Gifts and Gender

I was reading Facebook yesterday and ran across a post by Rachel Held Evans.  I don't remember what the post said; it was the comments that interested me.  The discussion moved into the traditional roles of men and women in the family.  The commenter (not Rachel Held Evans, whose opinions run the opposite of the commenter's) suggested that men have certain gifts and women have certain gifts, and those gifts should dictate how the family worked.  The man would be the one with the responsibility for being the head of the household and the disciplinarian, and the woman would be the nurturer.  Her opinion was that gifts are divided that way, and that's the way a family should be.

Huh.  Baldedash.

Everyone has gifts.  Everyone has different gifts, and God does not give them on the basis on gender.  I know it would certainly make life simpler if we could look at a person and say, "Oh, her gifts must be.... or "He's a man; these are his gifts."  Life isn't simple, thank God!  It just makes me wonder how anyone could believe that a stereotypical generalization could be better at deciding family roles than two people learning about each other and then deciding how each can contribute the the family unit.

My husband and I are, together, head of the household (and I know he would say the same thing if you asked him).  We each have responsibility for leading our family.  Neither one of us shoulders it alone.  Working out family dynamics might be harder this way, but it is so much more rewarding.

Life in a church is the same.  It's wrong to relegate women to certain roles and men to others.  It denies the gifts that God has given to them, and makes for some unhappy people who are unable to reach the potential God has designed for them.