Sisters

"The Christian faith is meant to be lived moment by moment. It isn't some broad, general outline--it's a long walk with a real Person. Details count: passing thoughts, small sacrifices, a few encouraging words, little acts of kindness, brief victories over nagging sins." Joni Eaeckson Tada

I started this blog as an outlet. I was, and am, going through a transition time in my life and I needed to express my feelings about it and so many other things that I prayed the Lord would use in other women's lives. I have had the feeling for a long time now that we, as Christian women, do not fully follow the teachings of Titus 2:3-5.

"Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God."

I prayed that the Lord would give me the words in this blog for that purpose.

As I began writing this blog it became apparent to me that He had a different purpose for calling me to write again. Hopefully you will be able to find somewhere in my ramblings encouragement to adhere to Titus 2:3-5, but I think, more importantly, we can discover together that it is a journey to Titus 2:3-5. Yours' will be different then mine but we can travel together towards it. We don't have to chart new territory constantly, we can pick each other up when we stumble and fall, we can encourage during those dark times of discouragement, we can pray for each other when there is doubt or fear or anger or remorse. We are called to be sisters--we need to start acting like sisters.

I'm probably the last person in the world who should be writing about being a sister. I'm an only child, I had only one daughter--I could write a book on what it's like to be an only child, but how do I know anything about sisters? What I have learned through the years has come mostly from observing. My mother had five sisters, three are still living. Not one of them had the same personality. They shared few of the same attributes, some had brown eyes, some blue, one green. They were brunette, blond and red headed. They were short and tall, small and medium framed. They lived different lives. One married to one man until his death, the others married and divorced. Some lived in near-affluence, others in near-poverty. Yet from these women I learned what it meant to be strong, to be generous, to be loving, to close ranks and defend your sister against anything or anyone. I learned to trade recipes and cleaning solutions. I learned how to manage money and mis-manage money. I learned how to dress, how to put on make-up, how to attract a man. I learned that people respond to honey more then vinegar and that everyone loves to be really listened too (although that was not a strong attribute in our family), that gossip was fun and that family sticks together no matter how mad you get with them. Without ever saying a word they taught me what a woman should do and be--in our family.

Then I got saved and a whole new group of sisters came into my life. Not born of the same mother, but born again of the same Heavenly Father. I was very timid about joining in with these women. They seemed so sweet and so good. I thought they couldn't be true. I feared that when I left the room they would begin to talk about me. They prayed so earnestly and knew so much scripture. Maybe I wasn't good enough for this sisterhood. I stayed to myself most of the time. I was a divorced single mother of three. It appeared these women had been married and loving their husbands forever. I felt more like a step-sister (in the fairy tale meaning) then a real sister. Little by little the Lord began to draw me into this group of sisters. First by listening to Christian women speakers on the radio, then going to a women's group to hear a study I was interested in. Then He did the most amazing thing. He put a ministry on my heart for abuse victims--women abuse victims! I tried to just hand it off to the women's ministry at my church. I told the leader there that I would help organize it and get the material for it but she said only if God was calling me to teach it. I couldn't say no.

As Corrie ten Boom said, "Peter said, "No, Lord!" But he had to learn that one cannot say "No" while saying "Lord" and that one cannot say "Lord" while saying "No".

When I said yes to Jesus, to the ministry for abuse victims that He gave me, I began to finally be in a sisterhood of God. Week after week as I sat in a classroom with injured survivors and watched the Lord walk among us and heal us, I began to understand. He used all of the things that I had learned growing up with my amazing Aunts and He fine tuned it with His truths of what a Godly woman looks like. She is not a robotic super woman with a bow on her head. She is one of many beautiful Princesses of God. She might have brown or blue or green or grey or speckled eyes. She might be tiny or fluffy; tall or short; a beauty queen on the outside or gorgeous on the inside. She could be rich or poor or anywhere in-between. She might be the one who prayed amazing prayers or she might be the one who could only manage to say "please help me Lord". She could have memorized every scripture and read her Bible through and through every year since she was 17 or she just might be the one who jumped for joy because some caring woman just donated a brand new Bible to her or she might even be the one who after thirty years of shame finally admitted that she never learned to read and had never been able to read one word of scripture but still knew that she loved His word. A Christian sister may not start off dressing a certain way, talking a certain way or acting a certain way. A Christian sister starts with the act of giving up her life to Jesus. She doesn't have to understand it all, she just has to understand that she's been one way--a sinner--and when she surrenders to Jesus--He will forgive those sins and start to teach her another way, His way; and while He's lovingly teaching her, He brings these amazing women into her life that He has already taught some of those same lessons to. He doesn't want us to be observers the way I observed my Aunts and Christian sisters right after my salvation. He wants us to be participators in each other's lives.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God." 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

He wants to use us to instruct each other, encourage each other, love each other. He cannot use Christian men for this particular part of our growth so we as Christian women must make ourselves available to Him for this work. Chronological age has nothing really to do with our Titus journey. A fifty year old new Christian woman can be taught much from a loving twenty-three year old sister who has walked with Jesus for years. Because Jesus valued women and thought of them as equal in the kingdom of Heaven, He has given us roles and the means to accomplish those roles. He needs us to be sisters involved in each other's lives. He needs us to say yes when He calls us to speak a word of encouragement or challenge or just to relate to another sister's suffering. I encourage you to use this blog for that purpose. You don't have to know all there is to know about being a Christian, you don't have to be considered a prayer warrior or an authority on scripture. Come as you are, just as you came to the cross. The Lord will make sure that you are coming with a gift and a purpose that someone else needs to share.

Unexpected Christmas

"I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." John 14:18

"Do we not continually pass by blessings innumerable without notice, and instead fix our eyes on what we feel to be our trials and our losses, and think and talk about these until our whole horizon is filled with them, and we almost begin to think we have no blessings at all?" Hannah Whitall Smith

How was your Christmas? I hope you received all that you had hoped for. I hope you were surrounded by love and family and that you ended your day of celebrating Jesus' birth with full tummies and hearts. I can almost be certain that some of you who are reading this did not have the Christmas you had been dreaming about. I know mine did not go exactly as I had planned--in fact it went pretty much exactly the opposite of the way I had it planned and there were moments when I thought it was completely ruined. I wanted to cry or scream or both. It's my own fault. I paint the pictures in my head with too vivid of colors. I forget that when real people are involved the colors will mix together and overlap and the picture will at times be muted and at times be blurred and at other times look like a Jackson Pollock original.

My husband and I woke up really early to drive the hour to pick up my Mother and then drive the two hours to my youngest son's home. His house was already filled with so many that I love--both my sons, their wives, my granddaughter and new grandson. My daughter was on her way. As the house filled with the smells of the Christmas feast we were about to have and the area around the tree exploded with gifts to be opened I looked around with such contentment. Maybe the picture wasn't exactly what I had imagined, but it was pretty close. We ate our meal. Gift opening would come next and I could imagine the happy faces as each opened presents that had been picked out intentionally and with love for each one. Then I heard a fearful voice coming from the restroom. My mother was screaming for me to come help her. I entered to find blood everywhere and my 82 year old mother shaking violently. Isn't it strange that when we are confronted by things like this so often the Lord just seems to slow our hearts down and helps us to remain calm? Well, He does that for me anyway. I'm always calm when calamity strikes and then when it's over, I usually fall apart. When I say there was blood everywhere, I mean there was a LOT of blood. She had told us earlier that when she woke up that morning there was a lot of blood on her pillow and that her nurse's aide where she lives said it was a nose bleed. Her nose was bleeding again, but not like any nose bleed I had ever seen. My daughter came into the restroom and panicked. My son who's house it was immediately thought she would die right there in his home on Christmas morning. My husband, the voice of reason, said it's a bad nose bleed, let's apply pressure and stop the bleeding and she'll be o.k. I could see that the kids were too afraid so I said I thought we better take her to the hospital. We did. We spent hours in the emergency room on Christmas Day in New York City.

By the time we reached the hospital the bleeding had indeed stopped as the voice of reason had said but because she had so much blood on her and because she is elderly, they put her in a wheelchair and wheeled her right in. She was seen very quickly and the doctor confirmed it was just a bloody nose probably caused by her heater drying out the air in her apartment this time of year. He decided he would check out her blood to see if it was too thin or if she had lost too much so the two kids who had accompanied us went back to the festivities and my husband and I waited. As my daughter left she took a picture of her grandmother and put it on Facebook with the caption "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer!".

I am ashamed to say that at that moment my thoughts were not God's thoughts. I felt resentment that I was in the emergency room of a New York City hospital on Christmas instead of celebrating with my family. I wanted the doctors and the lab technicians to hurry--I felt robbed of precious moments and invaluable time. I almost felt panicked that I was loosing seconds that I would never be able to get back and I needed each one of those seconds--I really, really needed them! This was one holiday that my empty nest was going to be full again, when my quiet life would be filled with noise and laughter again and I was missing it all to care for the mother who was seldom there when I was a child to care for me.

I've cared for my mother since my father died--21 years ago. At first, it was just taking care of paying her bills because my father always did that. Through the years she needed more and more care until finally she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and she had to move in with us. My whole life the role of mother and child had been reversed. She never seemed to grow up and I had to grow up too quickly. We were never close, never bonded, never got along for any length of time. Despite that, rarely a day has gone by that I have not called her to make sure she was all right. I made sure that my children were around her as much as possible--they have always adored her. I accepted the responsibility of taking care of her because I knew it was expected of me. Somewhere along the journey of taking care of this woman who really only invoked anger in me because of her neglect, I began to see her through the Lord's eyes. I began to enjoy hearing the stories of the past that Alzheimer's had made so vivid to her. I began to excuse the things that in the past I had found inexcusable in her. She started telling strangers that I was her best friend and I thought, o.k., I can handle being her friend and caring for her as unto the Lord. The amazing thing was that in learning to care for her the Lord began healing me of the hurts and bitterness of the past.

But now we were in the emergency room and the images of being a child and having my own nose bleeds and only my father to comfort me and take care of me. The resentment stirred up because I could not be with my own children that I had tried to nurture in all of the ways that she had failed to nurture me. Why God? Just as the tears started to run over the brim of my eyes He literally opened my eyes. Here I was in a hospital on Christmas day surrounded by nurses, doctors, technicians, janitors and aides who were not home with their loved ones. They had been cheerful to us from the moment we got there. They had served my mother without a thought of their own losses. She was a stranger that needed their help and they were giving their best gift of care to her. I took another look at my mother laying on the hospital bed and asked the Lord to please forgive me and change my heart; to please help me to minister to her with love and patience and to show the people at this hospital His love through me. I knew at that point that He would give us the time we needed to all be together; that He would work it all for our good and that was enough--more then enough to bring me peace.

Shortly after that prayer the doctor returned to tell us all was well with her blood and shortly after that she was dismissed. As we left the hospital we were able to wish all of the workers a Merry Christmas with real joy in our hearts. By the time we eventually got my mother back to her home my heart was thankful for each moment we all shared, each kiss, each hug, each joy-filled laugh. I could not tell you what each person received for a Christmas gift--I don't even care--this Christmas will always be precious to me because God shook my perfect Christmas up like a snow globe. He shook up the control I was unknowingly trying to exert to make Christmas fit into my box, he shook up feelings I thought I had long ago conquered but were still under the surface making me sick and sad. He let the snow come (figuratively and literally) and settle on my life and the scene that was left after all the shaking up was so much prettier then the scene He could see in me before.

If your Christmas wasn't exactly what you had hoped for. If relationships were difficult or hurtful. If all you feel is empty or angry or resentful when you know that you should feel peaceful and loving and thankful please remember that God knows what you are feeling and He cares. Sometimes He even has to show us what we are feeling and He'll do that for you because He loves you and He really, really wants to heal you. As He reminds us in John 14:18, even if our earthly parents are not here for us for whatever reason, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you."

Gifts

I think I just ordered the last Christmas present today. It's the perfect gift for my perfect husband and when I pressed the "enter" key to send all of the information necessary to purchase the gift and get it on it's way to arrive here before Christmas morning, I had the most wonderful sense of happiness. I could picture him opening it at our son's house. I could picture the look on his face because he would never imagine that I had purchased it for him. I could picture his joy and that brought me joy.

I think I get a little consumed with gifts at Christmas time. I make my lists, I think about what gift would please each name. Sometimes I panic because I can't think of a gift that will please or I don't have enough money to purchase the perfect one. I'm not saying that giving gifts is a bad thing. I believe we are called to be generous and called to be loving. I'm excited about giving my husband, children and grand children their presents this year. I can hardly wait!

As I finished buying that last gift, I joyfully thanked the Lord and He brought to my mind this scripture:

"We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." Romans 12:6-8 

I've been so busy obsessing about Christmas presents, but have I been diligent in giving to others the gift that God has given me? In His word God says He gave us all these gifts and He says we are to use them. Not just at Christmas, but throughout our lives. I can imagine when God created us that He took great joy in choosing just the right gift to give us. In a similar way that many thoughts went through my mind as I chose my husband's perfect Christmas gift, God thought of who you were, what your personality was, where you would live and work and play, the people that would surround you, the people you would love, the people who would hurt you. He knew the way you would think and the experiences you would endure in your lifetime and He said "this is the perfect gift for her".  Do you know what your gift is? Are you using it with joy?

I feel quite certain that my husband will enjoy his gift and use it for the purpose that it was made. I would be very disappointed if he didn't. Similarly God wants you to enjoy your gift. More then that He wants you to use it. Even more then that, He will allow things and people in your life so that you will have the opportunities to use your gift. Is He disappointed when we don't? I'm sure He isn't, after all He knows us. His love for us is unconditional. The gifts He gives us are not for Him to measure whether we are good enough or lovable enough. He knows that when we give to others we will be blessed and so will they. It brings us joy and happiness, a sense of purpose. It allows others to see God's love in a human. It may even be used to bring others to salvation.

Corrie ten Boom said, "The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration but its donation." Maybe this Christmas while we wrap each present to place under our trees, we should ask ourselves, "what is the gift that God gave me and how am I using it--not just at Christmas but for all of my life?"

Dear Lord,

Thank you for the special gift you gave me when you created me. Thank you for being the only One that knows me completely. Thank you for placing me in my family, in this home, in this church, in this state, in this country. Thank you for each person that you bring into my life. Help me please to really see them, to see their need for my gift. Please give me the courage to step out in faith and share the gift and to do it with joy and love so that others will see You in me. I give you all of the glory and I give you all of the honor and praise.

In Jesus name,
Amen