Ladders and Walls!

I spent the better part of three hours reconnecting with a friend yesterday and it opened my eyes to a ton of things I had either forgotten, or dismissed. One of which is how women need to remember how to be women.

It's really pretty funny, cuz I was a huge feminist growing up. Trying to prove all the time that I could do anything a guy could do! After I found out in climbing the ladder to success, my ladder was leaning up against the wrong wall, I fell rather fast to the ground and had to start rethinking my live and what I was really after. So many of us just stay on the ladder, even when we see that it's not working out the way we had dreamed. I'm thankful for my fall, now, not so much when it was happening.

I started to learn something about the way we women are made and don't think I've shared this before so here we go with a few things we know as women, but might have forgotten!

We were made as caregivers! It is something that comes as easy as breathing. Now, some of us are better at it than others and that's fine. We are social and want to connect everyone to everything and in the process we care about others. When I fell off my ladder and started getting real with myself and God, I found out I was pretty dang good at this caregiver stuff. I found this out very quickly after I started working at the soup kitchen. I got to looking and low and behold, 95% of my volunteers that came in and cooked and cared for the people, were women. The 5% that were men, were my board leaders, food pick up and maintenance.

Another case in point story. I was completely blown away one day when I had cleaned the parsonage, played in the yard, and had dinner ready for Preacher man when he got home. The look on his face when he walked through the house and smelled dinner, was worth an amount that I still can't put a price on! I had shown care for him by doing what was becoming my job. In all honestly, it has always been my job. I had balked against it for so many years, cuz I was a woman with more education than you could shake a stick at! Anyone could take care of a house, I wanted to climb that dang ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall! 

This has been part of my wake up call from God. My job is to care for my husband, AKA Preacher man! Because I am saying ok to this God given design, He is blessing me with a ministry! I am freed up enough to be able to sit down with others and listen to where they are on their spiritual journey and walk beside them. Just in the past week, I have shared in tears of joy, calmness that has come straight from God, frustration that has been self made, and rekindled a relationship that I believe will turn into something so much bigger than either of us can get our heads around right now! All I really did was be available to listen, which is a God given gift (those of you who know me, have seem the change!). 

To think it all started when I fell off the ladder that was leaning up against the wrong wall and I allowed God to reshape me into the woman he had planned all along! 

Wanted to Share

I found this and wanted to share it. It was written by Tom Junod and I hope you like it.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy's brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as "Young Rabbit," or even "Rabbit"; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be.

The little boy didn't know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray. He would grow up to become a great prayer, this little boy, but only intermittently, only fitfully, praying only when fear and desperation drove him to it, and the night he threw Old Rabbit into the darkness was the night that set the pattern, the night that taught him how. He prayed for Old Rabbit's safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. And so when he threw Old Rabbit out the car window the next time, it was gone for good.

Then he added this:

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn't want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, "The connections we make in the course of a life--maybe that's what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us--I've just met you, but I'm investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can't help it."

The next afternoon, I went to his office in Pittsburgh. He was sitting on a couch, under a framed rendering of the Greek word for grace and a biblical phrase written in Hebrew that means "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." A woman was with him, sitting in a big chair. Her name was Deb. She was very pretty. She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. She had curls in her hair and stars at the centers of her eyes. She was a minister at Fred Rogers's church. She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. Fred Rogers loved her very much, and so, out of nowhere, he smiled and put his hand over hers.  

"Will you be with me when I die?" he asked her, and when she said yes, he said, "Oh, thank you, my dear." Then, with his hand still over hers and his eyes looking straight into hers, he said, "Deb, do you know what a great prayer you are? Do you know that about yourself? Your prayers are just wonderful." Then he looked at me. I was sitting in a small chair by the door, and he said, "Tom, would you close the door, please?" I closed the door and sat back down. "Thanks, my dear," he said to me, then turned back to Deb. "Now, Deb, I'd like to ask you a favor," he said. "Would you lead us? Would you lead us in prayer?"

Deb stiffened for a second, and she let out a breath, and her color got deeper. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. "I don't know if I want to put on a performance..."

Fred never stopped looking at her or let go of her hand. "It's not a performance. It's just a meeting of friends," he said. He moved his hand from her wrist to her palm and extended his other hand to me. I took it and then put my hand around her free hand. His hand was warm, hers was cool, and we bowed our heads, and closed our eyes, and I heard Deb's voice calling out for the grace of God.  

What is grace? I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella. I had never prayed like that before, ever.  

I had always been a great prayer, a powerful one, but only fitfully, only out of guilt, only when fear and desperation drove me to it... and it hit me, right then, with my eyes closed, that this was the moment Fred Rogers--Mister Rogers--had been leading me to from the moment he answered the door of his apartment in his bathrobe and asked me about Old Rabbit. Once upon a time, you see, I lost something, and prayed to get it back, but when I lost it the second time, I didn't, and now this was it, the missing word, the unuttered promise, the prayer I'd been waiting to say a very long time.  "Thank you, God," Mister Rogers said.