How She's Made

Title: How She’s Made

Text: Proverbs 31:10-31

Thesis: When we know how intricately, wonderfully and purposefully a person is made, we appreciate that person much more.

Introduction

“How It’s Made” is a really interesting TV Series that airs on the Discovery Channel with thirteen episodes a year, each with four segments. Shows have been planned through 2011. “How It’s Made” gives us a peek into how it is that everyday items are made.

I was fascinated by how they make the pre-cooked bacon in our supermarket meat cases.

• Pork bellies are placed in to a tumbler to soften the hide.

• Softened bellies are placed on a conveyor belt where the hide is sliced away from the meat… the hide drops onto another conveyor belt where it goes to be processed into pork rinds.

• A brine solution of salt, liquid smoke and other flavorings is mixed and injected through injection heads into each belly.

• Bellies are then hung on a rack and passed through a smoke bay where they are showered with more liquid smoke and other flavorings.

• Then they are placed in a low-heat oven for five hours before being blast chilled and placed in a cooler prior to slicing. The pork bellies are individually placed into chutes where they are sized and sliced.

• The slices then pass through a long microwave oven where the fat is cooked off to be used in pet food.

• The bacon strips are then rolled out onto a waxy paper and packaged so we can take home the bacon.

My point is this… even the most common of things are intricately and wonderfully made. A great deal of effort goes into the making of things like tooth picks, chewing gum and Frisbees.

People are no exception to the intricacies of process.

I. How God Made Us All

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are too wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place… “Psalm 139:13-15

We are all so intricately and wonderfully made.

In The Joy Luck Club, author Amy Tan describes her pro-choice friend’s reflections on abortion. She had almost aborted her daughter. When she found she was pregnant she was furious. She thought of her pregnancy as a growing resentment. She drug the father along with her when she went to the clinic where she was surprised that they made them watch a film. She was shocked when she saw those tiny little seven week old fetuses with their tiny, tiny, tiny translucent fingers and the fingers were moving. When her daughter was born she spoke of how remarkably perfect her little girl was but she was especially intrigued by the way she flexed and curled her fingers around her own finger. (Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, Thorndike Press, 1989, p. 261)

God has done a marvelous thing in the making of every one of us. We are magical creatures right down to the way we curl our fingers.

We have all encountered people we thought to be uninteresting and unremarkable but C.S. Lewis cautions us in our dealing with one another. He said that in all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics and any and all of life, there are no ordinary people. He said, “You have never talked to a mere mortal.” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, HarperONe, 2001, p. 46)

In Genesis we learn that we are all created in the image of God.

A. In the Image of God

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” Genesis 1:26

And being created in the image of God means that we are created male or female.

B. Male and Female

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. So God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it…” Genesis 1:27-28a

The essential truth is this: If we are only exposed to the influence of men or if we are only exposed to the influence of women, we will have a skewed image of God. God has expressed himself through the images of both masculinity and femininity.

Someone aptly said, “God couldn’t be everywhere, so he made mothers.”

II. How God Made Mothers

Proverbs 31:10-31 is something of a eulogy. It is written in the form of an acrostic poem, in which each of the twenty-two verses begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet… If it were an English alphabet it would go something like “A” is for attentive, “B” is for busy, “C” is for caring, “D” is for diligent, and so on. In creating this Epilogue: The Wife of Noble Character, the poet is intending to say everything there is to say about the virtues of a praise-worthy woman.