| Monday, February 1, 2010 |
| His Very Own: Becoming a Titus 2 Woman (Danielle DeCarlo) |
When Travis was born, Randy stayed home from work for a couple of weeks and we enjoyed the time together as a family, getting to know our new little boy. And then he left us. He went back to work, and I was solely responsible for the survival of our baby from 7 am to 7 pm. I was nervous! It became my special moment every night when Randy returned and I would display Travis proudly and say, “Look what I did today! He’s still alive!” It took about a month or two before I got past that and felt fairly confident that Randy wouldn’t need to call and ask if we had made it another day. But I didn’t feel like I had mastered motherhood. There had to be something more than just keeping a baby alive. I wanted to move from keeping him alive to teaching him to thrive. But I wasn’t sure how to do that. And since that time there have been lots of times that I feel like there is something I am missing, but I am not sure how to figure it out. Sometimes I am not even sure what it is that I don’t know.
Elisabeth Elliot describes the way God planned for this need to be fulfilled. She calls it “spiritual mothering”: taking spiritual daughters under our wings to school them in the areas Paul mentions in Titus 2: loving their husbands and children, self-control, purity, kindness, being busy at home, and being subject to their husbands. She recounts the time Mrs. Cunningham, a sweet older Scottish woman, knocked at her door and said that God had given her a burden for Elisabeth and she wanted her to know that anytime Elisabeth needed to talk, she would be available. Elisabeth said that she spent many hours in her small apartment, drinking tea and opening up her heart to Mrs. Cunningham. Elisabeth says that she owes much to her spiritual mother, and she exhorts other women to follow her Biblical example and be spiritual mothers.
God has called us to teach the younger women these things, and we are seeking to respond with an event called His Very Own: Becoming a Titus 2 Woman. It is scheduled for Saturday, February 20 in the Ministry Building. We are planning a series of panel discussions focusing on each of the areas described in Titus 2. We will have 6 sessions with 2 topics running simultaneously, and each woman may choose 3 topics. We are seeking to create an environment that will generate some mentoring relationships and expose some of the hidden wisdom among our ladies. We are facilitating discussions, not presuming that any of us have arrived at perfection! Paul calls older women to teach the younger, and we ALL fit in both categories. We will have ladies ranging in age from their 20s all the way up to their 70s. We are praying that God would lead us into deeper relationship with each other, and that the wisdom that we possess does not end with us.
We are collecting questions to be discussed during this day. Any issue or concern you have, please write it down and place it in the pink box at any women’s event or during church at the welcome center. You do not need to sign your name, simply submit your concern and come to hear what advice and direction we can offer. We are hoping that you can find a gentle ear among our women, someone to teach you the things that you need to learn. And we are praying that as older women, we will be the teachers and counselors that we so desperately need.Labels: Seeing God in the Everyday |
posted by gm @ 2:34 PM  |
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