Notes to My Younger Self

On Saturday mornings, our church has a ministry at a local nursing home. A few of us takes turns leading a simple service, and there is usually a very small group of residents in attendance. This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to give the devotional to a group of elderly ladies there. They listened with rapt attention as I talked to them about the last four verses of Psalm 92, where the Psalmist says that the righteous - those who have their righteousness in Christ, as saved believers - can still be fruitful and flourishing in old age.

Sunday morning found me in my usual place of teaching my Sunday School class of teenage girls. They range in age from 12-17, and listen to me with varying degrees of attention. Most of the time I go away with the feeling that they didn't get it at all. Sunday School and church don't rank high on their list of priorities. Yet, they are at such an important point in their lives, where they are going to be making many major decisions in the next few years. I long for them to have their lives rooted and grounded spiritually and to be growing into Godly womanhood now, before those decision-making times come.

These past few days, I have been thinking a lot about these two groups of ladies. One group is at the end of their lives - most of their life is behind them, and they are now facing limitations in both their mental and physical abilities. The other group is just beginning. They have their whole life in front of them. And in between those two groups of ladies, a whole lot of life takes place. As I was thinking about this, I asked myself this:  if I could go back and give my younger self some advice, what would it be? Today in this post I am going to talk specifically about things I have learned as a pastor's wife. In the next post I will talk about advice to younger women and mothers, in general. But these lessons I have learned as the wife of a pastor can apply to everyone.

I did not marry a pastor. He was a successful businessman for 15 years before the Lord called Him to preach. When we started out in ministry, we had been married 20 years and had 3 children. I was scared to death about being a pastor's wife. And even though I knew it was going to be hard, it's interesting that the things I thought were going to be the hardest, aren't. Things like loneliness and needing to be flexible because your husband is always "on call", and difficult counseling situations are not the hard things. God is always faithful. He has helped me adjust to those things over the years. The hard things are when your sheep wander away for greener pastures, usually for silly or wrong reasons, or worse, when they never even tell you the reason. When the people whom you pour your life into make wrong choices and go away from the Lord. When your husband is discouraged. When people are upset at your husband for no reason, and so by association they are upset with you too - just because you are his wife. If I could give a couple pieces of advice to myself as a younger pastor's wife, they would be these:

1. What you are is more important that what you do. You can always be doing more. You can never please everyone. Everyone will have a different opinion of what you do or don't do. You are responsible to please the Lord, your husband, and no one else. I always have to remember I am serving the Lord, not the church. Eph. 6:7 - "Not with eye service, as men pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart."

2. You can't give out what you don't take in. Saturating yourself with the Word of God is so very important. Trying to give what you don't have is like trying to pour water out of a dry bucket. It won't work! My most important priority has to be my personal time with the Lord in His Word. My most precious possession is my Bible and my stack of journals that contain all the scriptures, wisdom and lessons the Lord has taught me.

3. The most important job of the pastor's wife is to be the wife of the pastor. Sounds elementary, but only you can be your husband's wife and your kids' mom. I need to be his wife and helpmeet first.

4. This one was given to me by my mentor and dear Pastor's wife, Mrs. Bobbie Yearick: You can't help people if you get into the pit with them. Yes, I need to have compassion and I need to do what I can to help them with the problems they have. But I need to make sure that I am guarding myself and my emotional, spiritual and physical health.  I cannot get so caught up in people's problems that I get down and depressed myself, and neglect my own responsibilities. I am not the answer to people's problems. God is. I'm thankful for that!

Whether or not you are the wife of a pastor, I hope these pieces of advice to my younger self are a blessing and a help to you.

Till next time,
Kathi

Letting Go of Perfection

One of the things I love most about writing this blog is knowing the Lord is leading me in what I write about. So often I have plans to write on a certain topic, and sometimes even as I am writing, the Lord changes and "tweaks" what I write. That is evident in most of my posts, but especially today. I first wanted to show you pictures of some of my spring decorating, before it gets in the too-distant past! The picture on the left is the "Before" using a lot of the snowmen I have in my collection. My husband graciously tolerates all the snowmen around here all winter, but when spring comes he wants me to get rid of them! Hence, the spring decorations in the "After" picture on the right.

Here are a couple close-ups. I found the cute birdcage at Hobby Lobby and filled it with the pretty pastel Easter eggs you see here, from Pier One.  The blue mason jar and the tulips were finds from Michaels. All were on sale! And I love the big letter E!

One more picture - four of my beautiful granddaughters in their Easter dresses, on Easter morning before church. Actually they were only here for Easter because of my mother-in-law's funeral, but it was such a special blessing to have them here!

These pictures, however, do not tell the whole story. As perfect as the pictures look, things were most definitely NOT perfect at our house on Easter. It was, in fact, probably the most chaotic and imperfect Easter I have ever had. Originally, we had plans to have two other couples in our church over for Easter dinner. I had enjoyed browsing through Pinterest for the "perfect" recipes to serve and table decorations to use. In God's plans (which are always perfect!), reality was quite different. He took my mother-in-law home to heaven, and the funeral was the day after Easter. Because we had to leave for Pennsylvania immediately after the morning service, there was no time for an Easter dinner. My daughter and I made food - and it ended up being a conglomeration of a menu, due to us wanting to use up what we had on hand since we were going away - on Saturday. So on Easter Sunday, everyone was busy changing clothes, packing last-minute items, and watching children. We set all the leftover (!) food out on the kitchen counter with a stack of (gulp!) paper plates. And in between packing snacks and suitcases, loading the cars, programming GPS's, and taking care of 4 small children we all took turns putting our plates of leftovers into the microwave and eating in shifts! No decorations, no special menu, no sit-down dinner together, and most definitely no perfection!

If you know me at all, you know that this was HARD for me! I am the stereo-typical firstborn child. I thrive on organization, precise detail, and PERFECTION. Over the years, the Lord has had to work on that in me. I have learned that while I need to strive for excellence, that perfection is something I have to overcome. Perfection is defined as wanting to do everything just right, and trying to meet a standard of performance that we have set. I can really identify with Martha in the Bible. She would have been a woman after my own heart - trying to have everything perfect for Jesus and the rest of her guests! The danger is in neglecting the more important things in the quest to have everything perfect. I have to ask God to help me "keep the main thing the main thing" and have the right priorities. Being a loving, gracious, and Godly example to my family is much more important than maintaining that self-imposed standard of perfection.

In Christ, we are "accepted in the beloved." Ephesians 1:6 says "to the praise of the glory of His Grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved." People like me tend to feel like we have to be perfect to be accepted by the Lord. Not so. He loves us with an everlasting, unchanging, and perfect love that is not rooted in who we are or what we do. It is rooted in who He is. We also tend to demand perfection from others, and that's not right either. Thankfully we have an awesome God who, if we depend on Him, gives us "grace upon grace." 

Maybe you can't identify with me. Maybe being a perfectionist is not a problem for you. But I have to think there are others out there like me, and I hope this is an encouragement to you! Seek to keep your priorities what they should be and to let go of perfection. 

Till next time,

Kathi

Re-Writing the Directions

I had something happen this week that I think is a first in my 40 years of marriage. I made 2 meals in 3 days that were failures. My husband is wonderful in that he will eat anything, and we did eat the dishes that I had prepared, but I threw the rest away! They were that bad.

With all of these years of experience and a lot of awesome, tried-and-true recipes, I love to cook and bake, and I have to say in all honesty that I have become a pretty good cook. Both of these meals, however, were new dishes. And, in both cases, I changed the ingredients or the directions.

The first time, I was looking for something to use up leftover ham and broccoli. I thought that a ham, broccoli, pasta and cheese casserole sounded like a good combination. And it probably would have been - if I had followed a recipe. I did look for a recipe online and found what looked like a promising one, but it called for a jar of Alfredo sauce which I did not want to use - too unhealthy - and I didn't have one anyway. I thought if I just added a bit of half and half that would work for a sauce. It didn't. I also didn't bother to add much seasoning. Not good.

The second meal, I decided to make Eggplant Parmesan. My husband loves eggplant and I had picked one up at a farmer's market when we were in Pennsylvania last week, and needed to use it up. We have had eggplant parmesan in restaurants and usually really like it. I noticed that all the recipes called for breading the eggplant slices before baking them. I thought that because I am gluten free, I could skip that part and as long as I pre-baked the eggplant slices it wouldn't make much of a difference. It did. I ended up with a soggy, liquid-y dish that bore little resemblance to eggplant parmesan!

As I have been reflecting on these mishaps, it dawned on me that my experience is very similar to what we sometimes do in our spiritual lives. In both cases, I had a recipe I could have followed but I chose not to. I thought that I knew better. We know what the right thing to do is, or we know what we are supposed to do, but we decide that we can make changes. We re-write the instructions and do a lot of rationalizing. We reason that it really won't make much of a difference. We treat the Bible and Christianity like a recipe that we skip steps or ingredients, or change the directions, and then we wonder why we don't have success.

I think about the children of Israel as they were in the wilderness, and God provided them with manna to eat. He also provided them with some very specific directions. They were to gather only what they needed each day, in the exact amount they needed. Of course, some of them decided they could do things better. Can't you identify with them? "Why should I go out and gather manna every morning, when I can just gather two days' worth at once? That saves time and is a whole lot more efficient!" They changed the directions. God also told them not to gather on the Sabbath but to gather extra the day before. Some of the Israelites had to test that out by not gathering extra and going out on the Sabbath morning anyway. Of course they came up empty-handed.

Some verses I think of are Proverbs 3:5-6, which tells us to not depend on our own understanding and in all our ways to acknowledge God and let Him direct our path. But the one that I think really applies here is Joshua 1:8, which gives us the key to success: "This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shall mediate on it day and night, that thou mayest observe to do all that is written therein: for then thou shall make thy way prosperous, and then thou shall have good success." (Italics mine)

The lesson here? The next time you are tempted to skip steps or change the directions, don't. There aren't any short-cuts - in cooking or in obedience to God.

Blessings,
Kathi

An Anchor in the Storms

I had to take a necessary break from blogging because the past two weeks have been an eventful blur. I feel as if I stepped out the door into a storm which is just now subsiding. On Tuesday, March 31, my husband's mom passed into the presence of her Savior. It was expected, but it was unexpected. Many of you who have lost loved ones know what I mean. Her health was rapidly declining, as I mentioned in my last post, but the end came much faster and much more suddenly than we thought it would. In the midst of it all, God was good. Mom's suffering was not prolonged nor did she become bedridden. Our daughter and her family were already here, and not only were they able to make the trip with us to Pennsylvania for the funeral, but they were such a help and comfort to us at the time of mom's death. Both of our sons and their families, including the one from Florida, were also able to be there and for one day (the day of the funeral) we had all of our children and grandchildren together - for the first time in nearly three years.

My husband and I have been going through a season of storms. 1 Peter 1:6 talks about being in "heaviness through manifold temptations", or various trials, for "a season." Seasons of storms are a part of life. Sometimes you can see the storm coming. Sometimes it comes at a moment's notice. And most of the time, we can't avoid them.

The Bible tells us about a lot of storms. I have been meditating on the storm in Mark 6 and would just like to share a few of my thoughts:

1. The Lord prepared the storm (vs. 45). He was the one who told them to get in the boat, He sent the storm, and He saw them struggling in the storm (vs. 48). Storms never catch God by surprise.

2. The Lord had prepared the disciples for the storm. In chapter 4, there was another storm, and Jesus had taught them that He would deliver them. They were prepared by what they had already learned. I would not know what I know about God if it weren't for the storms.

3. There was much struggling in the midst of the storm (vs. 48). The disciples were toiling - working hard to keep their heads above water. Ever feel like that? The winds were "contrary" - against them and very difficult to work in. They were working hard to get to the other side but were still stuck in the middle. Their natural response was fear. Our emotions can serve as a warning to us that we are letting them rule instead of remembering what we need to remember -

4. Jesus is our anchor in the storm. Jesus was the One who came to them and spoke to them and calmed their fears. I love verse 50 - "For they all saw Him, and were troubled. And immediately He talked with them and saith unto them, Be of good cheer, It is I, Be not afraid!"

In the storms, Jesus wants to talk to us and calm us. He wants to remind us of truth. I find it helpful to "talk to myself" by asking these questions:
Does God love me? (yes)
Does God know about what is happening? (yes)
Is God in control? (this answer can take a bit of faith, but the answer is yes)
Will God do what is right? (yes)

These are the calming words Jesus brings. He is our anchor in the storms. I trust the next time you find yourself in a storm, you will be helped by these truths.

Blessings,
Kathi