The Kinship Christian Radio Women’s Conference was last Saturday with over 700 women in attendance listening to featured speaker Liz Curtis Higgs, attending various mini-sessions, worshiping with Jillian Jones, enjoying delicious food, and generally being pampered and appreciated in many various ways.
I did not attend the entire event, but I was privy to approximately 100% of the process, planning, and logistics leading up to the event. My current level of research indicates the event was “fabulous as usual.”
So, certainly all involved in this mammoth undertaking deserve heartfelt thanks and appreciation.
Liz Curtis Higgs is a renowned speaker, so I made a point of ducking out of folding chairs and tables to catch some of what she had to say.
I noted that, on more than one occasion, she referred to the twelve guys who followed Jesus around throughout his ministry as “The Duh-sciples.”
Now, you might think I was offended by this as I very well could have been triggered by this obviously stereotypical characterization of male intelligence (and at some point I may get around to that) but right now I’m still looking for a booth selling the Duh-sciple T-shirts.
If I can’t find the T-shirts, I may have to get a Duh-sciple tat instead.
It’s all good.
Anyway, She was indeed marvelous, brilliant, encouraging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking.
When she talked about Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with a whole bottle of spikenard ($30,000 by today’s value and, yes, most translations simply call it “nard” but I’m in agreement with Liz here in that a perfume this rare and costly and expensive should not be called by a word that rhymes so closely with “lard.”) and how Mary used her hair to wipe His feet, she talked about how women in that place at that time just did not do that.
It was unheard of. It was not something “respectable” women did. It was scandalous.
And she talked about how women think and act about their hair –that a woman’s hair is, well, personal.
And every woman (and every man) in the place knew what she was talking about.
And then she took off her wig to reveal how her own hair is thin and just recovering, just coming back, from cancer treatments.
Liz Curtis Higgs has survived cancer. Her oncologist says she has “No Evidence of Disease” in her anymore.
She related how that is indeed glorious and God is to be praised, but when she first heard the doctor say that, she probably looked a little conflicted as a little piece of her said, “Oh, I guess I’m staying here instead of going to be with Jesus. Okay, Lord, I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here and do what you’ve given me to do.”
And Higgs said that when Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with that perfume, John writes that the fragrance of it filled the whole house. She said that it probably could have been smelled from a half-mile away.
Jesus himself said what Mary had done was intended for his burial and I remember reading somewhere that the aroma of such a generous outpouring of a beautiful scent like this probably was indeed still filling the air for many days afterward.
Beauty has a way of doing that.
Today’s Praise
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 2: 4-7 (ESV)