Bride or Gardener? Dressing for the Job I Want

During winter break of my junior year of college, I bought a cream dress at Banana Republic. It reminded me of Taylor Swift, because back then (this was shortly into her 1989 era) she was always wearing these elegant two-piece matching sets that felt both cool and classy, refined and romantic. The fabric was finely textured and its back boasted a yellow-gold zipper; I thought it was lovely … and I also thought, “This would be a great dress to wear for a wedding shower.” I had no real reason to think I’d be having a wedding shower anytime soon, but at a college where it seemed like most people got married in their early twenties, I assumed I would, too. “Dress for the job you want,” so the saying goes.

I know I’m not the only woman who has bought a white dress with a dream attached to it.

A few weeks ago in the middle of a seasonal deep clean, I found my cream Taylor Swift dupe dress in the back of my closet. For nine years, I have moved that dress from apartment to apartment, storing it season after season. I don’t think I’ve worn it more than three times since I bought it, but on a chilly autumn night nine years later, I decided to try it on again. My (ringless) left hand reached behind my back, zipping the yellow-gold zipper all the way up.

It still fit.

In the mirror, I could also see the reflection of my gray-faced golden retriever lying behind me, the only bystander to my bedroom fashion show. I don’t know about you, but (in that moment) I was not feeling 22 — the age when that gray-faced dog was just a puppy, the age when keeping that cream dress and the dreams attached to it just made sense, the age when Swift’s lyric, “Everything will be alright if we just keep dancing like we’re 22,” felt like decent advice on how to handle life and love and loneliness.

I did not get to wear that classy cream dress to my wedding shower in my twenties, nor have I been a bride in an elegant white dress who became a linen-wearing Proverbs 31-archetype wife and mother. Most days, not being a bride or a wife or a mom isn’t really something I think about. But on my lonely days or certain holidays or in catch-up conversations, I can feel as if I have less value as a Christian woman because I have not been those things. It cannot be said of me that “her husband is respected at the city gate,” (Prov 31:23) for my city has no gate, and I have no husband. The only time I “select wool and flax and work with eager hands,”(31:13) is when I am selecting wool socks from my sock drawer and adding flax seed to my morning oatmeal. I have no children to arise and call me blessed (31:28), however, it could be argued that I “provide [dog] food for her family” (31:15).

As I stood looking at myself in the mirror in my Taylor Swift dupe dress, I recognized that I was not the woman I thought I might be when I first bought it nine years ago. But in God’s mercy, I recognized something else, too. Even though the dress still fit my body, I could accept and maybe even celebrate that it no longer fit the rest of me: who I am today. Rather, there’s a different garment hanging in my closet that seems like a better fit for the kind of woman I have become through the course of my twenties: my Duluth gardening overalls.

35mm Film Photograph by Annie Spratt, Unsplash.

These gardening overalls have a dozen pockets designed to hold shovels and seeds and snacks and sunglasses, and best of all, the fabric is patterned with tiny gnomes. Granted, I do not have a garden, so they are mostly aspirational … but hey, dress for the job you want! Proverbs 31:16 says, “She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.” While I am far from buying an actual field, my twenties have been a decade of metaphorically getting my hands dirty, working the ground, planting seeds, watering, weeding, and doing the patient work of growing (up). Most (well, actually all) of this patient work has consisted of letting God do his patient work on me.

Sometimes, I feel as if I began my twenties planted in a “rocky place,” as the Parable of the Sower in Mark 5 refers to. I had a shallow understanding of what a good life would look like — of how I should grow and what fruit I should produce. I wanted others to look at me and say, “Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all” (Proverbs 31:29). I wanted to achieve the ideal: beautiful bride, wonderful wife, hospitable host, patient parent, and if I had time, industrious entrepreneur. But unlike the outcome of the shallow-sown seed in Jesus’s parable, the God of the Garden intervened. He came and dug me up, transplanting me into a different place than where I initially was. Here — now— I no longer read Proverbs 31 as a passage about the kind of woman that I am not or the ideal I should strive to obtain. Rather, I read it about the kind of bride Christ’s church is called to be and will ultimately become.

Proverbs 31:25 describes the wife of noble character as “clothed in fine linen and purple.” Similar phrasing is recorded in Revelation 19:6-8, except this time, it’s about a different sort of bride:

“‘Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure’ — for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.”

Because of Christ, the church — and the people who are part of it — can be encouraged that it’s not our righteous deeds that clothe us in fine linen and make us “more valuable than rubies,” but rather the righteous deeds of Christ crucified on behalf of his church: his bride. Just as no woman is ever going to live up to the ideal King Lemuel’s mother advises him to seek in Proverbs 31, no church is always going to bring good, not harm, all the days of its life (Prov 31:12). And yet the Bible makes it clear that God would not let his church be scorched by sin and taken away by Satan. Sown into a scripture verse often read at weddings, Ephesians 25 shares just how much Jesus cares for his bride, the church:

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”

Revelation 7 describes in more detail why the church — the bride of Christ — can “smile at the future,” and how “strength and dignity are her clothing” (Prov  31:25),

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

[…] Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes — who are they, and where did they come from?”

I answered, “Sir, you know.”

And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. ‘Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them,’ nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water.’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’”

“Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting,” I say, folding away my charming, beautiful cream dress from Banana Republic that made me feel like Taylor Swift. In its place, I make space for the styles of the woman I am today. I might not be a bride, a wife, or a mother, a successful entrepreneur, a vineyard owner, or a sash maker, but I am a woman who is covered by scarlet and clothed in white. I am an apprentice with dirt under her fingernails doing the patient work of preparing for the future Garden City. I am a Proverbs 31 woman dressing for the job I want in a pair of Duluth gardening overalls. And I am invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.