Time for Tea

My mother encouraged me this Christmas to make the best use of my place here as "our minister's wife" and take time to exhort the women I find myself in congregation with. Most of them are many years my senior and it is daunting to think about teaching my elders. She suggested something a little more subtle. And so begins my next spiritual discipline: tea parties!

For Christmas Mom gave me three tea-party-as-ministry books. I've always wanted these and they have provided me with the motivation to get started. I am hoping to do one tea party a month, inviting only a handful of women to each. We'll enjoy each other's company, share stories, and, I hope, I'll have a time to give a devotion or share something the Lord has put on my heart. I'd like to have a hostess' gift or party favor for each woman to take home along with some sort of reminder of the time.

For this first tea, I've invited four of the older women of our congregation. They are all very active in the congregation and have been for many years. I hope to encourage them to continue in doing the work they are already doing as well as challenging them to be mentoring younger women. I'm calling this a New Beginnings Tea and I hope to remind these seasoned members that they still have much to give to this body, even with a new young whippersnapper in the pulpit! The kids have helped me to bake an apricot ladder loaf, make fancy tuna salad for tea sandwiches and I've started making sets of quilted coasters for each woman to take home. I'm looking forward to our time together.

Please pray for this gathering as we minister to each other. Pray that it is the first of many gatherings of the women of our church to encourage one another to grow in our discipleship, and please pray for me in this strange position of leadership in which I find myself.

Rainy Day Musings

I have always loved the rain. What can I say, I'm a Washington state girl at heart. In college (in Washington state) I learned that the rain was one of God's ways of saying "I love you." I know that it rains just for me. Just to be told that I am loved.

Today was a rainy day. And windy, too. It literally blew our door off it's hinges! With all that love blowing around there certainly was a lot to be grateful for. And so today my list begins with:

186. Rain - lots of it
187. My husband who finds me beautiful
188. Past heartbreaks
189. A past redeemed
190. A new rowing machine (thanks Mom and Dad!)
191. A timely word
192. Fresh baked bread from...
193. A fabulous new bread recipe (http://www.peterandrewryan.com/baking/2008/11/european-peasant-bread/)
194. Our small town community
195. Emma, regarding taking turns for the new rowing machine: "Katie, the Bible says to let others go first and since I am an honest woman, you may go first."
196. My back porch/extra winter fridge
197. Ice skating with the kids
198. Katie working so hard and doing so well at ice skating
199. Katie working so hard at gymnastics with a good attitude
200. My Pastor-husband
201. Emma feeding her little brother for me
202. The trust of a wonderful young woman
203. A refresher course in geometry


Be thankful this week and enjoy the rain, however it comes in your life.

Spiritual Parenting

I said last week I'd write more about sewing with my girls.  Here is the promised update:

When I was small my mother would sew with me.  Simple patterns for sundresses, shorts, easy stuff.  We'd cut out the patterns and I'd struggle through pinning them to the hideous fabric I wish I could say my mother had chosen for me.  She would sit at her sewing machine and do a couple of seams, then invite me to come and finish off that particular piece.  Without fail, I would sit down and the thread would break.  Or the needle would come unthreaded.  Or the fabric would jam in the hole-plate-thingy.  It was all to easy for me to conclude that the sewing machine hated me.  It knew I was coming, it sensed my fear, and gleefully it thwarted my every attempt to use it.

Kind of like parenting.  Oh, I don't think that my children hate me; analogies always break down somewhere.  But just when I think that the parenting machine is humming right along, the thread breaks.  Usually my thread.  We've established an order, a comfortable pace or method of doing things.  Sure it's tedious to get some of those pins (guidelines) in place, but all in all we're doing alright.  Until I get to the sewing machine.  Or the math workbook.  Or the room cleaning.  And once again I've been thwarted.

Most of you know how much I love my four little ones.  You may not know that I grew up in a similarly loving home, but I did.  There are very few things that my husband and I have said we will not do like my parents.  We have said, however, that we will not yell - as in significantly raise the volume of our voices - at our children.  It is an intimidating and, ultimately, ineffective way of communicating, especially with someone so much smaller than you.  I confess, this week, I have done a lot of yelling.  I have often felt thwarted in my parenting, like something is out to get me. 

In my encounters with the sewing machine as a child, I usually quit trying after what seemed like forever, but in reality was probably only a few minutes of struggle.  I stopped sewing with my mother (I'm sorry about that, Mom) when I was about ten.  It was too frustrating.  I'm tempted to do that with parenting sometimes.  It can be too frustrating.  But I realized something today: I've started sewing again.  Literally.  My husband bought me a new sewing machine in the Fall.  I read the manual (always good for me) and gave it a whirl.  After a false alarm call to the company about a suspected missing part ("No, ma'am, that lever is inside the machine.), and several of my childhood mishaps, I'm sewing.  I've actually started a quilt as one of my New Year's Resolutions.  And I know that if I can take up something as eternally insignificant as sewing, certainly I can persevere in my parenting.  It helps to read the manual and just give it a whirl.  There will certainly be false alarms and regressions to my childhood, but I'll be parenting just the same. 

I was reminded of something important and encouraging today in an article by Leslie Leyland Fields in Christianity Today.  She writes about worrying less about being a successful parent and more about being a faithful one.  She says,
              
         "Parenting, like all tasks under the sun, is intended as an endeavor of love, risk, perseverance, and above all faith.  It is faith rather than formula, grace rather than guarantees, steadfastness rather than success that bridges the gap between our own parenting efforts, and what, by God's grace, our children grow up to become." 

Amen.

So: A Needle Pulling Thread

We didn't get to bake today.  We were out all day which is very unusual for us.  This evening however the girls and I sewed together.  I'm thinking, maybe a new discipline?  More later.

Memorizing Scripture

      I wish I could say that I've been really on top of memorizing Scriptures that are particularly meaningful to me this week, but I've been mostly relying on what my children are memorizing.  Ironically, their verse is instructive to me in this area:  "But these words are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in Him."  I do want that "life in Him."  Guess I should work on knowing and believing the words.

      I also wanted to write this week about our particular Wednesday discipline.  I've mentioned before that Wednesday is Baking Day here.  We've been talking to the girls about the concept of giving our first fruits to God and in that spirit we've been "tithing" on what we bake.  The girls figure out what a tenth (or so) of our batch of cookies or bread is and then they choose the best (hard to do when you know you're giving it away) and decide who needs some extra love this week.  So far they've chosen people from church and neighbours to share with.  It's teaching all of us to hold loosely what we have, to be grateful for what we keep, and to think of others.  It's an excellent practice, one I hope to continue into our summer garden. 
    
     Thank you, Lord, for your great bounty!