2 Times 2=????
Are you up on your “times tables”?
I love being a mother. I have been one now for 36 years. From that first moment of touching our precious, premature son with my fingertips, I have taken the responsibility very seriously. There has been extreme joy, uncertainty, sadness, pain, and lots and lots and lots of hard work. I have learned many things. But I felt designed to mother.
Along the way, I realized that part of the assignment was to find help. I looked to the usual sources – family, good books, of course God’s Word, parenting classes, Bible studies, etc. But then I did a study on spiritual mothering. Susan Hunt wrote a book on the subject where she shared the Titus 2 model for women mentoring women.
God created women with the nature to nurture, to mother. For many, that means children, but for all Christian women it means to spiritually mentor someone. Just like we multiply when we give birth, we need to multiply spiritually.
Around the same time I was contemplating this idea, I became involved in a women’s Bible study. We were given an assignment. For one week, pick another woman in the group, call each other weekday mornings, and pray together for 3-5 minutes.
Coming together the following week, we reported how our prayer time had gone. It was so beneficial to us that we continued for another nine years. We talked for thirty minutes about our children, our plans for the day, and then went together in prayer to our Heavenly Father. When I had an opportunity to attend a parenting conference, she watched my children for me. We prayed our children through lots of things. She walked me through this time. She was there regularly with advice, sharing Scripture, helping me when I needed it, and often just listening. Looking back, the value was priceless!
She ‘mothered’ me spiritually. I eventually started ‘mothering’ the young mom’s groups in our church. Before I knew it, I was watching the young moms ‘mother’ college girls. There is considerable spiritual health and strength in having a spiritual mother/sister and being a spiritual mother/sister to someone else at the same time. Start by learning from someone with a little more spiritual maturity than you, and then mentor someone a little spiritually less mature than you.
It is a multiplication principle – someone pours into you, and you then pour into someone else, and then they pour into someone else, etc. It’s an investment principle…developing spiritual mothers for the next generation. Your daughters are watching – are you up on your “times tables”?
Written by: Sherry Bitler