MOTHERS, DAUGHTERS, SISTERS, WOMEN
Last weekend was Mother’s Day. Christians have this whole debate thing about wives, submit to your husbands…right after it tells men to love their wives. I think that little part of the Bible has been one of the worst exploited pieces of truth ever spoken by Man. Truly, we as men, are terrible with that phrase when talking about Mothers, daughters, sisters. Just even women in general. We use it-some of us, I don’t want to throw us all in to the grinder, sometimes to lord over them. Like that phrase where when you kid asks you why they are supposed to do something you hit them (metaphorically of course) with because I said so, that’s why. Crappy answer.
I think for Man, the partner of his in this life will have saved him many times and earned his trust. Sometimes, us males don’t want to own that. We stomp our feet and claim we can do whatever we need to do and the woman should just follow and be quiet.
Terrible use of leadership.
…a captain on a ship.
I’ve used this before, an analogy of a captain of a ship. He is not the guy you want starting the engines, running the computers, feeding the crew. He just isn’t. Sure, he’s the captain, but as the leader, he delegates. If he didn’t, the boat wouldn’t move. As husbands or boyfriends, or fathers, we need to remember that. It’s okay if we follow those women. They have gifts and strengths we simply were not issued at the time we came to this rock.
I saw a great post on Facebook the other day of some women I know who were standing among other younger women and some holding babies. Why, in our own right mind, would we ignore a gift from God like women such as these? Or, like the one below? It is women like this, we strive to find, nurture, come along side, follow, lead, laugh and cry with.
The post I came across was talking about—looking at the picture described above of those apparent generations of women:
‘Here is to strong women, may we be them, may we know them, may we raise them.’
It got me to the computer and for the next ten minutes I wrote about it. Then, realized it touched on a completely different area—men, I saved it for that time in a couple of weeks. But it caused me to think about this woman in the picture.
She was part of….
She was part of the Greatest Generation.
She married young but at the time, you did so because you didn’t know if anyone was going to live another year.
She worked at a naval air-station where she met her first husband.
She buried him while pregnant with twins. Born three months premature, they were not supposed to live.
They did.
She married again and had two more.
She was a mom to four who grew up with expectations, values, challenges, laughter, and tears.
She made it a home.
She made it a home. She did those things and called us in when it got dark and talked with her husband when he came home in the kitchen smoking cigarettes and double martinis while she cooked a meal with a protein, carbohydrates, and a proper amount of fat-all measured.
Because the second husband was a diabetic, ice cream would go bad in our house.
She made a huge pot of minestrone soup every Christmas and no one knows why. She drank too much and took sleeping pills, because she was always listening for her husband’s breathing and him slipping into a diabetic event. Several times, her vigilance saved him.
She wore those fluffy slippers you would slide your feet into.
Because of her….
Because of her, we wore suits and hard and uncomfortable shoes to church.
Because of her, we knew the different forks in play at a formal setting.
Because of her, we NEVER tucked our napkins in our shirt collars.
She had the same hairstyle as long as I knew her.
She never made breakfast….
She never made breakfast as long as I knew her.
She buried her second husband and was again, alone.
In the last two years of her life, she slaughtered the demons in her mind and gave up drinking, pills, and went back to college-never having been to college, taking what was known as the hardest class offered at the college.
She got an A.
She beat cancer-once.
She was flawed.
She was bent.
And yet, she loved us, and those around her.
Dad planned that.
Dad-God, planned the life of that woman and all the others. Children are who they are by their mothers. The women in their lives. Then men too. I will get to that one come Father’s Day. But the women today need to know they counted. They count. They will count in others lives and make it well.
If they want. It’s okay if they ask us for help, or they may want to run it alone. We-as men, do the same, probably way too much. You want to love your wo-man? Encourage her, listen to her, ask permission first before you paint the house black or try that new recipe with garlic anchovies, love her sacrificially. You have to justify why you’re supposed to die ten-fifteen years before her from exhaustion. Earn this exhaustion by loving her well.
There is that pesky free will thing.
It’s easy to just be. It’s often a struggle we don’t want to struggle with, especially if we are alone in the fight, with no partner and the gaggle of kids, bills and a house painted black. But there is One. And His plan is always perfect.
Always.
www.markjwilliams.com
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In