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Journeys To Mother Love

~ Encouragement and healing in mother/child relationships

Journeys To Mother Love

Tag Archives: Women’s Issues

Dreading Mother’s Day

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by kyleen228 in emotional needs, encouraging each other, expectations, frustration to freedom, infertility, Mother's Day, the healing journey

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adoption, Childless on Mother's Day, Desire for children, Mother's Day, Women's Issues

Kyleen-webKyleen

I dreaded Mother’s Day. I used to day dream about taking the weekend and going away to a spa … anything to get away from the constant reminders that I wasn’t a mother when I wanted so desperately to be one.

Church was torture: smiling mothers holding little ones’ hands, videos of children telling the congregation about their wonderful mommy, roses at the doorway for all the beaming mothers … TORTURE! I went through the motions, trying to disguise the tears that welled. I celebrated with my own mother hoping she didn’t notice how much I didn’t want to participate in this day. Then, at night I cried myself to sleep.

The pain of infertility and barrenness is difficult for many women. Wanting children, we will put ourselves, our families, and our bodies through the ringer in the pursuit of fertility. We watch the other mothers around us and wonder, Why not me? Our friends and family members who conceive easily struggle to relate to us, feeling uncomfortable around us and at a loss for words.

So what are we to do? During those most painful years, while I waited to be chosen as an adoptive mom and I struggled with the pain of childlessness, the only solution that provided any help at all was … surrender. I finally got to the place where I stopped fighting God’s will for my life and accepted that His plan was good, even if it was different from mine. I just told myself over and over: If God has given me this desire for children, then He will fulfill it. I chose hope over despair.

My part was to be open to Him working in a new, creative way in my life: perhaps He would give me spiritual children; maybe He would give me a ministry that would be like a child—something that I birthed and nurtured; maybe I would be called to raise other people’s children through foster care. Whatever His will, I had to trust that it was the best for me.

Ephesians 1:18 says, “I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.”

So this Mother’s Day, if you are a woman who is childless and brokenhearted, embrace hope.  If you are blessed with children, appreciate them; and encourage the other women around you who are childless and struggling.

~Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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Storing Away Christmas ~ THE GOD BOX

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by arcecil in emotional needs, frustration to freedom, Mom and Christmas, Relinquishment

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

After Christmas, Holidays, letting go, personal discoveries, relationships, Women's Issues

©Lisa Risager (Wikimedia)

©Nevit Dilmen (Wikimedia)

The boxes sit all around me, saying, “Okay. When are you going to fill us with Christmas ornaments and take us back down to the basement?” They can no longer be ignored. Well, I’ll ignore them a little longer because these boxes have reminded me of all the other boxes in my life. And I want to tell you about them …

I am a woman. Women have many, many boxes in their brains. This truth was confirmed to me by the teaching of Mark Gungor, who leads marriage seminars. He uses the word picture of boxes to convey the various areas of our lives that are important to us. He goes on to say that all the boxes in a woman’s brain are connected by wires to all the other boxes. He is so right. Women do connect the house box to the husband box, which is connected to the boxes for children, grandchildren, meals, travel, extended family, memories, weather, books, church, and shopping.

Personally, I found this approach to life exhausting. One box could short-circuit all the other boxes. Then I realized I had one more box, immeasurably bigger than all the others. So, I disconnected the wires that ran from each small box to other small boxes, took those wires and connected them to the Big Box.

The Big Box is God, of course. All those small boxes are still open at the same time, but they are only seen as they relate to the Big Box. No one small box can ever stop me in my tracks again. Even when information from the wire of a small box is delivering unpleasant information into the Big Box—once it is in there, it doesn’t stand a chance of dominating my time and energy. The situation or the relationship is put into perspective. It’s now in the God Box, or—to use a more familiar expression—in God’s hands.

All the memories connected to these Christmas ornaments—I place them now in God’s hands.

I’ll go back to storing away Christmas.

But isn’t that just like God to take a few empty boxes—that came out of the house box—have them meet in the Big Box with the writing box … and out pops a post?

~A.R. (Alice) Cecil

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Grace to Mothers (and Fathers) Grieving Aborted Babies

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in emotional needs, forgiving yourself, Free to Love, God's healing love, grief and loss, healing after abortion, Mother's Day, Regret transformed, the healing journey, The power of honest sharing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Courage to be honest, Emotional and spiritual healing, Forgiving yourself, future hope, Healing love, life and death, Mother's Day, Post-Abortion Healing, unresolved hurt, Women's Issues

Sunset sky

Mother’s Day is painful for many people, for the bereaved, the childless, and those who suffer from post-abortion grief.

A few years ago I found my mother’s birth family, including three cousins, living not far from me. Recently I visited one male cousin the same age as me (he’s a Baby Boomer and Vietnam Vet, if that gives you an idea of our age).

Though he’s been married more than once, he has no children. Speaking of that fact, he got a little misty-eyed. Then he pointed to a memento sitting atop his TV: a ceramic baby booty. He said it represents a baby he fathered that the mother didn’t allow to come to birth. I know there’s always more to the story, and it’s true I don’t really know much about this “new” cousin’s past. I don’t know what that young woman years ago was going through, either.

I saw the tear in my cousin’s eye, though. And I heard the wistfulness in his voice when he told me he believed there was a child of his that he would meet in Heaven.

I was touched by the emotions of this man, over something that happened several decades ago.

A huge number of abortions have occurred in the years since abortion was legalized in America. If you believe as most Christians do, that babies and young children who die before the age of accountability go to Heaven; and if you believe that unborn babies are persons with eternal souls; then you believe as I do that all those aborted babies will be in Heaven. Perhaps they’ve been growing and developing in the nurture of Jesus and loving saints. Then, what a host of beloved children are waiting there.

My cousin obviously believes and hopes to meet his one child someday in the heavenly realms.

One of our Journeys to Mother Love contributors, Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton, has written movingly about her post-abortion experiences and healing. To my cousin and to Kyleen and to the many women and men who chose abortion when they felt trapped, hopeless, and helpless … the Lord of mercy and grace has healing, hope, and restoration for you. And He is taking care of your child. May that thought give you comfort this Mother’s Day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This video and the book it is based on, express the emotions that lead to and result from the choice of an abortion:

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Forgiving Yourself — and Your Children

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by guestmom in challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, forgiving yourself, generational patterns, Guest Post, Parenting, Regret transformed, The power of honest sharing

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Tags

authentic relationship, Courage to be honest, Forgiving yourself, Modeling the faith, mother and daughter, Parenting, Praying for our children, Women's Issues

Woman-at-gas-pump

istock photo

At a gas station many years ago, my preteen daughter ducked her head out of the car window and popped me a question.

“What would you say if I came home pregnant?”

I was glad for the pump to hang on to and the exercise of filling the tank to divert my eyes. Since she was too young to be sexually active, I didn’t faint at that prospect. However, this was a moment I knew would eventually come, so I said, “Well, my darling, not much … because that’s exactly what I did.”

You see, that pubescent girl was once the precious baby I had carried as an unwed mother.

It was time for me to share a major mistake I had made in my youth, which she accepted without comment. (Later we could talk about the deeper ramifications.) There is never a text book time or place to share these kinds of things; but when the question is asked, it should be answered appropriately, according to the child’s level of understanding.

At the gas pump, I had a choice to deny the truth, dodge the question, or in terror of the same thing happening to her, lay down the law. I’m so glad I did not lose the opportunity to show the grace and goodness of a God who redeems every circumstance, because …

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28*).

God’s ability to turn our darkest moments into good tells me that He is God and I am not. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic wrote, “Though the soul’s wounds heal, the scars remain. God sees them not as blemishes but as honors.”

After years of hiding my soul’s scars, it was such an utter relief and joy to relinquish the protection of my own reputation. In all the years I ministered to women, I only rarely and selectively offered full disclosure, for fear that others would think less of me. (My righteousness was in my works, not in Christ.)

A close friend shared with me a few years ago that when her son was getting married and would then gain possession of his birth certificate, her husband, the father, wanted to somehow have the young man’s birth certificate changed to reflect a full nine months from the wedding until the date of the boy’s birth. This saddened her for it spoke much more about her husband’s lack of confidence in a God of forgiveness and restoration than about hiding timelines from a son conceived out of wedlock. Chances are pretty high that their son had already figured it out, anyway.

So long as we mothers have not forgiven ourselves for our past misdeeds and sins, we’ll certainly never be able to fully forgive our children for their blunders. At times, our children’s choices may leave us stunned. When your children mess up, don’t reach for the hair shirt or beat yourself up for failing. Our children are free agents and must make choices of their own. But God is there when we can’t be. And while it is appropriate that we pray for God to keep our children from evil, or at the very least take them out of the circumstances, He often permits them to travel through the storms. But remember, He also is able to deliver them—safe, though scarred; secure, though shaken; and wiser, though wounded.

Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture” (Romans 8*).

Mothers, both you and your children will make mistakes. Bring them to our heavenly Parent, who is in the business of forgiveness and restoration. He makes no mistakes!

*Scriptures quoted from The Message


Alice Scott-Ferguson is a Scottish-born freelance writer, author, and motivational speaker who lives in Arizona. She writes from her heart as a wife, mother, grandmother, and Christ-follower. Among other books, she is the author of Mothers Can’t Be Everywhere, But God Is : A Liberating Look at Motherhood, from which this post is extracted.

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Helicopter Mom, You’re Creating a Draft

04 Monday May 2015

Posted by guestmom in challenges of motherhood, frustration to freedom, God as our parent, Guest Post, hovering and controlling, mother wounds, Motherhood, Parenting

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

kids leaving home, letting go, Modeling the faith, Mothering, Parenting, Women's Issues

 Bomba_heli

Controlling for Take-Off

When my daughter was raising little ones, I first heard of the helicopter analogy. It paints a picture of a fussing, overly solicitous mom who is fearful to let Tommy toddler try anything new without the constant whirring of her benevolent blades. Then, just as the helicopter hovers over its occupants even after they have disembarked, so we often continue trying to control our children even when they are grown and gone, creating the kind of draft that causes our offspring to duck out of the way. The current is often so great that they feel helpless to be free of its influence—an influence that haunts them and continues to disturb their adult lives. If they do get away, they don’t come back.

Guest-Post-logo

We hover because we think we can preside over all the eventualities of our children’s lives. Of course genuine, responsible guidance is essential, especially to ensure the physical welfare of a small child. But we often go beyond what’s necessary, thinking that if only we stay near to oversee, then we will be able to make sure no evil befalls them.

We are often unaware that the draft we cause with our fussing actually blows our children off course and out of the wind of the Spirit who is directing their lives. Someone once compiled a list of a few examples of how our natural proclivities as mothers sometimes get in the way of the greater good:

•    Being a mother is wanting to pick up your children each time they fall, but teaching them to pick themselves up instead.
•    Being a mother is wanting to keep them from all hurt and harm, but knowing that they must be taught to take care of themselves.
•    Being a mother is wanting to give them the best of everything, but knowing they will value life more if they wait and work for many of their rewards.

My own mothering life is replete with illustrations of yours truly as Helicopter Mom. Many years ago, one of our sons was living alone some distance from us, where he was working just before going to college. From every communication I had with him, it appeared that his life was one catastrophe after another. Following one telephone conversation, I slumped down into the chair saying, “God, please do something.”

The response was swift and searing: “I will, if you get out of the way!”

I was dumbfounded. God could do it!—without my fretting, cajoling, or even sending care packages. And He did. In the heavenly Parent’s own good time, all the issues were resolved—car finally up and running, rent money provided, fingers healed from a nasty accident—and my son took another step on the journey of trusting the God who is everywhere, rather than a mother who is not.

Our love is limited and lacks the divine perspective. As such, our attempts to control can result in over-involvement in our children’s lives that ranges from the ridiculous, like the mother who wanted to go on her daughter’s honeymoon, to the more sinister situation of the son who felt constrained to call his mother when sexual temptation with his fiancée threatened to overtake him. Such was the extent of the toxicity in that unhealthy mother-son relationship. Kenneth M. Adams poses a piercing question for our consideration:

Did you have a parent whose love for you felt more confining than freeing, more demanding than giving, more intrusive than nurturing?

We are in a wonderfully privileged position, and we may well be our child’s best, and most trusted, friend. We do have the responsibility to be available to listen, guide, and model, but our best efforts cannot preside over every outcome. Our calling is simply to stand, confident of the supremacy of God as their perfect Parent. If we stand still, we do not create unwanted currents.

We do the best by our children when we cultivate calmness and model faith instead of fretting and manipulating. As we learn to relinquish our need for control, we are free to love more unconditionally and lend support, rather than running to the rescue. When we allow our children, no matter how little they are, to take responsibility for their own behaviors, we facilitate the flow of health, wholeness, and wisdom in their lives. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an eighteenth-century writer, rightly said, “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

Let’s start early to lift off in our helicopters so our children can run clear of the whirring blades and have the opportunity to know only the wind of God’s Spirit as their guiding force.


Alice Scott-Ferguson is a Scottish-born freelance writer, author, and motivational speaker who lives in Arizona. She writes from her heart as a wife, mother, grandmother, and Christ-follower. Among other books, she is the author of Mothers Can’t Be Everywhere, But God Is : A Liberating Look at Motherhood, from which this post is extracted.

Mothers-Cover-Web

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Mother, Make the Most of Today

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in frustration to freedom, Motherhood, Parenting

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Tags

Family, kids leaving home, life stages, Mother, Mothering, Parenting, Women's Issues

Pink-graphicAre you fully engaged in your current stage of motherhood? Or are you focused on getting through this stage of life and reaching the next, longing for personal space and time to pursue your own ambitions? Can’t wait for your toddlers to be potty trained so you can put them in preschool? Can’t wait until your teen learns to drive so you can do something besides commuting kids to lessons, games, church activities?

Remember: Today is the day the Lord has made (Ps. 118:24). The opportunity for bonding with your child, teaching him the values you hold dear, and just plain enjoying him or her and creating memories to cherish and build on, is now!

One author who speaks compassionately to these sometimes-challenging aspects of motherhood is author and speaker, Alice Scott-Ferguson. During the week leading up to Mother’s Day, Alice will be our guest blogger. She will share her motherhood-affirming and faith-affirming insights.

Watch for Alice’s guest posts in the coming week, and enjoy!

Whether you are nursing a newborn, mothering a house full of teens, or enjoying grandchildren, live in the grace-filled moment of God’s “now time.”

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Removing Rocks and Hard Places

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Free to Love, God's healing love, Guest Post, Inner healing ministry, Jasona Brown, mother wounds, the healing journey

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Tags

Emotional and spiritual healing, Joyful wholeness, Prayer, unresolved hurt, Women's Issues

jasona-brown

About the time I was compiling the stories in the book, Journeys to Mother Love, I met Jasona Brown, a woman experienced in prayer for inner healing. Jasona has so much to offer in this area, that I want to introduce her to our readers as our first guest blogger:

Guest-Post-logoby Jasona Brown

Catherine, I can relate to so many parts of your story in Journeys to Mother Love because He has ministered to me in similar ways: speaking through Scripture, healing my memories, and even using dreams to bring healing to my soul. He is so beautiful and faithful! Thank you for sharing your story.

Being both a daughter and a mother myself, I know that these relationships are so complex and often fraught with tensions and obstacles. We all need the hope that our failures, shortcomings, and deprivations can be healed and redeemed, and can even be used to lead us into deeper fellowship with the only One whose love is perfect.

I love to hear of the many and varied ways that the Lord ministers love and restoration to our hearts.

We don’t get healed, though, just to be healed, but also so that we can bear “much fruit” in God’s Kingdom: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last,”( John 15:16). To the degree that we are unhealed, our ability to love God and others as He created us to do is limited; wholeness, especially the joyful kind, frees us to love as He calls us to love. And if we can love our mothers well (honor your father and your mother), we are well on our way!

I love how the apostle John says his joy is made complete by bringing others into the fellowship with the God of love that he has found: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete,” (1 John 1:3-4).

I pray that Journeys to Mother Love will create in others a desire for healing and the hope to seek the Lord regarding their mother-wounds.

Jasona Brown is a wife (her husband is a pastor) and mother (two girls and one boy) living in Colorado, a long ways from where she grew up in Washington state and Alaska. She is also a seminary graduate with a heart to help people experience joyful wholeness through inner-healing prayer. She blogs at http://thedeepestlove.com/. Jasona’s forthcoming book, Stone by Stone: Tear Down the Wall Between God’s Heart and Yours can be pre-ordered at Amazon by clicking this link: http://amzn.com/1939023572.Stone-by-Stone-coverIn her book, Jasona shares what she has learned through personal experience and years of ministering to others, that when a wall of stones blocks our heart from fully receiving God’s love, we live a stunted Christian life. With Stone by Stone she will help us identify and remove ten stones that may block our intimacy with the God of love including guilt, unforgiveness, and unhealed memories, so that we can live in the joy as God’s beloved sons or daughters.

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The “Facts of Life”

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Catherine Lawton in challenges of motherhood, childhood memories, emotional needs, feeling inadequate, generational patterns, Parenting

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Tags

mother and daughter, no false guilt or shame, Women's Issues

Two people in love

My mother and father when they were engaged to be married – 1948

My mother once confided in me that until she got married, she thought you could get pregnant by kissing. This led to unnecessary feelings of guilt and fear. I’m sure her wedding night corrected this faulty information, because nine months later I was born!

By the time my sister and I had boyfriends that we were kissing, she worried whether she had told us all we needed to know to keep from getting pregnant before we were married. For sure, she hadn’t told us much. She had bought a book for teenage girls written by a recommended Christian author and told us each to read it. She never talked with us about it. Maybe she thought if we had questions, we’d come to her. The basic explanations in the book did clarify some things but also got my imagination going and made me more curious; but somehow I couldn’t bring my questions to my mother.

As you can tell from the photo above (of my mom and dad just before they were married), she was a fun and loving person. But I doubt if her parents had taught her much about the “facts of life.” Maybe folks back then assumed the kids would pick up the necessary facts by being around farm animals. And maybe the adults didn’t want to “put ideas” into the kids’ heads. Or maybe, in their own shame, discomfort, and lack of information, they were too uncomfortable to talk about “it.”

I can’t say I did a whole lot better with my children. And now they have children who are preteens and need loving explanations and guidance. There’s such a fine balance between not wanting to give them more information than they’re ready for, but giving them the answers they need at each stage of their growth.

When it comes to teaching children about sex in marriage, I think the best teaching parents can give is by example. As a teenager, lying in my bed with my bedroom door closed, sometimes I could hear my parents down the hall of our small house, in bed behind their closed door. And they would be laughing, murmuring, giggling, obviously enjoying each other.

That didn’t sound like anything to be ashamed or afraid of. It sounded like companionship, mutual affection and pleasure, something right and good. And I knew that was what I wanted.

~Catherine

 

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When Mother Love Must Be Tough Love

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Catherine Lawton in challenges of motherhood, childhood memories, God's healing love, rejecting lies, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Family, Finding our identity, Mothering, Women's Issues

Water Under the Bridge

A mother’s love may be tested and tried almost beyond endurance, until it has the opportunity to shine like gold refined in a furnace.

Such is the case with the mother described in the novel, Water Under the Bridge, by Verna Simms (Verna is also a contributor to the book, Journeys to Mother Love and this blog.)

Verna’s novel surprised me with its vivid characters and setting and its powerful themes. If you have read Verna’s short memoir in the Journeys to Mother Love, this novel will provide background that will give you even more appreciation for Verna’s personal story. While Water Under the Bridge is fiction, it is based on Verna’s experience as a child. I am sure the wonderful main character of the story, a nine-year-old girl named Amelia, is very much like our Verna was as a child.

What was it like in the early 20th Century, when a father converted to Mormonism, sold the farm in Missouri and moved his family to the dry desert of Arizona, where he found freedom to embrace the teaching of polygamy? As the family struggled to make ends meet during the Great Depression, what was it like for the wife and children to have their husband and father bring into their home young wives no older than his eldest children? What was it like for the young daughter to deal with conflicting feelings of love for her family, normal experiences of growing up, and yet increasing disappointment and disdain for her father … and finally fear for her own future as she overhears what her father has planned for her?!

Where should the wife and mother’s loyalties lie?

An unusual and profound story! In places it is, perhaps, not for the faint of heart. But if you read it (and it is available in both paperback and Kindle) you will be rewarded with a great read, an engrossing story, and a beautiful picture of tough mother love!

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What? You Can’t Stop Crying

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by arcecil in challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, emotional needs, encouraging each other, God's healing love, grief and loss, letting go of anger, reach out and touch, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

a heart filled with love and hope, Emotional and spiritual healing, life stages, life's upward path, Mothering, Women's Issues

Alice-poetry-bookWHAT? YOU CAN’T STOP CRYING

What? You can’t stop crying.
I hear you. Been there.
You say you left your grocery cart in frozen foods.
You’re telling me it was loaded with food
and every kind of whatnot
from all the other aisles,
And then you hightailed it to your car.
There you hid behind sunglasses and drove home.
Did you remember to wipe your fingerprints
off the handle of the loaded, abandoned cart
in frozen foods?
Just kidding.

You complain you couldn’t sleep because your slumber
was interrupted by the need to blow your nose.
David of the Old Testament cried on his bed.
See, we are in good company.

Let’s look at the list of life’s events that can trigger
such an avalanche of emotion.
Just check the one that fits, or mark “Other”
at the bottom.

All right, here we go.
You poured your life into the children.
All the children left home.
The empty nest doesn’t feel as good as you thought it would.

You lost your job.
You’re too old to be hired.
You’re not sure whether this reinventing is right for you.

You moved your mother into a nursing home.
You tried to manage Mom at home.
You moved your mother back into the home.

There is an injustice in your life.
You try to think of ways to address it.
Every idea leads to a dead end.
You choose to remain silent.

You have just received a bad diagnosis.
Many well-intentioned people are offering suggestions.

Someone who is dear to you is very ill.
That loved one says, “Just sit with me.”

An important person in your life passes away.

Other.

Listen, if you weren’t crying, I’d be worried about you.
I sympathize with you.
God empathizes with you.
That’s the reason He included people
like Joseph, David, Job, and Paul in His Book.
Think about them; think about the Lord; and think about me.
And, in the near future,
you’ll be able to leave your empty cart in the corral,
go home, store the perishables in the refrigerator,
and then sit on the sofa and have a good cry.
Now, that will be progress. That will be hope.

~ A.R. (Alice) Cecil

Editor’s note: This poem is taken from the book, IN THAT PLACE CALLED DAY: Poems and Reflections That Witness God’s Love.

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Emotional Captivity

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by kyleen228 in confessing our need, emotional needs, healing after abortion, the healing journey

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Emotional and spiritual captivity, Emotional and spiritual healing, Forgiving yourself, Post-Abortion Healing, Women's Issues

Red-tail hawks soaring

(Photo: C. Lawton)

Is anything holding you captive? Do you long to be emotionally and spiritually free?

Red-tail hawk soaring

(Photo: C. Lawton)

After 10 years of avoiding the truth about my abortion, even hiding it from myself, I finally faced my own emotional captivity. At some level, I knew that my journey must begin with God, by seeking his forgiveness. Little did I know that my greatest challenge would be forgiving myself. Yet Isaiah 54 has been true in my own life. I have seen God move me from captivity to freedom. He healed my mother heart and freed me from the chains of guilt and shame. What should have kept me down forever, God has turned and now uses to help set others free.

Captivity, both physical and emotional, is a recurring theme in the Bible. One of the best examples of is Isaiah 54. This chapter, written to the Israelites, predicts their return to favor and release from captivity in Babylon. But because of the rich, multi-layered nature of God’s Word, this chapter also applies to anyone finding herself in a prison of emotional and spiritual captivity.

During times of barrenness of spirit, Isaiah 54 addresses the “destitute” with the promise that even when God seems distant, he vows to “return in mercy.” And though we face seasons of life that seem blanketed by sorrow, God’s promise is to move us forward into seasons of peace and restoration, should we choose to walk with him out of captivity and into freedom. The chapter ends with the triumphant promise that Satan, the one who seeks to steal, kill and destroy all that God has established, will be “baffled” and we will emerge victorious.

These verses from Isaiah 54 (NIV) are especially meaningful to me:

‘Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband,’ says the Lord.

‘Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities.

‘Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.

”The Lord will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—a wife who married young, only to be rejected,’ says your God. ‘For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,’ says the Lord your Redeemer….

‘Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,’ says the Lord, who has compassion on you….

Have you experienced this love and freedom?

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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Emerging From the Cocoon

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by ardisanelson in mother wounds, reconciliation, show love by serving, the healing journey

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Tags

mother and daughter, personal discoveries, Women's Issues

a butterfly on flowers

(Photo: C. Lawton)

When the contributing authors of Journeys to Mother Love were asked to write posts for this blog, I was thrilled. I had been blogging for a year and felt comfortable with the format. I was finding my voice and believed that God was giving me a story to share and point people to Him. But when it comes to writing about motherly themes for this blog, I feel somewhat lost and unequipped.

Less than two years now since my mother passed, the healing of my mother-wound is still somewhat fresh. I speak openly about what happened in the process, but I am still grieving the loss incurred by the fact that I didn’t really have a mother all the years that she was living. The mothering I didn’t get has had a profound effect on who I am today.

As described in my story, “Walking My Mother Home,” tremendous healing came as the Lord led me to minister to my mother in her final years of life. While I feel more spiritually alive and emotionally whole, I know there are still parts of me that are small, that missed having a mother’s love. It opens up from time and time like a gaping hole in my heart. Thankfully those moments are becoming few and far between, and I tend to recover more quickly.

Before my mother’s stroke in July 2009, I didn’t give her much thought. We weren’t completely estranged, but I really didn’t feel like I had a  mother. Since my mother was schizophrenic virtually all my life, I have no idea what went on in her mind, but I imagine she was sane enough to long for a loving daughter. In God’s infinite mercy and wisdom, that is what He gave her in the last eighteen months of her life. I didn’t know what I had missed, not having a mother-daughter relationship, until God gave me the joy of loving and caring for her.

Years ago when she gave birth to her only daughter, she couldn’t have fathomed the painful years that were ahead. Her life seemed normal. I am sure she had dreams for me and my brothers. Somewhere along the line she let go of those dreams and replaced them with fantasies fed by her mental illness.

Today, though, my mother is happily smiling at me from across my desk where I keep a photo of her, and from heaven above, with motherly pride for the woman that is now emerging from her cocoon like the butterfly that graces the cover of Journeys to Mother Love. I am like that butterfly, transformed from a shy little girl unsure of her own fate and sanity, into a woman who is more confident and free to be all that God is calling me to be. I’m even finding my own voice!

~ Ardis A. Nelson

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If I Can Just Touch One

23 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by kyleen228 in encouraging each other, reach out and touch, the healing journey

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Tags

Courage to be honest, Ministry, Post-Abortion Healing, Women's Issues

 

 

Mother Love
Mother Love (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A dear friend read my story in Journeys to Mother Love and texted me that she was still wiping away tears as her fingers wrote the text. She shared that we had much in common, both of us knowing what she meant although she never mentioned the word “abortion.” She went on to share that she was unsure about her faith but felt inspired by my story and knew God had brought us together for a reason. I was able to remind her that God was working in her life simply and wonderfully because of his LOVE for her.

 

When I shared the text with my husband, he said, “Well there you go. If nothing else happens, you have impacted the life of another human being in a positive way.”

 

She found the courage to be honest with me about her journey because I was honest about mine. My husband’s comment resonated with me. While my hope is that my story might touch thousands, that it touched one is no less significant. If we believe that we are all connected, the seven degrees of separation idea, then by touching one, I have impacted many more. If one person is encouraged to trust God more, to seek healing, or to finally be honest with herself, then imagine the impact of that decision on those in her life – her husband, children, family, co-workers, etc. We are wise to remember that changing even one life for the better is nothing short of a miracle. That God allows us this privilege is truly a blessing.

 

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

 

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