thank goodness for weekends....

This is kind of a melancholy post. This is my last weeknd in San Antonio, then back to Columbus. I'm happy to be at the end of school, training, etc. but its going to be weird to actually have a real job for the first time, as much as flying is a real job. I'm really bummed about leaving all of my friends that I have made here though. I'll be back again in March time-frame to transition to the T-6, but that is just too long. I have grown to love the church I have been attending and the women's small group I have been a part of. So the next four days will not only include lots of studying and checkrides, but many goodbyes as well. I'm glad God knows what He's doing....

So I have been thinking a lot about who I want to be as a woman following after God's heart and what that means for my life. I guess that happens when you have big life changes, right? My friend Lisa has blogged about it, but I have been trying to reconcile what the Bible tells us women, how we should act, roles, all that, and my own desires, what I think about my own life. Here's some of what Lisa included in a book she is reading:

Here's more from Kate O'Beirne's "Women who make the world worse"

"I quickly learned that the demand for equal opportunity was a typically dishonest feminist ruse. Advocates for women in combat were really seeking special rights for women in uniform. They argued that women should be allowed in combat if they felt like it, although men are involuntarily assigned to combat duties. And feminists weren't demanding an equal right for women to compete to meet the services' physical standards. They were demanding a new separate physical standard for women because the great majority can't meet a male standard.

Definitive studies show that the top 5 percent of women perform at the male medium. The average twenty- to thirty-year-old woman has the aerobic capacity of a fifty-year-old man. There's a reason why fifty-year-old men in uniform are not expected to do what twenty-year-old men do. To mask these real differences between the sexes, with their real consequences in the real world of combat - under pressure to integrate the ranks - the services have modified their training.

Since it was integrated, in a typial example of how the military copes with the fact that women are weaker and slower than men, West Point has developed a formula of "equilavent effort" that has male cadets obliged to complete an obstacle course in 3:20 minutes, while female cadets are allowed 5:30. Men receive the same grade for doing seventy-two push-ups in two minutes as women do for performing forty-eight. Scores on fitness tests throughout the military are now similarly "gender-normed."

The physical qualifications for specific jobs have also had to be changed to accomodate the lesser physical strength of women. A 1985 Navy study found that large majorities of women were unable to perform any of the eight critical shipboard tasks that virtually all men could handle. To keep things shipshape on the gender front, the job of stretcher carrier in the Navy, once a two-man job (that 100 percent but only 12 percent of women could perform) was redefined as a four-person task.

Proponents of women in combat are tiresome in their dishonest insistence that women should only serve on the front lines "if they can meet all the physical requirements." Experience with integrating the service academies and the great majority of specialities has shown that women can't and don't meet the male standard. The force is slower and weaker as a result."

I pretty much agree with all of that, but where does it leave me? As a child of Title 9, gender equality, and everything that came out of that whole movement, I don't think I have ever really thought about things that could not do as a woman, or that maybe God did not intend for women to do. And for the most part I have only been praised for the life choices I have made. But there is a part of me that wants a husband to stay home for and take care of our kids, and there is a part of me that could never do that. At this point in my life the career has pretty much take front seat since there have not been any relationship possibilities in a very long time, so for now that part of me has won out, even though I have this whole internal debate going on. And in a circular spiral, because I'm more focused on career, I'm less likely to have an opportunity for the family thing, and it just keeps going from there....

Honestly though, I can't imagine being anything other than a fighter pilot. Seriously, just being an instructor pilot is very hard for me sometimes, and I get depressed when I think about my buddies who are out there doing the flying that I think I should be out there doing. I have never done any of this to prove anything, just because I feel like it is what I'm called to do. This is the path I have chosen, and now I want to do my best as a part of the team protecting our country and ideals that make us the greatest country in the world. So that what I'm thinking about these days. The balance between the two, and how I can follow God's plan for my life in light of the desires of my heart, or in spite of them.