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Too many of us miss our goals and live beneath our privilege because we've allowed our emotions to dominate us. An actual Christian sister is self-controlled. She is patient. She is often silent--yes, silent, as Paul admonished. She is at peace with herself and on a journey with God she will not allow to be disturbed by LeRoy and his after-shave. What separates us from animals, what makes us more like God, is not our passion but our ability to bring those instincts and desires under submission to our intellect.

If I could say one thing to my sisters,

I mean, if you refuse to hear anything else from me, my prayer would be that you hear this: get a grip on your emotions. If I could share one thing with my sisters, I mean, not preaching, not judging, just trying to love on you the way each of us desires to be loved, craves to be loved, then, in love, I would beg you—down on my knees if I had to—to please hear me: get a grip on your emotions. God has endowed you, blessed you, ordained you to have an intellect. That intellect tells you right from wrong, good from evil, brilliant idea from stupid move. But most every sister I know—and I don’t mean to sound racist but certainly most every *black* sister I know—routinely abandons her God-given intellect and common sense in favor of giving her life, the lives of her children, and the future of her family over to her emotions. Stop what you’re doing, right now, and consider all the choices you’ve made in your life based not upon reason but upon emotion, passion, and urges. Emotion should be liberating, exhilarating. Emotion allows us to taste the best and suffer the worst of life.

But, emotion is largely a visceral response to stimuli; even dogs have emotion. What separates us from animals, what makes us more like God, is not our basic instinct but our ability to bring those instincts and desires under *submission* to our intellect. Emotion infantilizes and exploits. Intellect empowers and liberates. Too many of us miss our goals and live beneath our privilege because we’re slaves to the former.

I want to rush to say my sisters are not alone in this. I know a great many brothers, including many, many pastors, with hair-trigger tempers and attention deficits that have them evading logic and reason like it was a paternity suit. The phenomena with which I am more concerned is not the histrionic unthinking male—a demographic from which this writer is not excluded—but the thoughtful, intelligent, capable, remarkable, enlightened black woman who nonetheless chooses to lose her mind and go running after ice cream trucks whenever she hears the bell ring.

Most sisters I’ve ever known can’t tell time, don’t know what time it is in their lives. They simply rush headlong into whatever situation, whatever predicament, whatever mess comes along. Oh, but I love him. Sisters: get a grip. That's God's plan you're messing up. They were fourteen and thought it was time to start a family. Their emotions overwhelming them, they craved love and ran their little kid lives off of emotion and Pavlovian responses—chasing the ice cream truck when they heard the music playing. Intellect tells you the Ice Cream Man is trying to get paid: he’ll wait for you, there’s absolutely no reason to ever run after his truck. Intellect tells you real love is patient but teenage boys are not. Teenage boys aren’t interested in starting a family, but that’s what they do because my sisters let them do it. Because they ignored every word Mama ever told them and laid across their schoolbooks in some ridiculous effort to hang onto JoJo—a stupid boy they won’t even be talking to three months later when the test results come back.

Most every sister I knew in junior high or high school was incredibly easy. As a result, most every sister I know is dragging around some hatred for a brother. That hate holds my sister in bondage; she gives up her power to her emotion, just as she did long before, back when she called that emotion “love.” Whether love or hate, bondage is still bondage and bondage results in powerlessness.

A woman’s body, her allure, is her most lethal weapon. Silly girls, lazy and undisciplined, unilaterally disarm themselves with childbirth and fried food. The mature sister treats her body like the Temple of the Holy Ghost; she keeps the thieves out.

A brother will always crave that which he cannot have, those whom he cannot dominate. The easy girls were easy to spot. They were loud, all up in everybody’s business, often vulgar and incredibly obvious. They liked it and they wanted it as often as they could get it.

God’s woman, by contrast, is independent, mature, thoughtful. Slow to speak, quick to listen, and never, ever tells anyone outside of God Himself what she truly feels.

Foolish little girls think having a baby is the way to keep her “man.” A wise woman knows a baby is often the fastest way to lose one. A foolish mother exhausts herself in courtrooms seeking revenge on Baby Daddy. A wise sister knows the best way to provide for her children is to keep Daddy from leaving in the first place.

Chasing The Ice Cream Truck: Snap judgments, finishing my sentences, closed to new ideas,
presuming she knows what I'm going to say, more invested in winning the fight than solving the problem.

Being Heard

Most sisters I’ve ever met refuse to hear anything I have to say. My words just bounce off their force field as they go on being ridiculous and making ridiculous choices, sometimes just to spite me. I’ll show him, I’ll go on being ridiculous even though I know what I am doing is inefficient and/or stupid. Like one sister I know who hates her husband so much she adamantly refuses to give him a divorce. Even though she lives in another city and they haven’t been together in a decade, she’s staying married to him out of spite; just to prevent him from remarrying. This seems logical to her.

I'm not saying sister doesn't have a case, doesn't have a valid reason or right to be angry. I'm saying she should not allow her anger to run her. Most sisters I know brace against most anything any man has to say, mainly because she resents the idea of some man running her. Yet these very same women routinely allow their emotion—love, hate, anger—to run them. Be angry, Paul wrote, [but] sin not. Being angry is human. Living our life solely to make someone else suffer is not only childish, it strips you of power; you're giving that man enormous power in your life.

I’m never trying to run sister’s life. I’m here to help, here to support, here to listen. Maybe if I was taller, thinner, younger or better looking. Most sisters I know are very much like children or, at best, adolescents: they’d take me more seriously if I had money or if they were sexually attracted to me. It’s insane, but that’s the ninth-grade recess level of logic most sisters I know employ in their lives. They process every decision, every logical choice, through their vagina; the level of sexual attraction they feel toward the male trying to speak to them directly impacts their ability to hear that person.

Their vanity insists any conversation I have for them is prelude and, consequently, their simply listening to what I have to say is some manner of acquiescence to a sexual advance. They learned that in high school where, for the most part, that axiom was true. But, we’re grown-ups, now. The common stereotype of Madea or Aunt Esther should shame my sisters: no one wants to be thought of as a joke. But neither satire would be funny if there weren’t truth in it: women having given themselves completely over to illogic and hair-trigger tempers while claiming Christ. An actual Christian sister is self-controlled. She is patient. She is often silent--yes, silent, as Paul admonished. She is at peace with herself and on a journey with God she will not allow to be disturbed by LeRoy and his after-shave. She presents her body—her most lethal weapon—as a living sacrifice; giving it wholly (without reservation) and acceptable unto God. Her reward is often loneliness and frustration, trusting God for the right time and the right season.

Be very careful, then, how you live--not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. 19 Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, 20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. 21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.  —Ephesians 5:15-21

If I could say just one thing that might actually be received, get processed, be considered by my sisters, it would be this: please get that look off of your face: the pouty, impatient, intemperate, judgmental, sarcastic glare so many of my sisters share with virtually every man they meet. Rather, let us all submit ourselves one to another [Ephesians 5], in love and in the fear of God. I'm so sorry that some brother hurt you, but it wasn't me. Stop acting like a child and we'll stop treating you like one.

Christopher J. Priest
2 May 2015
editor@praisenet.org
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