Tag Archive | Voice

Volunteer?

May15

People. We’re all the same.

We want to be seen.

We want to be known.

We want to matter.

We want to make a difference.

Here I am sharing my experience with just one of the multitudes of ways we can make this happen.

The pay is so often not monetary.

The look in a young mothers eyes when here child can safely live in her room again, without becoming sick.

An American Veteran who has served well, but now must rely on his sister for even the simplest of tasks; bathing or being able reach the sink to brush his teeth.

The elderly woman who the only thing that stands between her and leaving her lifetime home for a nursing home, is bad plumbing.

Or the family whose life is forever changed when daddy has a collision with a deer, and will never walk again.

These are real stories. We tell them again and again. Because WE, can make a difference.

We can help, and I’ve since found out that even the little guys like to help.

You may not have Rebuilding Together near you, but you probably have Meals on Wheels, or some other source of senior resources, or even a shelter of some sort. They can all use your help. Talented or not, it doesn’t matter.

I encourage you to go out and do something for someone today. Believe me, you’ll be helping your own soul as well!

 

Rebuilding Together

Rebuilding Together Muscatine

Rebuilding Together Muscatine County – Facebook

Part Three – Growing Up Churched (3/3)

Mar9

 

The Men People Trusted.

 

In the church I grew up in, and in all churches, military, businesses, families etc, there is a hierarchy.

There is always the boss, followed closely by an assistant. There are scribes, and treasurers, and event planners.

Churches have Pastors, Assistant Pastors, Executive Pastors, Teaching Pastors, along with secretaries, treasurers and then Deacon Boards.

All of that being said, one must know that if you are to hold one of those positions, you have proven yourself to be trustworthy and upstanding, as a child might even think; Holy.

After church service, there was a Sunday school class. Adults went to a different part of the building than the kids. I can still see it in my mind, all the people passing in the hall to go to their respective classes.

There, going the opposite direction as me, was a deacon who locked his eyes on me. I was around 12 or so, so I just thought he was being friendly. Each week, as we passed in the hallway, he would lock eyes on me and began to walk a little closer. I had no vocabulary for it, but I knew it felt weird. It felt scary, even creepy. He then proceeded to touch me where he shouldn’t. Every time a bit more aggressively.

My stomach would roil, and my heart would threaten to come out of my throat when I saw him coming. I knew he was a deacon. Someone the other adults looked up to and even trusted. Who would believe the words of this child, who in her wrongness didn’t fit in anywhere?

I never told a soul. Several months and several incidents passed. I made up some story about not wanting to go to class any more, even though I really did want to.

So I wasn’t in the hallway anymore, the terror and the feeling of even more wrongness stayed with me. I will always wonder if I was the only one. Statistically speaking, there were probably many more..

That was “Back in the day”, when secret things were secret things. The problem with secret things is that they tend to tarnish their container. I was tarnished, through no fault of my own, but acted out tarnished for the next several years.

Until much, much later I found out a few things; it was not my fault, God did not see me as faulty, people are people, whether they be in high places or low, even little girls and boys should talk about any secrets that adults make happen, that make them feel awful and anxious and scared.

In a previous post, The Cartography of Our Scars I addressed the fact that our scars, our landscape, makes us who we are.

Sure, I can wish it never happened, but it did, and so much more. But now I have only to use that rutted road to hold on to someone else’s hand, to help them find the way out.

Remember when that woman I barely knew said it wasn’t my fault?

The truth that she spoke to me set me on the twisty road to freedom.

Part Two – Growing Up Churched (2/3)

Mar8

Thou Shalt Not

There was one thing I heard clearer than anything else during those early morning church services.

Thou shalt not.

I heard the words the Pastor was reading from the Holy Bible kept on the pulpit. I heard the Thou shalt nots, and that the payment for sin is death. I believed those words.

I still do. But he was telling me the thou shalt nots, without a word about how not to. Basically, he was telling me what to think, without teaching me how to think. What I never heard was just how to not do the Thou shalt nots, or how to receive forgiveness for my ill doing.

Surely, God didn’t punish little girls with the death penalty, right? But how could I know? Since they never told me (or I never heard) I only knew for sure that I was a wrong-doer.

I heard the words God so loved the world, but to me they were overshadowed by all of my wrongness. How could He love someone who was just so wrong?

Fast forward again, to when I was that young mother, going to that different church with my children, without their daddy.

It was there that I began to understand my Father’s (God’s) love for me. How it extended much farther than I could have ever believed.

The story of my earthly father is for another day. Suffice to say that our relationship made it very difficult for me to understand that “love” could be any other way.

John 1:12 (ESV) but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. All God wanted was for me to receive Him.

The wrongness of my childhood was nothing in His eyes. It only mattered that I look to Him for guidance.

The choice was mine. Wait. I get to choose? I had never even known that there were options. My wrongness, just was. It was what it was.

I had an encounter with a woman at this time, which I barely knew.

Here is what she said;

“When I see you, I see a chalkboard. This chalkboard says that 2 + 2 = 5. No matter what you do, or how many times you erase it, you cannot get the answer to come out correctly.”

What she told me next, totally floored me.

“God wants you to know that it wasn’t your fault.”

What? I knew at that moment that all my wrongness, was not my fault, I just had not been given all the facts.

On that day I received three things; Freedom from wrongness, choices, and a Father who loved me regardless.

It was then I realized that I would be in a totally different “classroom” being taught in a way that I could learn.

Oh what a glorious day!