Two areas of my ministry have come together in a beautiful way in the last few days.
I am teaching a class on Sunday nights on the Christian family and have spent the last two weeks discussing the roles of Christian wives and mothers. I have found both studying for this class and the discussion it has generated to be enlightening and wonderfully beneficial.
In my personal, benevolent ministry, I have spent the last couple of days visiting widows in our community. I have taken a small Christmas gift and spent some time talking with these ladies. Ironically, most of these women attend the same place of worship here in town and it is not affiliated with the church of Christ that I grew up in. In talking with these ladies, they shared freely the concerns they had about getting older, losing friends to death, the state of our country and a variety of other situations that they are each facing. Some of these ladies have experienced the tragedy of losing children, troubled marriages, and, as widows, all have dealt with the grief of losing a husband.
What amazes me about these women is that they, in different degrees, have learned to lean on God through all these experiences. They each speak openly of daily Bible study and an involved prayer life. Since many of them are members of the same congregation, they have learned to help carry one another through their troubling times. One of these women had driven another to her cancer treatments on many occasions and others told of how they each had worked together to provide food and Christmas presents for several families in town. These women are grappling with the problems of personal lonliness, wayward children, and the process of constantly growing older day by day. My town will certainly miss these women when they are not longer a part of our community.
In seeing these precious women age with grace, I was brought back to the study I have been leading at Lebanon. These women, and many others like them, have truly embraced their position in their families, churches, and communities. Younger women (as well as men) would do well to imitate their examples. The generation of which they are a part is quickly passing away and the ability to learn from these great matriarchs will soon be gone. What the Bible teaches about the importance of learning from older generations cannot be over emphasized.
May each of us take advantage of the opportunity we have to learn from our elders before they are gone and let us use the knowledge they have shared to be better people now and in our process of aging.