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The Family Manager Takes Charge By Kathy Peel Running a household is like operating a business. Like any good CEO, you have to know your goals, determine your strategies, and manage your human resources. Delegate - Motivate organize ... Relax! Every smart manager knows that success depends on teamwork. You've got your very own in-house players. Learn how to get kids and spouses to help around the house -with lots of practical advice and encouragement to get them motivated and keep them going. Practical tips on:
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Whatever is Pure - November, 2005
An Open Door Policy
"I talk to Jesus every day, no secretary tells me He's been called away..."I sat on the floor as I hugged a pillow close to me, wrapped up in a sleeping bag enthralled as I listened to a new friend strum her song on her guitar in the wee small hours, when we both should have been sleeping. Her story gripped me though and I had to learn more. We were attendees of a retreat that included the hearing impaired, some physically disabled and every day Christians. As we were tthe youngest there we naturally gravitated to each other.
Terry's story was a sad one. Her parents were both alcoholics, she was raised by a grandmother who had severe diabetes and serious a life threatening heart condition brought on by morbid obesity. At the age of fifteen, it was decided that Terry should be placed in foster care, and the abuse she had escaped from when moving in with her loving grandmother resumed. Terry had a brother in juvenile hall and she ended up on the streets. Terry had gone through every form of abuse that horrify us all and her face showed she had seen much too much for an eighteen year old. Yet... Terry shone.
At the age of seventeen, she had an encounter with a born-again nun, who told her of the life saving power of an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. Slowly, cautiously, fearfully, Terry began to explore this possibility. It sounded too good to be true. After all, even the kindest and most available resource person in her life was never there all the time for her. Crises would arrive and she would call them for help, only to be told that they were away from their desk, with another client or home with their families. Her grandmother, who loved her with all her heart, could not keep the promise to keep her safe due to her own poor health. Somehow, that woman got through to that girl living on the streets. Somehow, the Lord reached through the hardened cement wall that surrounded Terry's heart and met her there in that emotional bomb shelter Terry had created to keep her safe.
That night, as Terry sung me her song, she in turn let me in on the secret... that Jesus would never forsake us, never betray us, never say "I'm sorry, I just can't do anymore.." Although I had been a committed Christian for a couple years at that point, Terry's story planted a thirst for intimacy in my own heart that I carry to this day. That thirst can only be met by Jesus.... and no secretary ever tells me, He's been called away.."
© Katherine Walden
Please contact for permission to reprint or use in any format.
Receive a weekly devotional by Katherine along with a weekly archive of the Daily Christian Quotes.
Freedom
Demons, they have tortured me
For so many years
Harbingers of evil
Drowning me in fear
They flee from me in horror
My Savior dries my tears
Their vile grip cannot touch me now
Jesus Christ is near
Silent desperation
Melts in His embrace
Hope and reassurance
Smile upon my face
True emancipation
His grace has set me free
Sober and delivered
He radiates within me
© Bill Grimes Jr. 2005
awwgrimesjr@gmail.com
Please email for permission to use.
Jesus in the Thrift Shop
Sometime around 1991, my mother asked me to write this story.
I was working as a writer for the president of an international marketing firm in Canton, Ohio. Mom was proud of me. Especially the day my car wouldn't start, and my boss sent his personal chauffeur to our house to pick me up and take me to work. She thought I'd made the big time.
It was decided that I should write a story for her. All she had was a title: Jesus in the Thrift Shop. "Isn't that a neat title for a book?" she announced excitedly.
"But what's it about?" I asked. I had no idea where to begin. "It's about Jesus in the thrift shop," she replied, as if that should explain everything.
Mom liked to shop in thrift stores. She was always proud when she came home with a bargain. Even back in the day when it was embarrassing to be seen in a thrift store. Now it's called "vintage" shopping. Mom was ahead of her time. She thrifted when it wasn't trendy.
Mom believed that whenever she found an item she was seeking in a thrift store, Jesus was somehow behind it. "I was looking for a gray A-line skirt, and there it was!" she would say with childlike amazement and delight. "I'd been praying that I'd find a skirt just like it." After several such finds, all of them attributed to prayer, she suggested that I write a book about the presence of Christ at Value Village.
Always the cynic, I dismissed the idea. "Don't be ridiculous, Mom," I chided. "God has more important things to worry about than your shopping list." But no matter how many times I tried to burst her bubble, she never capitulated. She was convinced that Jesus had a hand in her thrifting triumphs.
Over the course of several years, Mom repeatedly asked me to write her book. But I never took her idea seriously. I thought it was foolish, and that there wasn't enough material to make a good story. Besides, I was busy with my own life and didn't have time to indulge her.
Mom went to heaven on October 30, 2002. It's taken me nearly 15 years, but I think I finally understand the story she was trying to tell.
Jesus in the Thrift Shop. What a silly idea, I thought. Mom was forever trying to inject God and Jesus into every little happening in the course of a day. If she baked a loaf of bread and it came out perfect, it was God's doing. If she found a dollar bill lying on the sidewalk, it was Jesus who had left it there for her. Nothing was too trivial to have been the result of divine intervention. And now she was trying to convince me that the Lord had hung that white blouse on the sale rack for her at the Next-to-New shop. I wasn't buying it.
In my infinite wisdom of youth, I often viewed my mom as a sort of simpleton. Gullible, unsophisticated, fanatical. While I'm politically liberal and open-minded about philosophy and religion, Mom was as conservative as they come and rigid in her beliefs. We often had clashes over our disparate views. Once, I subscribed by mail to a Zen journal, and discovered that she was secretly throwing it away before I had a chance to read it. Tampering with the U.S. mail may have been a felony, but Mom thought it was a greater crime to allow me to travel down what she thought was the wrong path.
In the three years since she's been gone, I've had time to reflect on who my mother was and what she stood for. I've been able to remove myself from the equation and look at her not in relation to me, but as an individual. And I'm continuously amazed at what I'm learning about her.
Above all, she was a woman of unshakeable faith. Many of her beliefs were unpopular, and she was often criticized for being inflexible, unrealistic, or out of touch with society. She may have been those things, but I've come to respect her for standing up for her convictions.
Her strict interpretation of the Bible meant that her lifestyle left no room for pleasures that most of us take for granted. She never knew the feeling of giddiness from being drunk; the thrill of sex with a new partner; the excitement of gambling. But she also never suffered the anxiety of wondering what life was about. She knew exactly who she was and where she was going. And she wasn't afraid to go there.
As it turns out, my mother was not a simpleton. She was smarter and braver and more together than anyone gave her credit for. She loved the Lord and saw his handiwork in everything - even in her successes at the thrift stores. That wasn't foolishness. That was faith.
The story that she so wanted me to tell was that God is everywhere, in everything, and we should acknowledge and be grateful for it. He's in that perfect loaf of bread, or that dollar lying on the sidewalk, or the ray of sunlight that shines through your window. He's in the biggest and the smallest of things. He's with us and in us and around us, and if we believe in Him, we'll find him.
Jesus was in those thrift shops with my mom, just as she is with him now, walking down streets paved with gold in heaven.
© Deborah A
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