Stop Wasting My Time

Sunday I sat in church listening to a woman my age speak. Her talk started normally enough. Then something happened that sent steam billowing from my ears. She quoted almost an entire children's book. Worse, a children's book in the most inane rhyme I've heard in a long time.

This is not the first time I've heard children's books quoted in full by women in my church in place of actual lesson/talk preparation. I've sat through more than one lesson where a woman stood in a room full of other adult women and read a storybook. Showed us the pictures and everything.

This makes me so mad! My church teaches that men and women are equal. That we have different tasks and abilities but that in God's eyes, we are equally valuable and needed. No man would ever dream of reading a storybook to a class, or of quoting an insipid poem to the congregation. It would be an insult to the intelligence of his audience. The class/congregation is full of adults. So then why, oh why do women think this is okay? It's ridiculous.

I'll grant many women in my church are stay-at-home moms. They spend a lot of time with little children. They read those poem-parables all the time to their kids. However. Reading your little children a storybook is fine. Reading adults a storybook is a waste of their time. When my daughter goes to bed, I don't sit around reading her books. I want to edify, challenge myself, learn new perspectives, new ways of thinking about things. So I read adult books.

1 Corinthians 13:11 - When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I have spent a lot of time learning more about the gospel, growing past the childish things. I'd like that to be acknowledged by hearing about the meat of the gospel when I go to church, not having more milk sloshed in my face. If women in my church want to be treated as equals, I really hope they will start acting like equals of men.