Loving God - Dancing With My Father

Table Mentoring: Blessed to Be a Blessing

admin — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 06:26:09 +0000

As a young mom with babies and dishes, laundry piles growing and lots of dreams for what lay beyond, I’ll always remember a woman in my church approaching me with an idea that surprised me. She wanted me to teach and encourage her teen daughter, and she wanted her daughter to grow a heart for serving others, and a mindset of learning from a woman a few steps ahead of her on life’s path. My church friend proposed sending her daughter and a friend to my home one day a week. During that day, the girls would help however I needed; they could change diapers, wash dishes or fold laundry, play with toddlers or whatever I could come up with. In exchange, I’d spend part of that time encouraging these two friends. We could do a formal Bible study or just spend time talking and praying together. Honestly, I was surprised and humbled (really, more like awed and a little terrified). Here was a woman I respected, willing to trust me with offering wisdom to her daughter at a crucial time in her life. I wasn’t long married and much of my day in that season involved helping my husband […]

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Soul-Thirst and Living Water

admin — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 14:42:25 +0000

I’m a girl who panics when I don’t have a water bottle with me. I want to always know that I can grab a drink if I feel a little parched. Imagining a village without access to clean drinking water shatters my heart and makes me want to run with a shovel and start well-digging myself. So when I think of a woman meeting Jesus at a well, there for a jug of water after walking through desert-heat in the mid-day sun, my throat feels a little dry in sympathetic longing. I’m thinking if I were her, I might’ve been a little impatient when he interrupted my vital task to ask for a drink for himself – especially when I realized he was a Jew, and Jews don’t talk to my kind of people. Jesus didn’t worry about social restrictions, though. He used that cup-of-water-request as a conversation starter, and then offered the hesitant woman living water… telling her if she drank it, she would “never thirst again.” “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend […]

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Six Words that Modeled Chivalry (#chivalrymovement)

admin — Wed, 31 May 2017 00:36:02 +0000

Six little words. “Can I help you with that?” He coupled them with a welcoming smile, and a hand reached out to grab a door handle, on the way into the coffee shop where he was training to be a barista. The ladies he spoke them to were so taken aback, they were nearly speechless. Now, my second-born is 19. He’s got tattoos and a motorcycle and he was wearing a black leather jacket. This might have caused the reaction, or it might be (as he believed) a sign of the stark lack of gentlemanly behavior that exists (or doesn’t) in our current culture. But when that young man spoke words of kindness to two women in a coffee shop, he crossed a cultural line of expectation and opened a door for genuine conversation, real connection, and sharing the love of God. I’m raising five arrows – four young men and a lady, and we value honoring others with our words and actions. We’re all broken people and sometimes we shock ourselves with our ability to be impatient or rude when we’re inconvenienced, but overall, I see my children intentional about courteous behavior, because it’s something we expect, and […]

The post Six Words that Modeled Chivalry (#chivalrymovement) first appeared on Dancing With My Father.

The post Six Words that Modeled Chivalry (#chivalrymovement) appeared first on Dancing With My Father.