Men Are DOS and Women are Windows

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31

I thought about the title of this devotion and wondered how many people would actually know what DOS – Disk Operating System is/was.  The first version of MS-DOS was for IBM PCs and came out in 1981.  DOS was a very simple operating system – back to the man analogy, capable of handling one thing at a time.  Then came Windows.  First in 1985, but the version that really caught on was Windows 3.0 which came out in 1990.  Windows allowed for more than one thing to be happening at once – called multi-tasking – and thus the woman analogy.  So what brought this up? It certainly was not my desire to give you a look back at operating system development.

A friend recently referred to the fact that men compartmentalize – stick life events in boxes in their brains – and so they can deal with one thing at a time.  Vice how women handle life events – like the planets revolving around the Sun – with their own moons. Lots of activity happening simultaneously. I agreed with what she said – but I think there is an important clarification to be made. Well maybe more than one.

First – God has wired men and women differently. Men are the way they are and women are the way they are by God’s design.  Certainly there are extremes – exaggerations of those differences – but the differences are God’s intent.  Of course there is a spectrum of difference and maybe even some overlap between the two – but even then there is a difference – a God-intended difference. We were created to complement each other, not compete with each other. Together men and women make a whole and, in my opinion, combined we reflect God and His nature more completely. The differences blended together making something better when the two parts are separate.  That is called synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” – Genesis 1:27

Second – men may compartmentalize life events – but when something hurtful – heart breaking – tragic happens, and men put that something in a “brain box”, that does not mean that they don’t feel the pain – that they don’t feel the weight of the problem – that their hearts do not hurt.  Men may express emotions differently, but are not in denial because of a different expression.  But, that does not mean they are not ever in denial – and the same could be said about women.

I realize that there is a movement in our culture and really around the world to try to find neutral ground for both sexes.  It seems almost a desire that people be a-sexual in their behavior. That is man’s idea, not God’s.

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-who is forever praised. Amen.” – Romans 1:25

So what is the point? Rather than point to our differences and see them as weakness (that is NOT what my friend was doing BTW) – consider why God might have thought it good that He should make us the way we are. And then rejoice in and be thankful for the difference.