A Simple Woman is a Complex One
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mothers womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous - how well I know it.
Psalm 139:13-14
As I write this piece, with the focus of a simple life or being a ‘simple woman’, I wrestle with the words of David. David, with great zeal exclaimed ‘‘Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!”. I’ve always skimmed through Psalm 139; it’s on every flower board on Pinterest, photo frames on Etsy, and on the odd shirt at a women's conference. I’ve known the scripture in the ESV ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’ but never have I sat with Psalm 139 that reads ‘thank you for making me so complex.’ Complex has always been a negative word to me. It belongs in the same family as difficult, confusing, exhausting, and to summarise, the opposite of simple, yet David thanks God for making him (us) complex.
Why does this matter? Well, because I don't want to be ‘complex’- I want to be simple. I want to be a simple friend, a simple wife, a simple mother, anything but complex. If I’m really being honest a simple woman sounds more attractive right? “She’s easy to be with”, “She’s just calm” “She’s simple.” Perhaps, I’m fighting the word complex because it tells me that in my natural state, as a woman ‘I’m too much’, ‘difficult to love’ everything but simple. But that’s a lie, a great one and I’ll go as far as saying incredibly demonic. This understanding encourages self-rejection, self-hatred and the belief that you are too complicated to be loved. But Christ made you with such splendor, such beauty that God the Father saw you worthy to sacrifice his Son.
When David thanked God for making him complex, he caught a revelation that God designed us with such thought and detail that to be complex is really to be ‘consisting of many different and connected parts.’ All of these parts come together to serve the people around you. But, at the core of Psalm 139, David realised that God was intentional about calling us to himself, therefore his design reflected this. No one can ever know you like the bridegroom. No one can truly understand your design, your inner thoughts, your heart, like Jesus. As a ‘complex’ woman I live a simple life by understanding that I’ve been called simply to ‘Love the Lord my God with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my strength and with all my mind’ and, ‘Love my neighbor as myself” (Mathew 22:37).’” With this understanding I now walk with greater clarity, confidence, and assurance of my identity.
Thank you Lord, for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous - how well I know it.