The Sweet Life

One thing that I was taught while growing up was the importance of being sweet. Many of you women had the same experience. Girls should be sweet and kind, not loud or rude, they told us. After all, “sugar and spice and everything nice”– isn’t that what little girls are made of?

Then we grew up and we were told that everything we had learned about being sweet was wrong. Being sweet, they said, is being an inferior version of yourself. You must be assertive. You must be loud. Nice gets you nowhere. In fact, they told us that nothing and no one should stand in the way of our dreams and goals. We even learned that children may impede our progress on the path to realizing our aspirations. We would be moving backward if we gave up careers for families. We would be slapping the faces of all of the women through the years who had scratched and clawed and sacrificed to earn us the right to choose careers. They told us not to think twice about divorcing men who don’t live up to our expectations. Meanness became an acceptable mode of operation for women who were enlightened enough to realize that sweetness is weakness.

After a while I began to grow tired of this new message. I wondered why the only acceptable mode of femininity was markedly rude and selfish. And I wondered when “sweet” became a dirty word in our culture.

There is no question where Christians should land on the issue of sweetness. It should be one of the foremost qualities of Christian people. Think of the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These qualities embody the notion of sweetness, not an obsession with self or an attitude that places others underneath our feet.

The sweet path is not the easy way, though. It is the road filled with self-sacrifice. It takes much more courage to live sweetly than not. Anyone can say the first horrible thing that pops into their mind. But it takes a strong woman to speak kindness. Anyone can have a get-out-of-my-way attitude. Only a truly bold woman can stand aside and let others pass her. Anyone can be cruel to those who are weak. Only an honorable and confident woman wraps babies and children and the hurting and the lost in her strong arms and says, I will love you. I will be here for you. I will sacrifice for you.

So I write this to myself as much as anyone else. Be sweet. Be gentle. Have children or don’t. Marry or don’t. Be the hotshot head of a multi-million dollar corporation or be the chief nose-wiper in your home. But, whatever you do, do it sweetly. Meanness is overrated.

Meanness is weakness. Be strong. Live sweetly. Please God.