Empowered Women

One of my favorite podcasts is Smart Women, Smart Power from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. They are usually panels or one-on-one interviews of women in politics, economics, foreign policy, and religion. I am always very impressed by the women being interviewed they are experts in national security, terrorism, politics, etc. Very smart and empowered women. However, the other day the topic was on U.S Ambassadors and their lives abroad. At one point the conversation got emotional for one of the ambassadors (Saudi Arabia) as she was telling the story of having the evacuate the country at two different times and having to let her children go back to the US, as she stayed in Saudi Arabia and continued to work for months. I cannot imagine having to do that.

Like these women with power and positions of leadership, I think of my female pastor friends who have children. I very much admire that as mothers and wives are following their calling. Much respect to those women. I think of single mothers who work long hours and miss time with their children like my own mother who was a single mother for a number of years until she remarried. As I get older and sometimes nostalgic, I think of my mother often and the things she sacrificed so that I could have a better life and opportunity. My parents divorced when I was very young and both remarried and had more children. My father moved to the US after the divorce and when I was 14 I came to live with him, that’s how I ended up here! I am forever grateful to my mother because she let me go at such a young age. The plan was for me to stay for a year and then go back to Mexico. But things happened and I am convinced that God had other plans and I ended up staying. Writing about this almost 19 years later still makes me choked up a little. I cannot imagine how painful it was for my mother, and all I can say is thank you, thank you for letting me go and for always supporting me at a distance.

I want to end with this ritual liturgy that very much describes women and mothers, and the power and strength that they carry.

The power to give life

The power of being vulnerable without being weak

The power of believing in a better future

The power of changing oppressive situations

The power to face difficult circumstances

The power of not giving up

The power of loving and claiming the need for love

The power of crying

The power that is ours because we are women.[1]

[1] Opening ritual liturgy in Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. 179-180.