Celebrating Women's Night

Without any disrespect to either the church-types who read this or the ambivalent/anti-church types who read this, I have very little hope that the students that I work with will learn much from either the church or the culture regarding healthy relationships between men and women.

And so our annual "Women's Night" event last night was a great and significant thing. And not just for our little community, but among the most significant and uniquely positive things that happens on the entirety of the campus all year.

Each spring the women and men put together an evening that is specifically designed to honor the other gender. It is full of food, laughter, skits, and video productions and people basically making fools of themselves in an attempt to communicate love, gratitude, respect, thanksgiving and all-around appreciation.

What happens during these evenings is priceless. In the process of organizing it, the gender that is hosting the event often comes together and builds community across normal friend groups. During the night-of, men and women learn how to articulate and receive words of affirmation and love.

Given the amount of familial brokenness that many of my students come from, those words of affirmation are often foreign and learning to accept them is the first key to authentically entering into community. Given how many dads are out of the picture, to have the men affirm the women without any spurious motives is gold, like first-ever drops of water to a parched soul.

On a side note, it's interesting to me to note the differences between how men and women take to the purpose of the night. Tell a bunch of guys to get together and think of ways to honor the women, and it goes one way; tell a bunch of women to get together and think of ways to honor the men, and it goes another way entirely. But that's probably another post for another day.

Our culture and the Christian church have a long way to go in terms of cultivating authentic and genuinely healthy cross-gender relationships. Our little chapter of InterVarsity does, too.

But after last night I am again encouraged by how much power we are given to bless and encourage one another. And the wonder at how much good exercising that power can do.