“Grandma wants us to scooch in close because she never had a brother who schooched so tightly!”

The hall was empty as people began to enter quietly and gaze at the Bosendorfer piano, the only instrument on the simple stage. The richness of the walnut wood on the walls and enveloping the platform gave the room a special warmth. The lights came up in the west doorway and a beautiful young lady in a ball gown entered and bowed. As the crisp melodic phrases of Mozart danced off of her fingertips, my heart swelled with pride and a sense of the awesome God who created this child, choosing her as His own before the foundations of the world, and giving her life in my womb.

I remember finding out that I was going to be a mother for the very first time. Just finishing my student teaching at a Christian college and being unmarried, I felt alone, helpless, embarrassed, and terribly frightened. Clay and I hoped to one day marry, but this certainly wasn’t part of the plan we had made for ourselves at the time.

During the first few weeks of December that year, I began to consider all my options. I had no money, no job, and no church family in which to confide. My best friends didn’t even know the lifestyle I had chosen to live and I thought I could never tell them. Worst of all, I dreaded telling my parents, knowing it would break their hearts. I remember thinking that no one had to know; I could end the pregnancy and start my life all over again. In desperation, I called the local hospital to ask the cost of an abortion. I spent many hours crying, holding my tummy, and both loving and hating that little one inside of me.

Finally, I called a pastor who had led a Bible study I had attended during one summer and asked if I could speak with him. I poured out my story; the tears of repentance began to flow as he very gently talked to me about God’s forgiveness and the fact that this child was a gift from Him. I left his office, knowing there was a plan for both of our lives.

As the days went by, the desire to mother this child, a tiny little person I had already pictured as a daughter, began to take over. Secretly I called her “Mollie” and pictured her as having dark brown hair like her father and freckles like me. I saw myself dressing her in pink and walking her in a buggy to the park near where I lived. Clay and I began to plan a simple wedding. We thought surely things would all work out for the best.

Christmas came and went, with me going home, not having the courage to face my mom and dad in person. I finally called them and they were wonderful, encouraging me and telling me how much they loved me. But Clay faced another sort of response. While some in his family were supportive, there were those who absolutely insisted that we abort our child. After endless hours of talking with them, wanting them to support our decision, we finally decided that we had to do the right thing, trusting that they would one day understand. And of course, all it took was one look at an adorable baby to change their hearts!

Sometimes I am in utter awe of all that the Lord has done in our lives, at the grace He has poured out to us. I remember once standing along the Pacific Ocean and imagining how much water there was. That is how I see God’s grace….infinite, beyond measure, something that cannot be contained or even held briefly in my hand. In the nearly 33 years since my daughter was born, God has so graciously given me the love and companionship of a wonderful man, my best friend and confident, my brother in Christ and my lover. He has given me the gift of being a mother to six of the most amazing children. And He has blessed me with the precious treasure of grandchildren. He has given me all of that, in spite of my rebellion. But the greatest gift He has given to me has been the gift of eternal life, the promise that while I am yet a sinner, Christ loved me and gave Himself for me.

According to recent research, 250,000 women who profess to be evangelical Christians each year choose to abort their children. That means that 5.6 million women in our churches have chosen abortion as their only option! How many more are struggling for the same reasons I was…guilt, shame, fear, loneliness? I know of the depth of God’s grace to those who have strayed from His righteousness. I love to tell the story of how God, having a plan for my life and for my daughter’s life as well, chose us, sought us, bought us both with a great price, the life of His only begotten Son, that we might have eternal life with Him.

This year as I celebrate Mother’s Day, I will be praying for those mothers who are carrying babies that they didn’t plan and that they don’t really want. They may be married or unmarried, but they are in a time of crisis. They may be Christians or they may be so far from Jesus that they cannot even begin to comprehend the wonder of His mercy. I will pray that each of these moms will know the joy I have found in Him as has been so beautifully written:

“My only comfort in life and death is that I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; indeed all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by His Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.” ~ Heildelberg Catechism, 1563

“Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and star-like things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life.” ~ Samuel Ullman

Yesterday I heard four things about mothers that I thought were interesting and not necessarily related. The first was that some woman who is 63 years old just gave birth. The second was that another woman in Italy just gave birth to a 22 pound baby. The third was that Michelle Duggar has recently announced that she will be giving birth in the winter to her 18th child. And the fourth is that someone has recently figured out that a stay-at-home mom’s duties are monetarily valued at over $117,000.00 a year. (I figured that if you are also a homeschooling mom and add in a median teacher’s salary that it would boost that number to around $170,000.00. ) Bring on the chocolate.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and judging by the number of wide-eyed children with five dollar bills waving in their fingers as they wander through my local Wal-Mart, the moms in my town will be well-remembered. Whether they gave birth to toddlers or preemies, have zero dollars or a million dollars in the bank, have one child or one dozen children, are young or, as my son says old-lady-Fresca-drinking old, tomorrow they will be honored with flowers, candy, bath powder, clothes they would never choose or lunch at the Sirloin Stockade.

Last Mother’s Day was my first one on this blog and I recognized it by sharing the story of my birth mother on a podcast. Continuing what I hope will be a tradition, this year I thought I would tell you two stories about being a mother that reflect the incredible ability moms have to express the fact that human life is sacred and that a person is a person no matter how small or how old.

My mom came to live with us 14 years ago. My father died in the hospital while she was staying with us after he had a stroke and she never went home. When she came, our older boys gave her their room and moved in with the three little boys….5 sons in 2 bunk beds and a trundle. It was crowded but no one minded enough to really complain. We painted her room her favorite color of blue, brought her reading chair and bedroom furniture along, and began an adventure in multi-generational living that I had no experience or knowledge of before I lived it.

During the first years she was here, my mom was able to go just about anywhere we did. We all went to church, out for lunch, and on family vacations. She had not traveled much, as my dad really hated going very far from his home and his garden. But my mom loved piling into the van and driving to homeschooling conferences or on field trips with us. She flew to both Florida and California for our older sons’ weddings and still talks about how much she loved the sunshine states.

She was also thrilled to be a part of all the planning of our daughter’s wedding, from the sewing of the dress to the cooking for several hundred guests. She enjoyed all the details of the flowers and fruit slushies and the tiny handmade gift boxes. She still talks about the three sweet flower girls. Often she sat around the dining room table, not really doing a thing but soaking in the girl moments. She recalled her own wedding, her navy suit, of traveling by train to Chicago for her honeymoon, the bridal glow still on her face as she talked about it.

We have often joked about homeschooling six children and one grandma because that is really what has happened. As the three younger boys learned to read, she would patiently listen to them read out loud to her. When Joe went through his paper family and house phase, she diligently cut out whatever he drew and taped it to her wall. I still will hear her reading to one of them from a poetry book and look through her door to see a big strapping boy-man stretched out on the floor listening to her. She loves to read about whatever we are currently studying and the past few months have been especially enjoyable for her as we have watched several documentaries on World War 2, often stopping so she can add things to the discussion like “I remember when they hanged Mussolini upside down” or the words to a love song. “Kiss me once, and kiss me twice, and kiss me once again,” she sang several times and I knew she was thinking of my dad, remembering him as the dashing 20 year old with the floppy curls in uniform.

More than anything she looks forward to family devotions in the evenings and is certainly Clay’s most attentive listener. We have been reading through the Old Testament and she has had so many unanswerable questions and really good insights, some of them hilarious. A few weeks ago she got started on a circumcision tangent that had us in uncontrollable laughter! But sharing this time with her has been precious to me and listening to her pray has humbled me and made me so thankful for a mother who has loved the Lord for most of her 86 years.

During the past few years, she has started to show signs of dementia, remembering things that happened to her 70 years ago but forgetting what she just ate for lunch. She doesn’t like to leave the house because she is so unsure of her footing and whether or not she will be able to locate a bathroom quickly. She is content with a stack of good books and she continues to write in a journal every day. Her handwriting is large now but she writes to help herself remember. It is hard to watch and to know that she is slipping away, a little at a time, and that one day she will fade away forever.

So tomorrow I will make something she really likes for dinner, like pot roast and hot rolls and Under-the-Sea Jello salad. I will give her chocolates and bath powder and probably a new book. I will bake a three-layer lemon cake and serve it with her favorite vanilla-orange sherbet swirl ice cream. If we are lucky, she will recite a poem from memory or will sing a stanza of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Latin as our dinner entertainment. And I will thank the Lord that He has seen fit to give me the gift of another year with my mom.

Pastor Norm Wakefield has now put part six of the Curse of the Standard Bearers online. What a blessing it is to know that there is forgiveness through repentance of our sin and the opportunity to renew our relationship with Jesus and with others, especially our children!

Join me this week for part four of my interview with Dr.l Cindy Kunsman on the topic of spiritual abuse.

O Thou who didst take the little ones in Thine arms, put Thine hands upon them and bless them; we believe that Thou intendest joy for all the young.

We pray for children who know no happiness at home; who are ill-treated, abused, and held of little consequence. Give to all parents, O God, an ever-dawning freshness of vision towards their children, that nothing commonplace or soiled may be found in their relations to them.

Teach us to see that their lives reflect ours, scorn for scorn, gentleness for gentleness, beauty for beauty, roughness for roughness. Grant us, O Lord, ever the heart of Christ Himself towards them, and an honest desire and will to alleviate any suffering of those not in our immediate charge.

We confess anew Thy blessed Name of Father. May this name and sign mark all our homes, through Him who died to make us all Thy sons.

O God who art the Lord of all ages of man’s life and the supplier of his every need, hear our prayer. We seek Thy favor upon young people growing in all the conscious awkwardness of adolescence. Save them, O Lord, from the bravado, which their unhappy feelings so often breed; preserve them from the internal misery that so often attends their stage of life; and turn their eyes to Thee in whom is all the beauty of tranquil peace.

In depth of grace, in strength of character and in loftiness of vision, may they grow in Thee, witnesses to Thy Gospel and heralds of Thy truth.

Amen

Presbyterian Church in Canada Book of Common Worship

“He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young.” Isaiah 40:11

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman Cooks and is one of her top 5 recipes. I tweaked it a little to make a larger batch. It’s a good thing I did. I had nothing to scrape out of the dish when I loaded it in the dishwasher! My boys got a kick out of me buying the Mountain Dew, since I usually tell them how bad the stuff is for them!

3 pkgs. Pillsbury or other crescent rolls

2 cups white sugar

2 ½ sticks butter

Cinnamon

2 tsp.vanilla

3 apples (I used Braeburn)

1 ¾ cups Mountain Dew

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Peel apples and slice each one into 8 slices. Roll one slice in each of the crescent rolls and arrange in pan. (I used my lasagna pan which is about 9 X 12) Over medium low heat, melt butter. Add sugar and stir but allow it to remain grainy. Stir in vanilla. Pour over the rolls. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Then pour the Mountain Dew around the edges and down the middle of the pan. (My kids loved that part.) Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. Really great served warm with ice cream! Serves 12 normal people; serves 6 if some of them are teenage boys!

picture courtesy Linda Stradley

I was baking pork chops for dinner the other night and absolutely nothing sounded good as a side dish. I rummaged through the freezer and the cupboards and decided to experiment. This is what I came up with. Everyone raved about it and both my husband and son wanted to take it in their lunches the next day!

2 pound pkg. frozen shredded hash browns, thawed

1 tsp. minced garlic

1 cup finely chopped or grated onion

1 TBS. fresh chives or dried equivalent

Olive oil

3 cups powdered pancake mix (the add only water kind) with enough water added to make a medium thick batter

Salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

In pan, sauté onions and garlic until translucent. Add hash browns and brown well on both sides (should take only a view minutes) adding more olive oil if needed to keep from sticking in pan. Pour into pancake batter and stir. Add chives, salt, and pepper. On hot griddle spray vegetable spray. Using half cup of batter per pancake, bake until browned, flip and brown other side. Keep warm in oven until ready to serve. Offer butter or apple sauce along with pork chops. This made about 18 pancakes.

It was late December. Armed with buckets, brooms, a shop-vac, and assorted supplies, Clay and I began to tackle the job of cleaning a now-empty house. Our older three children took turns carrying trash cans to the curb while one of them walked our toddler around the house, his baby laughter echoing through the rooms.

We had not lived in this house, this parsonage that had once been a home. During the past several years, however, we had spent many hours enjoying fellowship with our pastor and his family, especially during the few months prior to his move. It was a sad time for us and one that caused us to have many questions and doubts, not necessarily about our faith in God but certainly about our faith in men and in church leadership in particular.

During the summer of that year, it became increasingly obvious that this pastor ought to look for another church. His goals for ministry, while they were ones we personally shared, were not what the elders wanted. Steeped in a strong tradition that had its roots in the sawdust trail antics of Billy Sunday, this pastor with a heart for expository preaching was probably not a good choice from the beginning. We had come into the church because of that emphasis and were sorely disappointed at the direction his ministry was being forced to take. In retrospect, we believe there were faults on both sides of the pulpit, but nothing warranted what we saw done to this family.

In what we believe were attempts to force him to resign, this pastor’s pay was frozen, putting him in a position where he was unable to even pay for prescriptions for his children. Our pastor had never told us anything about this need but one of the church members saw that he was unable to pay at the pharmacy and approached my husband about it. When Clay went to one of the elders, the response he got was unbelievable “It’s not our responsibility. He should pray and ask the Lord to provide for him.” Unfortunately, that story was only the tip of the iceberg.

This was probably our first experience of witnessing spiritual abuse up close and personal, though we had no label for it at the time, and it left a profound effect on our whole family. It took many years for us to really understand what had happened and to grasp the impact that experience had on both of our families. For this pastor, it began a 20 year downward spiral that had a very tragic ending.

After leaving this town, his wife developed breast cancer and struggled with it for 2 years until she died, leaving a 2 year old and 4 older children. The pastor remarried a woman who didn’t want to mother his children and it ended in a bitter divorce. The children grew up and faced a multitude of problems with several of them rejecting Christianity. And then, on the 20^th anniversary of his experience in our town, this pastor was about to begin a ministry with a new congregation. He couldn’t bear the thought of it and the night before, checked himself into a motel where he took an overdose of medication and died.

Spiritual abuse is a very real problem, though there are many people who deny its existence. Looking back at what our dear friend experienced and what we have since gone through in our own lives, I believe that the Lord has preserved us and protected us from the worst that could have happened. During our own darkest hours, I cannot remember a time that I questioned my faith in God or in His Providence, thought there were times of tremendous grief.

My own experience of spiritual abuse came at the hands of elders who were pressing our conscience to believe things we didn’t agree with and that couldn’t be supported in Scripture. In fact, they never even attempted to do so! We were told that we were never to question any authority, that they were our “parents.” But that wasn’t the worst.

A young woman the elders had asked me to counsel a few months earlier had come to me with this incredible story. She had gone to the elders and asked for some clarification regarding things that were being taught from the pulpit. She was a fairly new believer but knew something wasn’t right when she was told by the pastor “You don’t need to read your Bible. Just trust us and listen to your elders. We will read it for you.” I was stunned and told her adamantly that this was not correct, that through her relationship with Jesus Christ, she now has the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who would lead her into all truth. I pointed out to her that we are all priests and kings (1Peter 2:9) and that we all have an anointing from the Holy Spirit (1John 2:20). I explained how she has access to the throne of grace without going through an earthly priest, that the veil was rent.

So I found myself on the telephone with one of the elders who was insisting that I repent for telling this woman these things. All I can really remember of the conversation was hearing this man tell me that if I didn’t go back to this woman and correct what I had told her, he would have to believe that I wasn’t even a Christian.

A while later one of my friends, who had also experienced similar treatment from these same men, shared with me what had been the true balm to his soul during that time. He encouraged me to read through the Gospels, the book of Acts, and then to read through the Epistles as though I had never read them before. He promised that if I compared what Jesus actually did and said, I would see a sharp contrast to the behavior of the men who were supposed to be shepherding us. It turned out to be a profound experience and one that opened my eyes to many things that are often taught as Gospel truth but, in reality, cannot even be found in Scripture. It brought me to a true understanding of what spiritual leadership ought to look like.

If you have struggled with spiritual abuse at the hands of church leaders or even from well-meaning friends or family members, I would encourage you to go back to the beginning of the New Testament and begin reading with news eyes and new ears for hearing truth. I promise you will begin to heal from your times of sorrow and grief and will fall in love with the Lord and his Truth all over again!