Naïve, but full of determination, Joan soon found herself fighting battles within the ranks of her own army. Many of the men did not take her seriously and saw her more as a mascot than a military leader. But Joan knew she was much more than an ornament of war. Being a female did not limit what she believed God would accomplish through her. Despite internal strife and Joan’s naïveté, the French were able to conquer the English at Orleans, and Charles was crowned king. It seemed God’s grace was working on their behalf.
Because of Joan’s unconquerable spirit and ability to face the impossible, her men were strengthened and inspired. Her mission had been successful. Joan could then have returned home to live in peace, but she continued to choose the life of a soldier.
Despite all Joan’s victories in the field, as she worked to recapture Paris, English soldiers captured her in 1430 and she was tried by bribed officials as a heretic. They condemned her claims to have heard from God as demonic. Enduring eight months in prison, she was taunted by English soldiers, chained to her bed, and forbidden to take Communion. She was found guilty of idolatry both for hearing voices and for wearing men’s clothing.
On May 30, 1431, at Rouen, she walked in chains, silenced by the jeering, savage crowds who wanted to witness her death. Joan requested that a crucifix be placed in front of her as she was tied to a stake. Repeatedly she cried out, “Jesus!” Her passing was slow and agonizing, as executioners had been instructed to keep her at a distance from the flames to torture her. Focusing on the cross, Joan resigned herself to death.
Joan’s partly charred body was shown to the crowd in order to prove that she was indeed a woman. Then the body was completely burned. Heretics at the time could not receive a Christian burial, and Joan’s remains were cast into the Seine River.
The brave soldier died alone at nineteen. Legends soon followed. Some said they saw a dove swoop down over her at the stake. Others said her heart would not burn and remained in the ashes. Whatever legends continue to surround Joan of Arc’s controversial life, her single-minded devotion to her calling was clear.
In the Middle Ages, it was unheard of for a woman to mark history outside of her traditional role. Women were viewed as objects of men’s desires, not as vessels the Lord might use to change history. Yet indeed, Joan of Arc did change history, despite the odds.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
(Ephesians 6:12)
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anna mikelson
A Smooth and Steady Pace
Olympic silver medalist Anna Mikelson had long envisioned herself competing in the world’s most famous games—but not on the water, and not with a team of seven other female athletes. Anna began running track when she was five years old, and she imagined crossing the Olympic finish line among other runners. God had other ideas.
Raised in the Seattle, Washington, area, Anna competed in track, cross-country, and basketball in high school. Her father, brother, and sister-in-law all ran for the University of Washington Huskies, and Anna hoped to follow in their footsteps. There was just one problem: every track and field coach who looked at her height, weight, and race times believed that she had maxed out in her sport. Although her times were good, they weren’t certain to improve a great deal.
But Anna’s high-school cross-country coach knew the rowing coach at the University of Washington, and Anna was invited to join the crew. The coaches at Washington took one look at her tall, athletic build and said, “You would be really good at this.” Wanting to believe in what the Huskies envisioned for her, Anna walked onto a national powerhouse rowing team, earning a scholarship the next year. “They sought me out and taught me what to do with a big oar,” she says simply.
Anna proved to be a quick study in her new sport. A four-time NCAA national champion rower, two-time College Rowing Coaches Association academic All-American, and three-time Pacific-10 academic All-American, she was the recipient of both NCAA and Pacific-10 postgraduate scholarships. As a collegian she rowed on the “women’s eight” national teams in 2001 and 2002, placing fourth and first respectively in the world championships, and graduated from the University of Washington in 2002 with a degree in communications and a 3.6 GPA.
In August of 2004, Anna and her teammates rowed to a second-place finish in the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. In their qualifying heat, the women set a new world record of 5:56 for the women’s eight—a two-thousand-meter race with an eight-woman crew. In the final, they battled two-time reigning Olympic champions from Romania and were well pleased with the first medal for the United States in that event in twenty years.
Today Anna divides her time between continuing to train on the water in Seattle and working for the University of Washington Athletic Department and the National Rowing Association. She also speaks to corporate executives and students of all ages about team building and motivation. “We use our boat as an example for teamwork,” she says, “and we encourage younger kids just to have fun and be healthy.” She hopes one day to work in athletic administration, but whatever the future holds, it is sure to include a constant that she has pursued with a passion equal to her sport: building relationships to share the love of Christ.
“In high school I was discipled by a woman in my church who worked with our youth group,” says Anna. “She really made a difference in my life and is still a significant person to me today. Her example caused me to want to do for others what she has done for me.” As a sophomore at Washington, Anna was living in a Christian house, but God was growing in her a love for her rowing teammates. “I wanted to reach out to them, but it’s really hard to apply your faith in all areas of your life—to have it fully integrated into your world and not compartmentalized into one tiny little section.”
Soon she started attending meetings of Athletes in Action (AIA), a ministry of Campus Crusade that was active on the U of W campus. Together with an AIA staff person, she started a Bible study. She continued to nurture small groups as an intern and later a volunteer for Campus Crusade at Princeton University.
“So much of my sport and my life are about relationships,” she says. “I’ve loved rowing with these seven women. We’re not just fellow athletes who train and compete together. We’re women who can also pray for each other and share life together.”
Anna is currently discipling two other rowers, a process she admits is time intensive and deeply relational. “There’s a fine balance of feeling each person out and determining what level of communication and interaction she is open to,” she says. “I want everyone to know the great joy in Christ—but the privilege of sharing that comes over time by caring about people no matter where they’re at, asking questions to know them better, and whenever possible, using Christ as an example.”
Anna’s message is simple, and it’s straight from the pages of her own life: God has a plan for you. “I have always thought the pop culture ideal has a quick appeal,” she says. “I wanted to have a made-for-TV life, but I guess I always knew it wasn’t that easy. I understood that the things I focused on—sports, school, family, and friends—were the foundation for a great life if Christ was my center. He made them have a deeper meaning, and now I would say that my life is like the perfect movie because God is my Director.”
Even though she may not line up exactly with the world’s standard for feminine appeal, Anna’s comfortable with being “a tall, strong woman.” She explains, “The world tells us that our performance, plus what others think about us, equals who we are. But that’s not true. We are who God says we are. He establishes our identity, and out of that will flow our performance and our relationships, not the other way around.”
Refusing to be satisfied with her present set of skills, Anna is adding another challenge to her agenda: she is learning to row sculls instead of shells and becoming adept with two oars instead of just one. With those ad
ded abilities, she’ll be able to compete for any rowing spot on the 2008 Olympic team.
But her focus is flexible. “We’ll see what happens,” she says cheerfully. “God may have other plans. It’s like the verse says: ‘“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope”’ [Jer. 29:11 NASB]. I’m taking it one day at a time, one year at a time. We’ll see what He has in store. I don’t view life as a series of big moments—even moments like winning an Olympic medal. It’s more about the process for me.”
For Anna, it’s one long, smooth, and steady race. She’s rowing strong, and she’s sure to finish well.
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
(1 Corinthians 9:24)
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shannon wright
A Change of Plans
Shannon Wright jokingly confesses that growing up as a Southern Baptist in Texas, she wasn’t sure Presbyterians were even Christians. Today twenty-seven-year-old Shannon serves as a deacon in her inner-city, evangelical Presbyterian church. And although she planned to move away from her home state of Texas after graduation from Wellesley, she’s returned there to pursue a calling that wasn’t quite what she had in mind either.
Shannon’s dream was the excitement and prestige of a literary career. “At seventeen,” she says, “I imagined myself at twenty-seven as a writer in New York, wearing a little black dress and dropping witty one-liners to the worshipful crowd.”
But after her sophomore year in college, as she was pursuing her carefully mapped-out plan of becoming a journalist, Shannon’s direction changed. The newspaper summer job that she had lined up fell through, and instead Shannon found herself answering the call of a homeless shelter to run a summer program for kids. She calls the job a “baptism by fire” introduction to issues of race and social justice that she’d only read about before: “For the first time I saw how crushing poverty can be to the spirit, and how ugly the physical manifestations of racism are. But at the same time, I was introduced to children who were bright and resilient and funny and savvy in the face of it all, who demonstrated unshakable faith and irrepressible spirits.”
It was also the first time Shannon learned how it felt to be in the minority, where her hair and skin color were the exception and where she had to acclimate to someone else’s culture. The hard questions she began to ask about where her life might be heading were uncomfortable, but she says they were unmistakably “the probing of the Spirit, leading me slowly off the road I had been groomed for.” Instead of worldly success and respect and influence—“the kind of stuff your dad can brag about on the golf course”—Shannon felt a pull toward something she knew would “challenge me every day, show up every weakness I had, play on all my vulnerabilities, invest me with responsibility which I don’t always discharge well, and put me right in the midst of the salvation drama.”
While she’d planned on garnering publishing successes and accolades, Shannon now recounts a different kind of reality: she deals each day with AIDS babies, people struggling with drug relapses, abused children, and the overt racism frequently directed at them. And for inspiration, she reads Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Saint Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day.
Instead of writing scintillating pieces for the mass market, she writes letters to a drug-addicted mother who has lost her children and is dying herself of AIDS, to say: “You are loved. You have a Shepherd. Your life is not a waste. Your children will be cared for. You are a daughter of the King, and He is present in your suffering and He thinks you are beautiful, and He can still redeem you and bring you to glory.”
This young woman who imagined herself as a media mover and shaker is these days growing into “an imperfect vessel that gets to be a conduit of perfect grace.” And Shannon says it’s the reason she shows up every day. “You get to stand with them in the trenches,” she says. “You tell the stories of the miracles because we know they do happen, and you don’t pretend it doesn’t break your heart, because some days, it does.”
In spring of 2004, Shannon received an unexpected invitation to be the commencement speaker for a small Christian high school in another state. She spent a lot of time thinking about what to say to young people who were just a few years younger than herself—what sorts of words might ring true to eager eighteen-year-olds going off in pursuit of their dreams. Her audience received her words with more than a little discomfort. Her speech’s frankness and honesty were stripped of the usual “the world is your oyster” platitudes. But within a few days it was making its way across the Internet to a broader audience than she ever imagined.
What did she say that caused such a stir? “Fear not.” She urged the graduating class of 2004 not to be afraid of failing, of disappointing people, or of their own unique callings and paths.
“Don’t be afraid of the world,” she told them. “You have nothing to fear from the world. Christ has already told you He has overcome it. Engage it. Understand it. Know why people think the way they think, what they care about, what they’re afraid of, what makes them laugh, and what keeps them up at three in the morning. Remember the first Bible verse you ever learned: ‘For God so loved the world.’ God does love the world, and the sign of a God-lover is to love the things He loves.”
She also implored them not to be afraid of the church, in what she described as “all of its multi-hued, chaotic, messy glory.” She assured them that as they came to know more believers of other stripes, “there will be days when you think, God has no standards and no taste. Other days, of course, this is what gives you hope for yourself.” Instead of being fenced in behind denominational boundaries and caught up in theological squabbles, Shannon asked her audience not to be afraid of other worship styles or different denominational norms.
So, while she’s not communicating in quite the way she might have planned at seventeen, this young writer/social activist/church leader is finding her voice and helping others find theirs. And she’s not so worried anymore about what others might think: “It can be the most liberating thing in the world to refuse to be held hostage by the expectations of others, even when those others are incredibly loving and well-meaning people,” Shannon says. “Ultimately, the call of Christ is one that only you can discern. So go ahead and disappoint some people and show yourself that it won’t kill you.
“I’m still standing. Disappointment hasn’t made me wither up and die. I stay as close to the call of Christ as I can, I start over when I mess up, and I get over it when people aren’t happy with me. And I’m a bit freer than I was at seventeen—not all the way there, to be sure, but a little farther down the road.”
Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
(1 Corinthians 15:58)
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danielle, tara, crystal, and kimberly
A House of Hope
When thirteen-year-old Danielle stepped into the spotlight at a national women’s conference in San Antonio, Texas, it was probably a good thing she couldn’t see the ten thousand or so women in the Alamodome waiting to hear what she had to say. But her voice was calm and clear, and when she finished speaking, the auditorium erupted with applause and her audience stood to its feet.
This is what she told them: “Hi, my name is Danielle. I was born and raised in Orlando, Florida. I’ve been in House of Hope for nine months now. My life was pretty good until I was ten years old and my grandpa died. After that, my parents got divorced, and because of it I had to switch schools a lot. My grades dropped from A’s to F’s. Then, at the age of eleven, I started smoking marijuana, dating older guys, drinking, and going to clubs. Then, because I wanted to look like my friends, I started selling my body to buy new clothes. What I didn’t buy I shoplifted. I got involved in gangs, witchcraft, and pornography. I ran away several times and was arrested. Finally, I was bro
ught to House of Hope.”
As Danielle spoke, the room was quieter than it had been all weekend. “Soon after I got to House of Hope, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I was actually baptized in October. I am a ‘born-again virgin.’ My family is being restored, which I thought would never happen, and I learned that Jesus Christ is going to love, accept, and forgive me no matter what.
“I want to be brave and courageous like Queen Esther in the Bible. I am taking the chance of losing my popularity just as she did to help others, to help save my generation.” Danielle then asked her sisters in the Lord, “Would you please pray that I keep making good choices?” And she thanked them for listening to her story.
House of Hope was established in 1985 by Sara Trollinger, a former schoolteacher who believed God was leading her to begin a ministry to troubled teens. She felt she should provide a place where they could learn responsibility and respect for authority and experience the healing and restoring touch of God on their lives. Nearly twenty years later, House of Hope has been instrumental in changing thousands of lives. Sara’s goal is to have a House of Hope in every major city in America by 2010.
Young girls like Danielle are not just quitting drugs and learning to live sexually pure lives again. They’re finding Christ and finding their voices—and speaking boldly about how their lives have turned around.
Tara grew up with an alcoholic mother and a critical stepfather who was also physically abusive. When she was seven years old, she was molested by one of his friends—something both parents denied ever happened. By the time she was barely a teenager, Tara had begun to smoke, have sex, and poison her body with cocaine and other drugs.
“I began to fight with my mom over everything,” says Tara, “taking advantage of her when she was drunk and not listening to what she told me to do. I was a mess and she was a mess. I was confused and full of shame, and I hated myself for the mistakes I had made.”
Sister Freaks Page 2