I Wear Pants and Call Myself a Christian

A pastor came to our town one year to replace our old pastor. This pastor had some very specific ideas about holiness in the Christian. One of them was that women SHOULD NOT WEAR PANTS! Yep, women should not wear pants. It wasn’t the Christian thing to do.

I wasn’t living in Alaska at the time, so I didn’t hear exactly how forceful he was about the whole thing. But apparently he really stressed it. Now I’ve heard of people down south telling women they shouldn’t wear pants, but coming to Alaska and preaching that nonsense. What are you crazy? This is Alaska for crying out loud. It’s the land of foot deep mud that sucks your boot in so you end up pulling out your foot from your boot while half your sock is hanging off your foot. You have no way to balance yourself, except to plunk your foot down in the mud that just sucked in your boot. Now your foot is stuck, next to your boot. You try and pull the other boot out of the mud, and your other foot comes flying out of that boot. Your sock didn’t even bother staying on. You have to balance yourself again, so now the other foot is stuck in the mud next to your other boot. The mud is freezing cold. You try and free one or both feet and you end up landing right on your bottom, in the mud with both feet and both boots stuck in the mud. Now trying doing all that in a dress! I dare you.

Or how about the mosquito problem in Alaska? In Alaska we say the mosquito IS our state bird. It certainly feels like it is. The mosquitoes are so thick during the summer, you need pants to cover yourself up. Pants are your mosquito shield.

Or how about gutting 300 salmon in one day. You spend the whole day, gutting and filleting salmon. There is blood, salmon guts and slime, everywhere. It get’s everywhere. The last thing I would want to do would be to wear a dress while dealing with all that blood, guts and slime. Yuck.

I suppose if you did none of those things and just stayed indoors all day, you could probably wear dresses all the time and get away with it. But that’s really not the point. I am a Christian woman who wears pants all the time! There, I said it, I feel better now.

The point really isn’t that telling women they have to wear dresses if they are Christians, but there should be exceptions for Alaskan Christian women. The point is that nobody should be telling anyone that what they wear makes a difference. (Well, okay, men wearing women’s clothing is an exception, but that’s a discussion for another time). I wear pants, always have. AND I’m a Christian. I know, when I die, I will go to Heaven and God will not care about me wearing pants. What He will care about is whether I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. That’s it. I promise you, my wearing pants will not come up. I know this for sure.

Holiness is never external. It’s not about what’s on the outside. The Pharisees during Jesus’ day were all about the external. They dressed a certain way, acted a certain way, wore certain things and prayed a certain way and what did Jesus call them? He called them white washed tombs. On the outside they were clean, but on the inside they were dead men’s bones. Yikes. That’s pretty serious.

Holiness is Jesus living inside of you. That’s it. So simple. It’s not wearing dresses if you are a woman. Holiness isn’t wearing a cross or not wearing a cross. Holiness isn’t raising your hands in church or not raising your hands in church. It’s not how big your Bible is (whether you can knock someone out with it or not). It’s not what you eat. It’s not DOING anything. Isn’t that beautiful? I love that.

I’m a terrible rule follower. Maybe that’s why I love the gospel so much. It’s nothing I can do. I can’t follow a list of rules to become righteous. I love that God took it all away from us and simply says, “Accept my Son as your Savior.” Don’t DO anything. Just take the free gift of Jesus Christ!

I’m probably lazy by nature, that’s why I’ve responded so well to the gospel. But if you are a Christian and you feel compelled to Do something, look into that. Remember that holiness, again, is Jesus living inside of you. You can be all clean on the outside and not have Jesus living inside of you. That’s not a good place to be. Because you don’t want to be a Pharisee. Christian women can wear pants. It’s not an issue, really.