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I'm loving looking up info on Mother Teresa this week. She was simple, passionate and full of truth. Here's some special encouragement for us as mothers today. Friend and Sister, no one can take your place. God has chosen you for this most amazing life-task of mothering.
An Excerpt from Mother Teresa's message to the Fourth UN Women's Conference
God has created each one of us, every human being, for greater things-- to love and to be loved. But why did God make some of us men and others women? Because a woman's love is one image of the love of God, and a man's love is another image of God's love. Both are created to love, but each in a different way. Woman and man complete each other, and together show forth God's love more fully than either can do it alone.That special power of loving that belongs to a woman is seen most clearly when she becomes a mother. Motherhood is the gift of God to women. How grateful we must be to God for this wonderful gift that brings such joy to the whole world, women and men alike! Yet we can destroy this gift of motherhood, especially by the evil of abortion, but also be thinking that other things like jobs or positions are more important than loving, than giving oneself to others. No job, no plans, no possessions, no idea of "freedom" can take the place of love. So anything that destroys God's gift of motherhood destroys His most precious gift to women-- the ability to love as a woman.
Instead of death and sorrow, let us bring peace and joy to the world. To do this we must beg God for His gift of peace and learn to love and accept each other as brothers and sisters, children of God. We know that the best place for children to learn how to love and to pray is in the family, by seeing the love and prayer of their mother and father. When families are broken or disunited, many children grow up not knowing how to love and pray. A country where many families have been destroyed like this will have many problems. I have often seen, especially in the rich countries, how children turn to drugs or other things to escape feeling unloved and rejected.
But when families are strong and united, children can see God's special love in the love of their father and mother and can grow to make their country a loving and prayerful place. The child is God's best gift to the family and needs both mother and father because each one shows God's love in a special way. The family that prays together stays together, and if they stay together they will love one another as God has loved each one of them. And works of love are always works of peace.
And then from her talk to the National Prayer Breakfast which was an incredibly couragous talk on the horrors of abortion. (In her talk she spoke against abortion and said in front of the Clintons, "Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child.) I want to have a couragous love like her! This next quote was simple but true. How bizarre the plight of rich purposeless teens must look to the outside world.
"I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given to drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that, when those in the West have so many more things than those in the East? And the answer was: 'Because there is no one in the family to receive them.' Our children depend on us for everything - their health, their nutrition, their security, their coming to know and love God. For all of this, they look to us with trust, hope and expectation. But often father and mother are so busy they have no time for their children, or perhaps they are not even married or have given up on their marriage. So their children go to the streets and get involved in drugs or other things. We are talking of love of the child, which is were love and peace must begin. These are the things that break peace."
We have in our charge God's precious, dear daughters and son. We all can take a deep breath. Our kids don't need a perfect cupcake decorating Martha Stewart mother. They don't need a cruise-ship, fun-ship nostalgic childhood, but a mother and father listening to and in love with Jesus, loving them passionately and fierce for their minds and hearts.
I’ve lost my husband. We are driving home north along route 70 from our Holy Spirit Diocesan Synod and the New Wineskins Conference through the mountains of North Carolina/Tennessee. Andrew has taken a detour into a mountain town where the streams and trout are legendary. On our way south through this town, we had seen a barefoot boy, about ten years old standing outside the gas station without a fishing pole, but with a large fish on a string. He raised the fish in greeting to his mother who picked him (and the fish) up in a station wagon and brought them home. I think it was then that Andrew determined that this is where we would stop on the way home. About ten minutes ago, he pulled over on the side of the road and just about pushed me and my computer out, so here I am at a small café writing…and with children still with Grandparents in Columbus, OH, I’m able to actually keep my train of thought. Hallelujah, what a gift!
I think Andrew is a bit disappointed that I didn’t go fishing with him, but my heart is too full from the lecture by Baroness Caroline Cox I just had the privilege to witness. In her, I have found another strong, life-giving woman for my personal gallery of women. In a world which collects plastic Barbie dolls who lose their beauty in a few years and who whine through life, I think it is essential that we as women are inspired by stories of those who courageously transform the world around them.
I wish I knew more of Caroline Cox’s story, but what I do know is that she was appointed to the House of Lords in England after living as a nurse in northern Sudan before the coup by the Khartoum Arabs in 1989. Now, besides having a seat in Parliament, having recently been the House’s Deputy Speaker, she travels to areas in the world that are ravaged by war. The Baroness has established her own relief organization and then after providing what assistance she can, she reports back to England. Besides writing many books on slavery, militant Islam and martyrdom, Caroline Cox speaks all around the world, unabashedly showing the truth through her well-done research and documenting pictures. At New Wineskins, she dared us to look at what many throughout the world experience personally. One was a picture of what looked like a five year old with a pink shirt who was naked below the waist (raped?) and whose hand had been cut off. Although I only looked for a moment, I will never forget this girl around the age of my own children whose life had been so brutally taken away.
A few unforgettable notes from her talk:
Islamic Sharia Law is starting to undercut the British System of justice by holding their own courts at which women are not given equal treatment under the law. Christian ministers in England are beginning to be persecuted when they publically are open about their own Christianity. One priest handing out invitations to Christmas services which just included the name of his local Anglican Church and the service times and had his computers taken away and was told that he would be prosecuted if he ever did that again. This silencing of religious freedom is happening throughout the United Kingdom. AND THIS IS ENGLAND, folks!
A Muslim man who holds a seat in the legislature in Uganda told a Christian legislator that the Muslims would take over Uganda through the sheer number of children they would have. “We Muslims are polygamists and if I have four wives, I can have over 30 children. You go ahead and be monogamous. We will take over this country soon.” (This is my own paraphrase.)
Caroline Cox reported Muslims around the world are strategically buying huge portions of Uganda’s social services, banks, etc. in order to be able to gain political clout and force their decisions upon the country. (She said that this was worse in Uganda but was happening all over the world.)
In the Sudan, a blind woman and her malnourished child would not travel to where she knew food and clothing was because the owner of the social service would not give out their help unless the receivers recanted their Christianity and became Muslim. “We will stay here and die and stay Christian.” No one, least of all a mother with a young child, should have to make that choice.
The Deng orphans in the Southern Sudan are kept in a rural area on purpose by the bishop of that area because, he said, that was the only way that they would be protected in order to stay Christian.
Slavery has been used as a weapon of Jihad in the Sudan where thousands of women and children have been marched north to live with Arab families in order to become Islamicised and Arabicised and to be forced to bear Arab children.
The Baroness showed a picture of a Nigerian bishop who, because of mujahidin (jihad warriors) raids, daily watches the churches in his diocese burn and whose life and clergy’s lives were constantly in danger. His wife had been brutally assaulted and he had been held at gunshot by Jihadists in front of his children while his home was burned. This bishop, Ben Kwashi said this: “If we have a faith worth living for, it is a faith worth dying for. Don’t you (in the West) compromise the faith that we are dying for.”
Bishop, we pray that we will live with courage in our small worlds, fighting in prayer for you and training our people for true maturity in the faith. (“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” Galatians 4:19) You, as well as Caroline Cox have challenged us to look beyond ourselves and never be silent in the face of the suffering around the world.
We started the second New Wineskins’ session with glorious worship while being surrounded by the flags of the nations, which reminded me of the yearly week-long missions conferences of my youth in the Christian Missionary Alliance. Halfway through Baroness Caroline’s challenge, I sunk into my chair in deep disappointment that I had not been allowed to go to Trinity School for Ministry in Pittsburgh from Western Michigan. Just that conference alone would have enriched my seminary experience more than all the Politically Correct gatherings I attended at Virginia Theological Seminary. I look forward to going to the next New Wineskins Conference with my children, giving them the experience of shaking hands with the quiet heroes of the faith like I had a chance to as a young child. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
At New Wineskins I got to experience once again that the Anglican Church around the world is alive and yes, Bishop Kwashi, we are praying that the faith in North America will not be compromised but that some of us will have enough courage not just to stand firm, but to aid you in your fight against poverty and injustice.
Now, hopefully, I’ll find my husband soon, happy, suntanned and well-fished.
