In the Beginning, A Woman with a Voice by Elizabeth Troyer

“In the Beginning, A Woman with a Voice” by Elizabeth Troyer

When I was younger, I thought holiness looked quiet.

I thought a good woman was one who lowered her eyes, softened her opinions, and learned how to disappear with grace. I thought faith meant becoming smaller so God could become larger, as if the Lord of heaven and earth required the erasure of women in order to be seen. The women I watched in church were faithful, yes, but often faithful in ways that looked like silence. They cooked, cleaned, prayed, organized, gave, and endured. Their labor held the sanctuary together, but their names rarely made it to the microphone. Their gifts filled the room, yet their voices seemed to stop at the threshold.

So I learned the lesson many women learn early: be useful, not loud. Be good, not difficult. Be spiritually available, but not spiritually expansive.

And yet, beneath that training, something in me kept rising.

Not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Not ego. Something older. Something deeper. Something like a pulse in the marrow. A knowing that before the world told me what a woman should be, God had already spoken. Before anyone tried to make me ornamental, He made me alive. Before anyone told me to shrink, He made me in His image.

There is something startling to me in the opening pages of Scripture, something so familiar we risk no longer seeing it. In the beginning, God creates by speaking. Light arrives because God says it should. The sky holds because God names it into place. The world is shaped by holy language. Then, into that speaking world, He creates humanity in His image—male and female. Not as decoration. Not as an afterthought. Not as a quieter copy. He creates woman in a world already humming with divine utterance, and I have come to believe this means something. We were made by a speaking God. Why would women not be made to speak?

This thought has become a shelter for me.

Because for a long time I did not know what to do with my voice as a Christian woman. I loved words. I loved books, essays, testimony, story. I loved language that could cut through performance and find what was true. I loved the way writing let me sit with God in honest company, without rushing to become impressive or correct. On the page, I could be searching and sincere at once. I could be uncertain without being faithless. I could grieve, rage, confess, remember, and still belong to Him.

But I did not always know if there was room for that kind of woman in Christian spaces.

There are versions of Christian womanhood that ask for beauty without boldness, service without selfhood, obedience without imagination. In those visions, a woman may host a Bible study but not trouble the order of things. She may share a testimony as long as it ends in neatness. She may be visible, but only in approved dimensions. She may be gifted, but her gifts must never threaten the comfort of anyone who confuses control with godliness.

And yet Scripture itself is crowded with women who trouble neatness.

Mary does not respond to the angel with passivity; she responds with courage. Elizabeth bears witness. Hannah prays with such intensity that her faith is mistaken for disgrace. The Samaritan woman becomes an evangelist to her whole town after one honest encounter at a well. Mary Magdalene is entrusted with resurrection news while the world is still dark. The women of the Bible are not all polished or safe. They are grieving, prophetic, inconvenient, maternal, barren, singing, bleeding, waiting, shouting, pouring oil, carrying spices, asking questions, telling the truth.

They are alive before God.

This matters to me because I am weary of every theology that flattens women into types instead of meeting us as souls. I am weary of the assumption that a woman’s holiness is best proven by how much of herself she can suppress. I am weary of Christian cultures that praise women for sacrifice while feeding on the fruit of their uncredited labor. There is a particular exhaustion in being told your sensitivity is too much, your intellect too sharp, your ambition too worldly, your grief too intense, your body too visible, your calling too unclear. Sometimes the church has not known what to do with women who are both devout and fully alive.

But I am beginning to think that being fully alive may be one of the most faithful things a woman can be.

Not self-worship. Not brand-building. Not a modern gospel of self-invention. I mean aliveness before God—the kind that tells the truth. The kind that stops performing acceptable femininity long enough to become honest in His presence. The kind that says: Lord, this is what You made. This mind. This hunger. This tenderness. This anger at injustice. This creative fire. This longing to make something that lasts. This desire to be seen without being consumed.

I think of the women artists and writers who came before me, women who kept making meaning in rooms that were too small for them. Women who wrote in margins, in notebooks, after children were asleep, after shifts ended, after sorrow gutted the house. Women who made art from scarcity. Women whose faith may not have fit the polished language of institutions, but who still wrestled with God in pigment, poem, cloth, and line. Women whose lives whispered what I
am still learning: creativity is not frivolous. It is one of the ways we bear witness to being made by a Creator.

For me, writing has become a form of witness.

Not because every sentence is explicitly religious, but because attention itself can be holy. To look closely at a life, to refuse numbness, to tell the truth about suffering and beauty, to insist that what happens to women matters—this too is sacred work. I no longer believe Christian writing must always sound certain to be faithful. Sometimes faith sounds like a woman refusing to lie. Sometimes it sounds like lament. Sometimes it sounds like memory. Sometimes it sounds like praise scraped together from the floor.

What I know now is this: God did not call me to vanish.

He did not save me so I could become a more polished shadow. He did not breathe life into women so we could spend our lives apologizing for taking up spiritual and creative space. The God I meet in Scripture is not threatened by women who think, make, question, lead, or tell the truth. He is the God who sees Hagar in the wilderness. The God who hears Hannah. The God who chooses Mary. The God who speaks resurrection first to a grieving woman and lets her carry the news.

I have spent years trying to reconcile faith with womanhood, creativity with obedience, voice with holiness. Maybe the reconciliation was never the problem. Maybe the problem was every human system that taught me they were enemies.

Now, when I write, I think less about becoming acceptable and more about becoming honest. I think of Eve, the mother of all living, and I wonder how many generations of women have been taught to fear the very vitality God placed within them. I think of Christ, who never seemed afraid of women’s devotion, women’s intellect, women’s persistence, women’s questions. I think of the Holy Spirit, who still moves like wind and flame, refusing containment.

And I think perhaps holiness does not look like quiet after all.

Perhaps sometimes holiness looks like a woman opening her mouth. Perhaps it looks like her making something from what she has survived. Perhaps it looks like her refusing to call herself small when God has called her beloved. Perhaps it looks like language returning to her. Perhaps it looks like creation echoing its Creator once more.

In the beginning, God spoke.

And somewhere inside every woman who has ever been told to disappear, I believe there is still an answer rising.

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Elizabeth Troyer Artist Statement:

This creative work is about the spiritual and creative lives of women, and the ways Christian womanhood has too often been shaped by silence, self-erasure, and constraint. Through lyrical nonfiction, it reflects on faith, voice, and the belief that women are made in the image of a speaking God, and therefore are called not to disappear, but to live, create, and speak truthfully. It is for women who have wrestled to reconcile devotion with identity, holiness with selfhood, and creativity with belonging.

As a creative woman, I define my creative identity as a writer shaped by faith, reflection, and the pursuit of truth. I am drawn to the intersections of womanhood, spirituality, identity, and voice, and I use creative work to explore what it means for women to live honestly and fully in the world. My creativity is rooted in observation, language, and meaning-making, and I see writing as both an artistic practice and a form of witness.

My writing means truth, freedom, and connection to me. It is one of the primary ways I make meaning of my experiences, my faith, and the world around me. Writing allows me to explore the inner lives of women, questions of identity and spirituality, and the tension between silence and self-expression. It is both a creative practice and a form of witness—a way of honoring what is felt, observed, endured, and hoped for.