The New Eve by Robert Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

entrepreneur.
    On and on we could go, but the point is this: you are by God's design your own snowflake, etched in a pattern never to be repeated in the whole history of women.
    Next comes the level where your wants and desires are found. Your autonomy as an individual and your personal choices come into play here and further separate you from that core sameness you share with other women. Here you decide what other things will define and shape your life as a woman, that is, what experiences you want to have, what people you want to be with, what things you want to do, and what dreams you want to pursue.
    At this level, it's important to remember that the choices you make around your wants and desires have consequences—good and bad—when it comes to fulfilling God's core callings on your life. For instance, your choices and the pursuits that spring from them may complement these callings; they may create conflict or impose roadblocks in fulfilling them; or they may foster circumstances that keep one or more of these callings from ever happening. Whatever direction your life ultimately takes, much of its unique script is written here by the decisions you make.
    The third level is where the world's values reside and where cultural forces seek to shape, manipulate, and form your life into certain prescribed patterns. This ring often unleashes godless values wrapped in stylish images, and it does so by relentlessly bombarding you through music, media, academia, and popular opinion to gain your allegiance.
    Here you are told what you should look like; what standards you should embrace; how you need to arrange your personal, career, and domestic priorities; and what you should believe about womanhood. Here the world constantly presses to choose for you how you should think and live. Without a conscious effort to combat this pressure, it's amazingly easy to give in to it.
Your Lifestyle Direction
    Although the diagram on page 49 can summarize your life, something else is needed to show how you actually live as a woman. Generally speaking, the life-shaping power of a woman's life flows in one of two directions—either from the outside in or from the inside out.
    Let's first address outside-in living. Many women live primarily by the dictates of the world's power and influence. Maybe you live this way more than you know or would like to admit. As I said, it's a current that's hard to resist without conscious effort.

    When you live from the outside in, the world's values and the cultural conformities that go with them will dominate almost everything about you. This outer ring will squeeze and reshape all the inner rings of your life into its mold. Your wantsand desires, personal choices, what you do with your gifts and abilities, and your beliefs about your core callings all shift onto the tracks set down by the world's priorities. From here you yield to cultural images and measure your life by the themes of your favorite movies; the ideas in the latest best-selling books; the images in magazines; or the opinions of your favorite educator, politician, or social trendsetter. You are driven by your senses—what you see, hear, and feel—not by well-defined spiritual convictions. When you live this way, your core soon bears the twisted influence of the outside world. And when the outside world changes its values, or presents new options and opportunities, you shift again, always working to make your inside fit the outside.
    But this doesn't work. Instead, you experience problems and conflict. You may even experience lifelong regret. That's because by living from the outside in, God's core callings for your womanhood have been compromised, dumbed down, or choked out altogether by a new set of worldly outside callings (see Mark 4:18–19). Some Christian women live this way more than they know and wonder why life is so troubled and conflicted.
    Outside-in living was never God's design. Romans 12:2 says it straight up: “Do not be