Confessions of a "Know-it-all"

As noted in my first blog post here at Hargraves Home and Hearth, I began my life in the blogosphere   at the age of 15 with my first blog, By His Grace and For His Glory.  While I still fully support and endorse many of the posts which were written for that blog, others I could not stand by now in good conscience. Looking back at my 15 or 16 year old self, I can see what a know-it-all I was at the time. Not only that, but I can now see areas where I was just plain wrong and definitely erring on the side of legalism in some of my beliefs. In a few of the future posts here on Hargraves Home and Hearth, I would like to address a couple of those topics and share with you what the Lord has been teaching me over the past year or two. These issues include the following ideas:

• The false belief that it is Biblically wrong for a woman to wear pants and that in order to be feminine, a lady must wear only skirts and dresses

• The false belief that it is wrong for women to have any sort of job outside the home

• The false idea that in order to live Biblically between graduation and marriage, a young woman  absolutely must live at home with her parents 24/7, should not attend a college campus, and should not hold down any kind of job outside the home

This post is a little hard for me to write, as for years, these issues were extremely important to me and I fought tooth and nail on my old blog to defend them. But while I wholeheartedly embrace Biblical femininity, teach Biblical roles for women, love to wear skirts and dresses, believe a woman's primary sphere of influence and responsibility is to be the home, embrace the idea that an unmarried young woman would do well to consider remaining at home with her family as she prepares for marriage,  that women would do well to pursue home businesses and higher education at home, etc. etc., I no longer espouse the legalistic stances that I once did in these areas. While this is difficult to post for several reasons, I believe it to nonetheless be a very, very important post to write. The Scriptures alone (and not man-made laws which misconstrue those Scriptures!) are to be our sole basis for our faith and practice. We are not to add to nor take away from anything in Scripture, and it is a serious error on our part when we do so. Problems follow when we take a wonderful Biblical principle and run with it, adding to it our own boundaries and limitations. For this reason as well as my past experience in legalism and the realization of how miserable one can be when stuck in the web of legalism, I desire to address some of these ideas in the near future and pray the Lord will see fit to bless you through those future posts and to bring you closer to His heart and His Word alone.

Blessings!

Mrs. Rebekah Ann Hargraves