that's a little bit about the ministry. I've been married to my husband, Zach, for almost 10 years. We don't have any kids, not because we don't want them, but God just hasn't given them to us. And it's been a whole nother journey of just infertility and trusting God with his timing.

And he's grown me a lot through that as well. But I am a Texas born and raised girl.

So I'm pretty proud of that too. You said five girls in the family. Is that right?

Five girls and three boys. So big family. We're a big Texas family.

Yes. I forgot from the book, you mentioned the boys. You talk about your sisters quite a bit, but I forget about those boys. Now, before we talk too much about this book, and I do, I want to talk to it again.

Like I said earlier, I kind of alluded to it. I kind of need to confess something to you. So Truth Love Parents book review team is always very busy. Okay. We have new and old titles being sent to us all the time.

Actually, this particular book was written longer ago than I thought it was. I thought, you know, like I always like to be like when it just comes out, you know, be one of the first people to get an interview, but this book has been out since 2016.

Yeah. When it comes to the review system, our experiences are kind of a mixed bag when it comes to the books that we read. So recently I was reading a book that even though, you know, I made it through the first couple of chapters before setting it aside, I knew from the first paragraph of the foreword that I wasn't going to be able to support this work.

However, many of the books we're receiving these days are actually fantastic. And I'm finding more and more of the books that we're getting are really great. And I like to joke, especially when I'm on podcasts with other people and I'm giving interviews and whatnot, that I find myself reading a lot of mom books because I just do.

That's probably most of my reading. Well, when this book came across my desk, I did not want to read it. I wasn't judging it by its cover or anything like that. I just believe there had to be someone else who would be a better choice to read through a book called Girl Defined.

It was even if it were a mom book, like mom books talks about parenting and parenting is one of those things that, you know, guys do too. And there's a lot of crossover. But I told Kristen before we started recording, basically I was sitting there going, anybody else want to read this?

Any takers? Anybody, anybody at all going once going, you know, I was, I was trying to decide, you know, who else could read this? But there wasn't anybody. The Lord wanted me to read it and I'm so glad that he did.

So I really wasn't prepared to learn about my, my God ordained biblical femininity. I just really wasn't prepared for that. And so that's my confession. That's how it all started. I really didn't want to read the book because I'm not a girl, but like I said, I am so extremely glad that I did read it.

I'm not kidding. Okay. About this. It was providential that I was the one to review the book. I'm explain a little bit more in a minute, unpack this a little bit as we go along, but before I do go ahead and tell us a little bit of what I know, what prompted you to start the ministry Girl Defined.

And obviously this has grown from that, but specifically as you and Bethany were writing this book, it kind of explained to us your calling and how the Lord.

Counterfeit Femininity and the Lies of the Culture

Guided you to write this particular book. Yeah. You know, just being a woman myself and growing up in this culture, I remember, and still, still today face so many messages that are counter to God's word about what it means to be a woman.

And, you know, I was very intrigued by the modeling scene when I was young and I had had people, um, from the time I had a little girl and I shared this whole story and Girl Defined offer me modeling jobs, like, Hey, we want you to work for our company.

And they would hand me their business card. And my parents were like, Oh, we're just not so sure about the modeling scene for our daughter. You know, there's just a lot of pitfalls. And especially as a young, impressionable young Christian girl that they're trying to raise, they just weren't a fan of it.

But when I got to my later teens, a company approached me and they said, Hey, we're family friendly. Um, we would love to hire you, you know, are you interested? And I was like, uh, you know, I am, but here are some of my stipulations.

And I said, like, if I, you know, I, I need to be able to wear what I want to wear and not feel like pressured to wear what you want me to wear. And I'm just different things. And they said, Oh, for sure.

Like if you're ever uncomfortable, you can back out of a job, you can deny a job, whatever. So I was like, this seems too good to be true. So I took the job and for one year I was in this modeling world.

And you know, it was so eyeopening to me because as I was wrestling with my own insecurities as a woman, trying to understand God's design, but hearing these messages of, you know, beautiful women are more confident.

They're more valuable. They have more worth. They're more accepted. Um, you know, being popular matters so much and just, where's my identity? Like, who am I? And all these questions. And I remember thinking, wow, now that I'm a model, all of that's going to go away.

I am going to be the most confident. I'm not going to have any insecurities. I know who I am, you know, kind of thing. And I tell you that year in the industry was so eyeopening and revealing because I became more insecure, um, with who I was.

I became more confused about my identity. I was placing all of my worth and value in the opinions of others. And so when I would get a job, I felt good when I would not get a certain job, I would feel really bad and rejected.

I became more self-consumed and just obsessed with my outward appearance. And I remember after that one year thinking I am way more worse off now, way worse off now than I was before I even started this and way more confused.

And so I got out of it and I was like, I don't want that. You know, that just wasn't the path for me. And I, for the first time really dug into God's word. You know, I grew up in church, I grew up in a Christian family, so I understood a lot, but I just didn't understand a lot about God's design for women, for womanhood specifically.

And so that's when I went on kind of a journey biblically just to discover what is God's design for me? What does it mean to be a woman? Where do I find my worth and identity? What does God say about true beauty and really learning?

And I will tell you those few years of just digging in God brought so much freedom and purpose and joy back into my life as I got on His track for womanhood. So I've just experienced it so personally, and I see other women in that place that I was, young women, and I just want to, I want to help them so much because God's design is so beautiful.

I think it's interesting that your story and my story actually have a lot of unique touching points. Yes, I'm not a female and I didn't grow up in Texas, but it's interesting that even when we grow up in a Christian home and we go to church, we love the Bible, we read the Bible, sometimes it takes one of those hard life-changing moments for us to really act like we believe the Bible, like, okay, oh, so there's everything we need for life and godliness.

Like I knew that, but now it's so real to me because I had a similar situation. It wasn't until I suffered a pretty significant breakup trauma, right, when I was in college that I found myself turning to the scriptures, like, you know, like, well, she said she loved me, and now she said she doesn't love me, but I thought the Bible said that love was, you know, eternal, and so now I'm digging in to find the answers because I realized I didn't have them at that particular moment.

Maybe I wasn't remembering them or not believing them, and you went through a similar thing. It took that scenario, even though you were a female who had lived 16, 17 years in a Christian home and been taught and had a Christ-honoring mother who was modeling for you, it took that experience for you to go, man, I need to understand God's Word, and I just want to say just an aside here to parents, don't think that that's not going to happen with your kids, okay?

Yes, teach them. Definitely teach them how to be a woman that loves the Lord. Teach them how to be a man that follows after God. Use this book when teaching your daughters, and use this book to teach your sons what type of a woman he should be looking for, but also understand that there's a very good possibility it's going to take some hardship or some difficulty in their life that's really going to drive them back to the Scriptures, but if you're a parent who's always doing everything you can to protect your child from those difficulties and those hardships, and they don't have them, and they're never forced to really dig into the Scriptures and look for answers themselves, you start to have an issue.

So instead of protecting our kids from everything, we want to prepare them to answer it, and so the beautiful thing is that Kristen knew where to find the answers. She knew to figure out who she was as a woman, she needed to go to the Scriptures.

So anyway, that was all coming to me as you were talking. I'm so glad you shared that story with us, and I'm really glad that you and your sister...

Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, it's so true what you're saying, because, you know, if you think about it as Christians growing up today, you think about how much discipleship we're getting in the church, or from our parents, or from godly mentors, like so often it's such a small percentage compared to how much influence we're taking in from the world.

And so you think, oh, a couple hours a week, you know, on Sunday, and a little bit here and there, like that's not enough. You know, I say like the world is discipling us all the time as men and women.

It is telling us who we are, and what we should think, and what we should believe, and what's right, and what's wrong. We are constantly being discipled by the world, and so if we aren't, whether parents or young people, so intentional to say, yeah, there's a lot of messages, and in fact they're pretty appealing, like they're pretty enticing, but what does God's word say?

What does he say is true and right? Who does he say I am? How does he call me to live? And until we really get serious in our own faith, or just recognize as parents, like I have to be so intentional to make sure my children are being discipled, getting truth, it's hard.

It's hard being a young person today, I think, with social media, just in general, the pressures are, they're so strong, and they're right there at our fingertips.

They're just available and speaking to us every day. Oh, so true. Amen. And I'm so very glad that you and Bethany both submitted to the Lord to write this book. Again, I just want to say I did love it, and here I'm going to tell you why, okay?

So I found the book to be winsome and wise, as I would expect. I believe that a book that's Christ-honoring, that's going to glorify God and help other people, needs to be. It's also biblical, and it's necessary, meaning the content in there is stuff that we need to be talking about, okay?

But I loved it primarily because I realized at least in my own mind, what a great tool it could be for me specifically in parenting my daughter. Now, before I continue, I am curious, what age did you imagine would be your core.

Preparing Daughters for Biblical Womanhood at Any Age

Demographic when you guys wrote this book? That's such a funny question, because our publisher, they said, you know, we only publish to 18 and older, and our target audience is like 13 and older. And so we were like, ooh, is this going to be a problem?

And they said, no, just write it to the 18 and older crowd, but write it in a way that the younger girls can relate to as well. And so we were like, okay. So it's kind of a question, but I think really any young woman, and I will tell parents, hey, if your daughter's 10, 11, 12, she is not too young to start learning about God's design for womanhood, because she has questions.

I guarantee, I remember being 9, 10, 11. You see those magazines at the grocery store when you're with your mom, and you see these big, bold words, and you're going, what does that mean? What is that?

And you have questions, and you're curious, and you're already starting to form your worldview from a very young age. And so I encourage parents, don't wait until they're older or until they start openly asking questions.

Catch them when they're young. And so this book can be a great resource for parents to use as a discipleship tool for their daughters, whether they're teens or even younger, to say, hey, let's learn about.

God's design for your life as a girl. Yeah. And I'm not surprised to hear that, first of all, that the publishing agency was wanting to kind of focus more on the older girls. But at the same time, to me, it definitely resonated that it could very easily work for the younger girls.

And that's what I told my wife. That's what I told my sister. My sister's actually listening to it. She's listening to the book, and she's been enjoying it a lot too. In her mind, she's thinking, you know, because our daughters are in the 11, 12 range.

My niece just turned 12. A friend of mine, their daughter's about in the same range. And because she's listening to it, thinking about her daughter. I was reading it, thinking about my daughter. And my daughter's 11.

She's going to be 12 this October. And in our home, we believe very strongly that a child needs to start transitioning to adulthood way before they turn 18. If you wait until they're turning 18, you have wasted so much time.

My son, he turned 13 last year, and we had this whole manhood ceremony for him, where a bunch of male family members and mentors took some time to challenge him and to celebrate his transition out of childhood into adulthood.

And we're planning to do the same thing with my daughter. And my wife and I were on a walk today, talking about this concept, specifically, how do we prepare her for this transition from childhood into adulthood?

And then how do we work her from young adult to more mature? And I personally thought after reading it, that Girl Defined could be a great facet of preparing her for that transition because it deals with so many important and like you said, very timely topics that girls her age definitely are dealing with.

I mentioned earlier that again, any dads listening needed to keep listening, because I understand how a lot of men feel very ill-equipped to teach their daughters how to be God-honoring women. I'm not saying that response is correct.

I just understand it. I understand how they have that struggle. But to be honest, it bothers me. It bothers me when guys kind of relegate certain things to their wives. Oh, that's a wife thing. That's a mom thing.

You know, I don't really talk to my daughters about that. And I think that's really sad, because I think I know that God put us into our children's lives for a reason. And I have something valuable to speak into my daughter's femininity, just like my wife has something very valuable to speak into my son's masculinity.

So what happens anyway, is that these men put that responsibility solely on the mother. And obviously, mom needs to be totally involved. But again, I believe that dad needs to be as well. And this book can be used to not only help prepare dads and moms to teach their daughters what the Bible says about being a godly woman, but husbands can also use this book to help their wives grow in God's plan for them as well.

Because it doesn't matter if you're in your 20s, or your 30s, or your 40s, there are temptations. Like Kristen said, the world is lying to you. And men, you need to be washing your wife with the Word, with God's Word.

And there is so much of God's Word in here in the applications, really easy to grasp and understand, and to help the ladies in our lives. So obviously, I believe that women of any age will benefit from studying more about what God wants them to be.

So I wanted to share that with you. And I wanted to share that with our listeners, because I don't know how many other dads, you know, would have considered reading this book. But I believe there's tons of value for the whole family, especially the men of the house, and then the wives, and the mothers, and the daughters.

Now, as I kind of mentioned, my wife and I are discussing inviting two of our good mom friends and their almost 13-year-old daughters to do a book study with my wife and my daughter. I'm so excited about them doing this together that I really wanted to be part of it.

But I do think in this particular situation, I'll just leave the book study to my wife. So anyway, that was my personal journey with your book. I don't know how many other people have had the same experience.

You mentioned that some guys have definitely read it. And I hope you're encouraged that the Lord used this book in my family in a way that you may not have originally expected when you wrote it. Yes, I am.

Now, let's go ahead and dig into the book a little bit more. Let's talk a little bit more about the details. Personally, I loved the first part of the book because you do a fantastic job showing how, like you mentioned, the world lies to us about femininity.

How the Culture Lies About Femininity and Sexuality

The whole first part was just fantastic. And it took me a minute as I was going through. I was like, you know what? They're not really providing the answers yet. They're just detailing the problem. And that's really actually a fantastic way of going about it.

I'm glad you did that. So let me ask you this. Specifically, how is the world lying to our girls? How is the world lying to our women?

Yeah, we unpack three pillars early on. We call it counterfeit femininity. You've done me wrong. And it's just popular messages that are so accepted. And I would say very, very much in Christian circles as well.

And there are these messages that we as women are like, we need to be liberated from any form of traditional femininity, traditional family. Like we just need to be liberated from all of that and pave our own way, find our own truth, make ourselves happy, follow our hearts.

And it's very much a message that centered on self and us discovering ourselves and just being liberated from anything that we would ever see in God's word. And as Christians, we have to rewind and go, well, what is my ultimate purpose as a Christian?

It's to glorify God. It's to reflect him. And so if I don't understand who he created me to be, or I forget what my bullseye is to glorify him, then I'm going to get totally swept up in these messages that are coming from most celebrities, young girls who are online on social media.

They're seeing it from all of their peers. They're seeing it from influencers, the movies they watch. I mean, the books they're reading, it is just a message that's permeating every angle of their life.

If they're just living in this world and soaking up the messages of the world. And so that's a huge lie, but one that sounds so good. You just follow your truth. You just pursue what feels good for you as a woman.

Ditch all of that old fashioned thinking. The Bible is so outdated. There's so much more the world has to offer. And it's ironic, doesn't that sound very similar to the message that Satan brought to Eve in the garden?

Are you sure God said that? Are you sure that's what's right? Have you considered this? This is so much better. And it's the same old.

Lie just packaged in a new way for us today. Definitely. So what's another lie that we.

Encounter? Yeah. There's so much about sexuality right now going on in our culture. It's even more intense than ever. Even when we wrote this book, a lot has changed over the past few years, but that's another lie.

Just that sexual freedom, sexual autonomy. It's my body and I can do with it whatever I want. And that's the message that our young women are receiving. And they're being told like, yeah, sex is for you to enjoy and to embrace however you want to do it with whoever you want.

It's all about you. Um, there shouldn't be any boundaries. There shouldn't be any restrictions. You know, if someone tells you, um, to save sex for marriage, that's oppressive language. And that's what our young women are hearing.

And there's just so the, the sexualized content that they're consuming without even trying. I mean, you just, like I mentioned earlier, checking out at the grocery store and you just glance over and see these magazines that are so sexualized with these provocative messages, you know, intentionally done that way or toward attracting young women, teenagers.

Um, it's just so sad, but the messages are blatant in their face. And so if we don't have a biblical understanding of sexuality, then yeah, it's going to be so easy just to follow our hearts and follow the world because that's, what's normal.

That's what's trending. That's what everyone around them is doing. And as you were talking, I was flipping.

Through my copy here. I went to one of my dog-eared pages and I found some of my, uh, my highlighting and I highlighted this. Ultimately, and you were talking at this point about some people that you knew that you grew up with, that you went to church with, uh, that these people walked away from God and you wrote, ultimately, it wasn't their wrong decisions that led them down that road.

It was their wrong thinking. It started the first time they questioned God's word. It started the first time they believed a small lie. And these lies that we're talking about are not small lies. They're huge lies.

Um, they're, they are, like you said, they're making us want to question God's word. And, and sometimes it's not even questioning God's word. Sometimes it's a situation where we're just not thinking about God's word at all.

This is the environment I live in. And I just accept all of this as truth. And I'm not even comparing and contrasting it with God's word. So powerful and so absolutely necessary. So Kristen just talked about how the culture lies to our girls.

Okay. But Kristen, in your opinion, is there ever a time it's okay to maybe go with.

The cultural flow? You know, I would say these days, it's going to be rare. Um, as Christians, we are more and more finding ourselves swimming against the cultural flow. You know, I, we, when we talk to young women, we often use this analogy that if you're not intentionally pursuing God's word wholeheartedly, constantly searching his, his word for answers and truth.

Um, it's like we're swimming in a, like a river. And if we're just passive about it, like, Oh, I go to church. I'm a Christian. We are automatically getting pushed downstream, pushed in the cultural flow.

You have to be intentionally pursuing God's word, which is swimming upstream these days. Culturally. Um, if you're going to pursue him, you can't just be like, Oh, I'll just somehow transform into a godly woman one day.

Like, no, it doesn't happen. We have sinful hearts and we are, um, you know, prone to be deceived. And that's, that's something we all have to battle. But, um, if we're not intentionally pursuing God's word, then I think the cultural flow is almost, it's hard for me to think of any case where the cultural flow, what's popular is in line with God's word.

I mean, these days it's hard to really think of many examples.

Definitely. Now every now and then you've got, you know, styles and fads and things like that. We're both using zoom and that's really a big cultural thing right now. Um, obviously some things can be redeemed for God, but I definitely believe that when it comes to the stuff, like what you're talking about, where, where we're identifying ourselves, we're, we're defining ourselves.

That's all wrong. It's just wrong. And I, I am a biblical counselor. And so many times in my counseling, I hear people using the excuses that the world is crammed. Yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but, and I'm going, but the problem is what you're saying is no, God's word is not going to work in this.

Uh, we need something else. And every single one of those are alive. Every single one.

The Sufficiency of God's Word Against the World's Lies

Yeah. The word is sufficient and we have to believe that, you know, it starts with faith. Like, okay. God's word says that it is sufficient for all things. Like I can go to his word and I'm going to find what I need for godliness.

And I have to trust him. And then I have to do the work to go find that. Right. It doesn't just appear in your brain. Like it's not going to happen.

Accidentally. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yes. Now, one of the things my wife and I appreciate it about girl defined is that you don't simplify biblical femininity down to just getting married and having kids.

That was one of the first questions she asked. I was reading the book and she, and she hadn't, and she was like, she was kind of like looking over my shoulder. Like, what do they say? And I told her that.

And she was very surprised because you know, a lot of other resources do that. But you suggest that women can be everything God created them to be, even if perhaps they aren't married or they don't have kids.

And that really should thrill our listeners and their daughters. Not because getting married or having kids is bad. Okay. I'm sure that we could both argue that they're wonderful gifts from God, but because not everyone can or does get married or have kids.

So Kristen, how does that work? What does biblical femininity look like for a single woman or a wife without children? Yeah. You know, this was when we wrote.

This book, I think it was so, it was just God's timing all around because my sister, Bethany was completely single, um, wanting to get married, but there weren't any guys on the horizon. I was married, but didn't have any children, um, and was wrestling through seasons of infertility.

So really that struggle of like, Oh man, God made me as a woman. And I know having children is, you know, a heritage and I want to pursue this good gift and blessing, but God's not giving it to me. So I kind of went through a little bit of an identity crisis myself of like, what does it mean to be a woman?

You know? Um, and so I feel like God really used each of our seasons as we were writing about biblical womanhood to challenge our perspectives of biblical womanhood to not be just, Oh, a godly woman gets married and has children.

Like that's what it means to be a woman. Just like you're saying. And because neither of us were in either of those seasons of having kids or for my sister being married, it really challenged us to dig deeper and go, okay, what, you know, if biblical womanhood is for every woman, then it has to be for women who aren't married or for women who don't have children.

So what is it? As we dug in, we came up with three floors, you know, we were studying Genesis and we were looking all throughout the godly women, um, in the Bible, Proverbs, Titus, like we're trying to find every passage about womanhood and just try to understand what is God's heart.

And so as we were doing this, we came up with three different pillars. And the first pillar is that she helps others. I'm sorry, my dog is barking a lot in the background.

That really is okay. It is totally fine. What kind of dog do you have? What kind of dog do you have? That depends on what it makes it okay or not. Well, she's a multi poo. So I don't know how small, cute little white dogs.

See, my family always defined that as dog food. So your dog food is barking. That might be a problem. If you had a dog barking, it would be okay. But your cat's.

Barking. I had a feeling something like that was coming. It's totally okay. I don't know if my husband just got home. Okay. Well, it's totally fine. Let's talk about, we might cut it out,.

But we might also leave it. We could possibly leave it because, you know, the audience is getting such a high view of you. They need to realize that you're just a normal person. You.

She has a faux dog. Right. Well, now, now they know apparently a lot more than they bargained.

For. So they do. All right. Well, let's get back to the pillar. Yeah. She helps others. Now, normally, you know, you think help and you're thinking Genesis, right. Help me a wife for the.

Man. But you expand on that idea. We do. And you know, it is foundational biblically because we do see in Genesis before God had formed any humans, what did he do? He intentionally made a man and he gave him jobs.

And he said, here, I'm going to put you in this garden. He gave him rules. Here's the animals don't eat this tree. Then he brought the woman onto the scene and he calls her his helper. And that word is one that a lot of women and even young women will cringe at like, Ooh, I don't want to be a helper because we have been taught that we just need to do our own thing.

We need to be independent, you know, girl bosses, like I'm not helping anyone I'm helping myself. And it's this mindset that has us to cringe at even being called a helper. But in fact, this is a powerful word.

It's not a word that is putting the woman under the man in the sense of worth and dignity and value. God created the man and woman to be equally valuable, but purposely different in role and function.

There's, there's a distinction there, but it's complimentary. It's beautiful. It was God's intentional design. And so that same word that God uses for helper, he also uses for the Holy spirit and saying that the Holy spirit is our helper.

So it's a very high and Holy word as we say, and it's a beautiful word. And one that we need to start as women, we need to dig deeper and not just hear words and have a cultural lens and go, Ooh, I don't like the way that feels, but we need to say, you know, God loves women.

He loves men. He created us. So what does it mean when he says that she, he created a helper for the man? What does that mean? Let me try to understand God's heart and God's purpose and his intention here and, and dig deeper.