Encouraging parents in their efforts to raise their children to be enthusiastic servants of the Lord.
Author: Thereasa Winnett
Thereasa Winnett is the founder of Teach One Reach One and blogger at Parenting Like Hannah. She holds a BA in education from the College of William and Mary. She has served in all areas of ministry to children and teens for more than thirty years and regularly leads workshops for ministries and churches. She has conducted numerous workshops, including sessions at Points of Light’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the National Urban Ministry Conference, Pepperdine Bible Lectures, and Lipscomb’s Summer Celebration. Thereasa lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Greg, where she enjoys reading, knitting, traveling and cooking.
If your daughter is over 5’7″, has long legs and is thin, someone has probably suggested she consider modeling. To young girls, modeling appears to be a dream job. Who wouldn’t want to travel to glamorous places, wear beautiful clothes and make tons of money?
In Kylie Bisutti‘s book, I’m No Angel, she does a fantastic job of describing the life of a model from a Christian perspective. As Bisutti shares her story, the reader follows her through her early aspirations, her conversion to Christianity and her life as a model. Throughout the book, Bisutti slowly reveals the experiences and thought process which made her decide to walk away from her dream job in order to honor God.
Sixteen months. Sixteen MONTHS?! Yesterday, my daughter completed the last AP exam of her Junior year in High School. Which means (Lord willing) she will be leaving for college in sixteen short months. I am not a doctor, but my guess is the number one cause for hyperventilating moms is realizing they only have a few months left to “finish” full-time parenting.
I know a mother’s job and influence continues, but the opportunity to impact your child on a daily basis ends for most of us when our child heads off to college. While that’s a wonderful, exciting time in her life, it can cause a bit of panic in mine. I picture myself trailing after her towards her dorm sharing vital tips of wisdom – “Remember to cook that at 350* for 30 minutes”, “Never take any wooden nickels” (A favorite in my family, although I’m still not sure what I was supposed to do!) and “Wash your brights separate from your darks, if possible.”
As a mom of young children, many of your crisis times seem to hit during the middle of the night. Often the crisis is a sick child or a young one with bad dreams. Sometimes the crisis is only the anxiety that hits you once you finally have the time to lay still in a quiet, dark house. I was blessed to have relatives and strong Christian mentors nearby, some of whom accepted late calls. What about those times when I didn’t want to bother anyone? What about women who had no close Christian relatives or friends to turn to for godly advice? How would they get the mentoring they needed as quickly as they needed it?
Debbie Morris wrote The Blessed Woman with this woman in mind. At one point in her life, she was that woman who wanted godly mentoring, but had no resources. She turned to the women in scripture to answer the questions she had regarding living life as a woman of God.
Mother’s Day is supposed to celebrate mothers. The older I get, the more I realize everyone has a little child inside of them wanting to be loved and nurtured by a motherly person. If someone has had a lot of pain in their past, the need is even stronger. I wrote this post some time ago and it remains very popular. Much love to all of the women out there who show God’s love and nurturing to the child in everyone they meet. If you haven’t thought about “mothering” that way, I encourage you to consider it. Any woman can be a mother of the heart to everyone she meets. Happy Mothers Day!
When my daughter started kindergarten, I remember a very long list of people signed up and were almost fighting over becoming the room mothers of her class. I was a little too busy to volunteer to be room mom that year, but expressed surprise to a more experienced Mom whose youngest child was in the class.
“Don’t give it a second thought,” she said. “They will start disappearing next year and by fifth grade the school will be begging you to be room mother.” She was absolutely right. I was the class room mom for the next several years and noticed a huge drop off in parental involvement. Now that my child is a teenager, she knows girls who basically only see their parents a few minutes before bed and maybe a minute or two in the morning.
Do you ever wonder about Mary? Sometimes, I wonder if she ever had days like I do. You know, when she had just finished sweeping the floor and Jesus and his brothers and sisters came running through the house with muddy feet. Or weeks when her kids passed the same horrid virus back and forth to each other. I am guessing she probably did.
I wonder though if she ever got so tired or frustrated that she forgot for even a minute God had entrusted her and Joseph to raise his son to adulthood. We really have no way of knowing how Mary felt about the important responsibility God gave her (other than very limited references in scripture). I don’t know about Mary, but sometimes, I get just distracted enough by the craziness of family life or my exhaustion to forget God has entrusted me with a part of the future of His Church.