Tribulation brings perseverance (the ability to remain faithful under pressure). Perseverance leads to character. Character produces hope. The hope is that we will know the glory of God. ” This is child’s play down here, ” David Jeremiah once said in a sermon. Really? It doesn’t feel like play. It’s pretty brutal. I will learn everything God wants me to learn so I can do all he has planned for me to do. I may be still woefully inadequate in showing grace to others, but I know without a doubt I have God’s grace to sustain me. Jeremiah reminds us that there are some of us whom only God’s Holy Spirit can love. For years I witnessed how God brings some of the most difficult and unlovable people into my life. This was long before I became a counselor, before I moved to Florida. At one point I asked him point blank “why are you bringing all these broken, misfits to me? They’re like orphans emotionally. They come longing for friendship and understanding but it feels like I’m having to carry all the weight because of their needs.” These individuals were not what I wanted in friendships. Even so I would love and serve them as well as I could and for as long as I felt under God’s direction to do so. Some became real friendships that endured to the extent that we were able to give one another grace again and again. Others were only for a season. I think back on some of those relationships and how much I learned from them during our journeying together. I realize that some of those relationships were training for the ministry I am now called to do with women who have crashed in their lives to a point where they often feel very unlovable and unloved. But no one ever really is. That is the good news. I have felt rejected again and again in multiple venues by multiple individuals and groups (there’s been quite a list of them over 67 years). But God has been training me. In the midst of it God has been my ever present Friend. And he gave me the support of a loving husband and friends so full of grace and acceptance, like Janice Villars, Pammi Nevins, Pat Sabiston, April Bergloff, Cinda Trexler, Pat Hall, Sandy Tillery, and others, that I knew through it all that I would persevere. The Titus 2 ministry was birthed in the midst of pervering through travail. I would never have stepped out in faith to start Titus 2 without having felt persecution and rejection. I would not have learned how to trust God so completely in some ways without some of the other rejections. I am grateful for the hardships for what they have taught me about God, about life and the human condition, and about myself. I remember the words of a pastor friend at an Emmaus Walk years ago, “We give as much of ourselves as we can understand to as much of God as we can understand.” In 2014 I was asking God for the word I was to use for a centering prayer meditation. The word he gave me was “give”. I was annoyed. I said what else can I possibly give? I’ve given and continue to give everything to you!” I don’t think I have anything else to give. Can’t I have anything just for me like this time of prayer among friends? I need to receive sometimes,too. It really felt like stomping my foot before God and saying, “Are you serious????” The lesson from that prayer experience and all of this has been that yes, God was very serious. Like Abraham I must be prepared to give everything, holding onto nothing and holding nothing back. It’s a good place when one finally figures out the lesson. It is also good to discover that one can never outgive God. I pray to God that this is one lesson I won’t have to continue to repeat.
