lifeasmission

A Simple Blessing

October 24, 2005

For reasons that I won’t go into right now, I have been feeling exceptionally lonely the last few weeks. I was feeling it especially acutely today. But tonight, I got an unexpected (but very welcome) call from a friend and former high school student of mine, Gina. Gina is a sophomore at Anderson University in Indiana. Basically she was just calling to say hi and catch up a bit, but the conversation was quite a bit more meaningful than that. I’ll explain.At one point in our conversation Gina was telling me how lately she had a hightened desire to figure out what it meant for her to intentionally become “the woman of God that He created her to be.” I’m not sure if she was aware of it or not, but she used, verbatim, the words of advice which were passed on to me as I ventured off to college and the words which, on numerous, ocassions, I imparted to the high school students that I was involved with at RiverTree. My high school coach told me, “JR, when you go off to college you will have the opportunity to completely reinvent yourself. No one will know you or have any expectations of you. You will be able to be and become whoever you want to be. I want to encourage you to decide at the very beginning that your sole desire will be to become everyday more like the man of God that He created you to be.” Those words stuck with me and became the central theme of all I did and experienced. It did my heart good to hear that Gina was thinking along these lines.More than this, Gina made mention of part of this endeavor being to understand what this meant for the kind of wife and mothers she may one day have the chance to be. For those you you who know me well, you know it just doesn’t get any better for me than this! Besides my desire to be intimate with God, I have no greater desire then to partner in life with a woman who wants to live out an Ephesians 5 kind of relationship – to be with the kind of woman who aspires not just to a healthy and happy marriage, but one which absolutely radiates the kind of love and unity that Jesus desires with His Church as a witness to the world. In a time when I am utterly dismayed over just how few of those women there appear to be (and remember I’m at seminary!) Gina’s words were like a ray of sunshine right on my soul. So thanks Gina for being a friend in a time of loneliness that you could have never known about, thanks for actually paying attention during Bible studies, messages, and personal conversations, and more than anything else, thanks for refreshing my spirit by your radical devotion to knowing and living for God.

Posted in: decisions, friends