Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Back when men were men and were offended by each other, they could challenge each other to a duel. If a man happened to be a medieval knight, he could tear off his heavy armored glove and throw it down and, in one fell swoop, alter his or another man’s fate. This glove was called a gauntlet, hence the expression throwing down the gauntlet. In the image above, you can see that several gloves have been cast down. To be honest, I have no idea what the context of the image is. Why are so many gloves cast down in front of Richard II? All I know is it must be serious; a knight doesn’t just casually throw his gauntlet at the king’s feet.

In modern days, the expression has much less dire implications. It’s merely a challenge and doesn’t involve swords. Of course, dueling is no longer a legal activity for a pleasant Saturday in the village green. Perhaps challenges should have more dire consequences, though. I speak as someone who is obstinately independent to a fault. So much so that I tend to throw my metaphorical gauntlets before God.

Okay, I take it back. I don’t want the dire consequences that might come from issuing challenges to God because I can’t seem to stop doing it. A duel with God is a losing battle, unless you are Jacob. To be fair, that wasn’t a duel, but struggling with God is by its nature a battle that could prove deadly. Jacob understood this, as he called the place he had his battle Peniel, which means Face of God. Jacob said, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:22-32).

Recently, I threw down a gauntlet before God and got what I deserved thrown right back at me. I’ll talk more about that later, as it’s still in process. Because of this recent experience, it got me thinking about the other times I’d thrown down gauntlets and God had responded, “Okay, Jill, have it your way.” Although I don’t want to talk about the recent gauntlet-throwing yet, I’ll give you a happy example of God answering one of my challenges positively — one of my favorite answered challenges, in fact.

Back when I was caring for a toddler and homeschooling two children and working toward my degree at UNM, my husband proposed that since we had three daughters, we ought to try for a son. Before we were married, we’d decided that we were going to have three children, and here he was changing things up on me. How dare he! I know it’s silly that we selected as if from a checklist how many children we were going to have, and now we were ready to choose the sex of our next child that we would…yes, choose to have. Oh, my. This “choice” ideal might seem powerful, but the thought of caring for another baby made me panic instead. I was tired. So, I put an absurd challenge before God: I told him I would only agree to this male child my husband wanted if he was born before my 35th birthday and after I had graduated from college.

I repeated this challenge to other people, as though that would set it in stone. If I told it to three people, God would have to honor it, right? Most people did the math and scratched their heads. They insisted it wouldn’t be possible due to how long it was taking me to finish my degree. Inside, I was sardonically saying, “Exactly!” I don’t like to think of myself as a smug person, but perhaps….

The thing about motherhood is it’s hard. A woman’s body gets tired. In a traditional society, the man takes on the monetary responsibility, but the actual physical act of bearing and rearing the young falls on women. Both can be backbreaking, to be honest. The fact that a man wants to take on the responsibility of working even harder to provide for another child demonstrates he is a good man. Ultimately, I knew that having a fourth child would be a positive. Despite my challenging him with absurd terms, I would never tell God no when it comes down to it. That still didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid to have another baby.

I’m sure you’ve already guessed the end of my story: God brought me a son within the absurdly unrealistic parameters I had made. At the beginning of my final year in college, I got pregnant. No joke, I gave birth a week after graduating and a month before I turned 35. I did not intend to get pregnant at that time. I still didn’t want to get pregnant. I had to cope with the many taunts from people at the university, such as, “Don’t you know how babies are made?” Seriously, do people think they’re funny when they say that? They don’t sound funny; they sound like snarky haters of life who care more for their own selfish desires than being part of gifting the world with beautiful children. It assumes that couples must hate babies so much that if they knew how they were created, they would do everything in their power to prevent babies from being born.

Continuing along that tangent, bringing life into the world is what God expects of us. Because we’ve decided as a culture not to do this, we are experiencing demographic decline. Like coddled queens, we have thought we could live only for ourselves (like my useless college degree*) and then bring in immigrants to do our heavy lifting when we no longer have a big enough work force to keep us in the fat delights we enjoy. I suspect the liberal-minded people who push for one or even zero child per household would never admit their system requires either soft slavery or genocide of elders who can no longer work. When you don’t have enough people growing food and manufacturing products and bringing everything to the market and selling those goods, certain segments will have to die off, either naturally, or by eugenicist means. Or — you import slaves from other countries to do your work for you. There really is no other way for the system to work unless we get going on our robot slave class, instead.

In conclusion, now that my son is a teenager, I wouldn’t go back for a single minute and change my challenge to God, or my acceptance of the gift he gave me in exchange for my belligerence. It might be better not to throw those kinds of gauntlets at his feet in the first place, but, hey, at the very least, if you do, you will find out who is really in control. And I can tell you right now I’m not the one.

In secondary conclusion, the whole point of this post was Bring Dueling Back! Men need to be knights again and wear heavy armor that makes a loud clash as it hits the floor. But wait, Jill, that’s an antilife sentiment. Oh, all right, so it is. Don’t bring dueling back. We should solve our disputes through rap battles instead.