Do you remember my devotional about Roger?

http://proverbs31-woman.com/2008/12/10/you-bless-him/

Today I went back to our old house to do a final inspection after the cleaners had gone through to make sure all was in order before handing the keys over to the selling agent for the new owner.

After that I popped into the local shopping centre to buy some new summery frocks. I live in jeans but now I’m in the country I have this urge to once again wear long flowing loose summer frocks.

While wandering around the centre I saw a familiar man stooped over and walking.  It was Roger. I’d never seen him at the shopping centre before – it’s very large with lots of department stores and specialty shops. I’ve only ever seen him at the small shopping strip close to our old home.

I thought about whether to go say hi and turned around and noticed he’d stopped and he was holding his forehead in his hand.  This is a normal pose for him. I think he gets tired walking around but does lots of it.  So I went up to him and stood in front so he could see me (he’s partially deaf) and said ‘hello Roger’.  His whole face lit up when he recognised me.  He said hi and I explained we’d shifted and told him where. He said to me we were very lucky.  Sounds like he knows the area.  I asked him how was his Christmas and his face dropped, he said not special. I asked him if he saw his sisters and he said yes.  I asked him how his church was and his face lit up again and he said it was good.  He asked my name – he’d never known it and shook my hand.  I wished him the best and moved off again but not before saying I thought of him often.  He’ll never know I’ve written about him and that my story might have prompted others to look for people like him to bless.

I hope I’ve blessed his day.  I prayed for him as I went on my way.

Proverbs 31:31 Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

My husband and I have been house hunting for most of this year.  We wanted to buy a place in the country with some land – not too much but not too little. We didn’t want to be close up against neighbours and wanted some peace and quiet.  Our children have left the nest and we are empty-nesters now, enjoying our pre-retirement stage.  We’re free to do what we want in the evenings and weekends and just do nothing if that suits us.

Not that either of us are the type to just sit in front of TV and do nothing. We are both active people.  He enjoys mountain bike riding and is out every weekend, I enjoy my photography and often join him on his trips so I can wander off to enjoy the scenery behind the viewpoint of my camera while he enjoys his rides with his mates.

We finally found the house a couple of months ago. We shift in this coming weekend.  The wait was worth it, although we despaired whether we would find the right place.

Because we are in pre-retirement stage we are conscious also of our bodies growing older and the needs that older people have. We wanted to be sure we were close enough for medical support if needed later in years. We had to have a place where the land was reasonably flat so our knees wouldn’t give out on walking steep slopes every day.  And God has been good and provided the right place.   2 acres in an area that is nearly all sloped. We think we got the only ‘flat’ piece of land in the area – well almost!  3/4 of the land has lawns and plants and a tennis court. The rest is bushland and sloped at the back of the block.  Native birdlife and we’re told some animal life too, which I look forward to seeing.

Now comes the hard part. All the packing. I feel like I’ve been doing it for weeks and that’s probably because I have.  I am so over packing and just want it to end.  But every day I get stuck back into it, after knocking off from my work early in the day. I don’t want my husband coming home and feeling overwhelmed with how much there is to do.  We’re nearly at the end part of it.

When I look at the last verse of Proverbs 31 I wonder how often the P31 woman also felt like this.  Like there was no end to the work in sight but she knew she had to press on.  And look at how she is remembered all this time later!  She did achieve, she did succeed and she earned her reward.  She is a woman for us to look up to and admire, and want to be like. She was a hard worker and that hard work paid off.

For me, my reward will be the unpacking in just a few short days and being able to take photos inside and outside our new home.  Being able to sit back and enjoy the solitude of the country and enjoy more of the beautiful nature that God made.  And knowing that I might just experience a little of what the Proverbs 31 woman felt so long ago for a job well done.

This year has been very different to the past years of our lives.  We’ve gone through tremendous upheaval and change which began almost 12 months ago when we lost our darling Miriam.

If anyone had told us at the beginning of September last year that nearly every member of our immediate family would be moving house this year and that we would be missing a member of our family too, we just would not have believed them.

It’s been a long slow year – one where I’ve been anxious to get back to some sort of normality and yet when opportunities arise, particularly through my business, I am slow to respond or take things up.

I’ve been very reluctant to go out in the evenings so have missed a year’s worth of business networking events and church events. I haven’t wanted to leave Graham alone and I haven’t really felt like being with groups of people.  Neither has he for that matter.

The book I was going to write has been put on hold but I am a contributing author for an anthology of poems and short stories about babies and impending motherhood called “Even Before You Were Born“.  The poem I wrote back in the 1980s.

I’d been planning a number of things for my business and team this year – at least I was going to plan them, but the year is almost over and I haven’t moved forward with them.  I wrote things down and thought about them but they progressed no further.

I did set business and personal goals in January this year, as I do each year, and I have achieved 5 out of 11 things which isn’t too bad (45%) – but I usually achieve 85-90% of my goals.

It recently hit me that I’m entitled to ‘time out’ – time to reflect, time to heal, time to just vegetate if I need and want to.

Why do we (and particularly women I mean) feel guilty if we just take time out?

When we look at the Proverbs 31 woman in Chapter 31 of Proverbs she seems to be constantly on the go, always doing, never letting her lamp go out.    But if we look more closely at these verses there are hints that because of her previous hard work, profitable trading, her planning and preparation, she has no fear for her household (v21) and she can laugh at the days to come (v25).

Perhaps I am allowed to take time out after all and not feel guilty about it, simply because of all I have done in the past.  I need to allow myself time to renew, refresh, heal, rest, and gain new enthusiasm for life and all it promises in the days to come.

I manage a forum for women interested in being Proverbs 31 women and I had shared with them there about the loss of our daughter some months ago.  One of the women had commented she didn’t know how she’d cope with something like that.

My response to her astounded me even – it was like God was speaking to us through my fingers.  I hope what I share below will help you too.

It hasn’t been easy by any means and we’re only 9 months down the track.  Two weeks ago (almost) my cousin lost his son in a car accident.  My cousin is not a Christian and now I feel that it’s my role and responsibility to reach out to him and his wife. I hadn’t seen a lot of them over the past 2 or 3 years so I’ll be making up for it now and keeping in constant touch. The funeral was Tuesday just gone so it’s very early days for them yet.

I find often that our healing takes place when we are helping others, our growth takes place through our own personal hardships. So one needs to follow the other so we have this balance of growth and healing.

Now, I hadn’t even thought about that till I typed it just now.

The Proverbs 31 woman was a wife, mother and business woman. It’s important to remember those three aspects – all knitted into one.

Today women struggle to manage all their various roles and the many hats they wear, daughter, sister, auntie, wife, mother, friend, lover, worker, nurse, house duties and so on. Just where do we become ‘me’?

I believe as we grow older we begin to learn more about ourselves but in our younger adult years while coping with a family and work, and being a good wife we can often feel lost from who we really are.

Don’t despair, others have been there before you and it will become more ordered as your life moves on. Content yourself in God’s word and the instructions of King Lemuel’s mother about the Proverbs 31 Woman.

If your family loves you, if your husband knows you care for the home and provide for your family in ways only you can do, if you love the Lord your God and seek His assurance, then you will eventually see who you are and where you have been. You might even get an inkling of where you are going with your life. I know I have.  And when I was first told about the Proverbs 31 Woman many years ago by a wonderful woman pastor at the church I attended I had no idea what God had in store for me in days ahead.

Now I look towards the Titus 2 woman and can see I’m heading in her direction and I know that many of you will be too. And for those of you who are young, perhaps you’ll find a Titus 2 woman in your life to help guide you.

I hope you’ve seen my Proverbs 31 Woman presentation set to music?  I have it linked on the site here or you can see it at youtube.

I had an interesting comment placed at youtube which basically said the writer felt that the Proverbs 31 verses were not positive but saying that women were servants.

This morning I got up before my husband because I was going out on a photoshoot (my latest passion and favourite hobby) and I set about getting ready, switched on the urn for a cuppa and made myself breakfast. Once the urn heated I asked my husband would he like a coffee and then made it for him and took it into the bedroom for him.  For which he was extremely grateful and he told me so.

Doing things for my husband gives me a warm glow inside and a feeling of contentment, that all is right with the world.  It doesn’t matter what else is going on in our lives if I can do small things for him here and there and know he truly appreciates what I’ve done for him.

This is not a sign of being subservient but rather I am demonstrating love in action.

Verse 12 says: “She brings him good, not harm all the days of her life” and I like to feel that is exactly what I do for my beloved Graham.  It’s not about being a servant or being subservient ( implies the cringing manner of one very conscious of a subordinate position <domestic help was expected to be properly subservient>).

I choose to do things for my husband, loving him for who he is and it doesn’t matter if he shows his appreciation or not for the most part.    My actions are not dependent on his praise, acknowledgement, or reciprocal actions.  It’s about showing him the love I have for him, knowing that in some small way I am making his life better on a daily basis.

If anyone at all feels that a wife doing something for her husband (freely and willingly) is an act of being a servant then I would say that person has never ever experienced true love.

I’m not talking about being besotted with someone and getting in their way and hanging around them and constantly smothering them. That can get really tiresome for the person the attention is focussed on. But I am talking about really loving someone and getting real joy out of doing simple things for them.

My husband told me quite some time ago how much it means to him to come home at night and have an evening meal ready for him. He cycles to and fro work daily so by the time he gets home he is quite hungry and the text books tell him he should be fuelling up after a ride. After Graham told me that I began to take even more care with the type of meals I was preparing and deriving real joy from his genuine comments of appreciation and enjoyment of the meal I’d prepared for us both. Just that simple one statement he’d made about his appreciation for the evening meal meant so much to me and it’s something I’ll remember always. And because of his comment I get even more enjoyment out of preparing the meal for him.

What about you?  Do you know how much your husband enjoys something you do for him? Not all men express their feelings verbally but look for ways he might indicate to you of his pleasure at something you’ve done for him. And if you’re not sure – ask, or perhaps share with him something you really appreciate about him.  It may just open up conversations you haven’t had before.

This was shared on a forum I belong to and I asked permission to bring it here.

Today is my day for the devotional and I want to share something that Celiabeth said to me the other afternoon. Remember, she is our youngest grandchild and has just turned four years old. At the time of our conversation, it did not hit me as to the depth of what she said, but it has since.

I was sitting on the love seat and she squeezed between the seat and the end table. She reached out and patted me on the arm and said, “Nana, how is your kidney ‘fection?” All the time those huge brown eyes are seeking my face looking for the answer she wants to hear, which was, “Oh, Celiabeth, Nana is feeling much better and will be back to normal before too much longer.” As if we were conspiring, she leaned into to me and said, “Nana, I am going to tell you something that you probably don’t know.” She said, “I know you know who Jesus is, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, I certainly do.” She cuts her little eyes up at me and says, “Then you know He will heal you, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, I do know that.” Then, as if she were telling a universal top secret, she said, “Now, Nana, this is what I don’t think you know—–did you know that you don’t have to wait until it is dark to pray?”

They have family prayer and devotions every night before they all go to bed and that is where she got that. She laid her little hands with the chipped fingernail polish on them and prayed the sweetest prayer for me. Tears streamed down my face. She smiled and said, “See, I told you and it is not even dark!”

Now I told you this to say that, yes, those were words from a four year old, but how many times have we waited until it got ‘dark’ to pray? When things got so bad that we couldn’t fix them ourselves and we couldn’t do anything else but ask God to help us. Darkness surrounds us in many ways—family relationships, work problems, church problems, financial problems, marriage problems—–many, many ways of darkness and sometimes we wait until the darkness envelopes us and drags us down before we pray.

So, in the words of a very smart little girl….. “You may not know this, but you don’t have to wait until it gets dark to pray”.

Thank you for allowing me to share a ‘grandchild’ story.

Love, Rhonda

and faithful instruction is on her tongue Prov 31:26

It’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do or say is.

I manage a forum of over 1,000 people, mainly women, in the Virtual Assistant industry.  The forum is many years old but in recent years I’ve felt the need to bring on board some moderators for a number of reasons – some are on the other side of the world to me and they can moderate messages when I’m in bed asleep.

But there are times when we need to discuss a certain member for not behaving well on the forum or to another member who becomes demanding and insists we do things their way.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had a small number of newer members take exception to an older member and they feel I should be banning her from the list.  I’ve struggled with this particular problem and took it to my moderators for discussion – it wasn’t a decision I wanted to wrestle with on my own.

Thankfully my team of moderators are a group of wise women of varying ages and experiences and each were able to give me their perspective and thoughts on the women involved in this latest conflict. And they were able to help me see things in perspective.

When you’re in the middle of conflict and each side hold what seem to be convincing arguments it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.  You need to be able to step back and look from both sides, and seek wise counsel.  We can’t always know the answers ourselves.

In the midst of this I had prayed to God for an answer and as if to help put the final part to the answer, this evening a lady I know from another state rang me out of the blue. She manages a network about 12 times the size of mine, but like me, it’s her business, and like me, she has problems with members from time to time. As she says ‘they are human and all have different personalities.  They need to learn to get over it or go without’.

I didn’t know Lyn was going to call me and I had not contacted her about my problem.  I had responded to a newsletter she’d sent out several days ago and it was tonight she chose to ring me and encourage me and just have a chat.  She’d been away interstate and hadn’t seen my email of encouragement to her until this evening.

Isn’t God good? He provided a woman with 12 times the ‘talent’ that I have (see Matthew 25:14-30) to call me on the very day I’d been struggling with a problem, providing just the answer by a woman who could speak wisdom and faithful instruction into my life. Thank you Father!

Proverbs 31:26, faithful instruction, speak with wisdom, Proverbs 31 Woman

Proverbs 31:20
She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy.

There’s a man I see shuffling along in the local shopping strip almost every day. He walks with head bowed and usually has a bunch of books and a bible under his arm.  He rarely looks up at anyone.

Many months ago I felt God leading me to pray for this man and so every time I drove past or walked past I did just that, asking God to bless him.

One day I saw him in a full suit on a very hot summer’s day, sitting on the pavement with his back to the fence of the house he was outside of, and he was reading. I got out of the car to see if he was ok and noticed for the first time his bible and struck up a conversation. I found out his name is Roger (I’d nicknamed him Mr Klump as that is how he walks) and that he went to a local church. He lived not far by but was happy where he was reading and writing and thanked me for my concern.

Over the months I’ve made sure I say hello to him and I see his face light up and he smiles, showing his blackened misshapen teeth.  I feel sorry for him as I’m sure he is lonely and I’ve never seen anyone else with him or talking to him.

Sometimes I just pass him by as he’s hard of hearing and if he doesn’t hear me the second or third time I call out I feel a bit silly as I know others are walking in the street also and can hear me clearly.

Today I walked past him as he sat on a park bench in the new plaza strip between the shops and asked God to bless him.  I continued to walk and began to feel convicted. I turned around but he’d not noticed me and so I continued to walk and pray for him.  Again I asked God to bless him and then I got the response ‘you bless him’.  I kept walking and began to feel guilty. I turned around and Roger still had his head down writing.

So I turned back and walked up to him as he got up to move away and felt I better hurry or I’ll miss my chance.  But he was only moving to a seat in the sun to get more warmth and then sat back down again. He looked up as he heard my voice (I made sure I spoke louder than normal) and he smiled when he saw me and settled back in his seat.

We had a short conversation and I asked how he was, and how were things at church. And then it occurred to me Christmas is not far away and I wonder if he’s going to be alone this year?

I’m not really in the mood for more company this Christmas – we usually invite loners to join us each year but this will be the first year without our beloved daughter Miriam and I don’t know how the family is going to be on that day.  Will I need to ask him to join us at a time when we will be in sorrow?

But I still asked him if he had someone to spend Christmas with and he didn’t hear properly so I asked again, louder this time, wondering what on earth I was doing.

He looked up at me and said he was planning to see his sisters.  I said ‘that’s good’.  Then he thanked me for asking and I told him he was welcome and said goodbye.

I walked away and then suddenly realised he’d thanked me for asking, for taking an interest.  How many do that? Thank you for taking an interest in their lives?  I couldn’t help wonder just how many people take an interest in Roger and continued to pray for him as I moved away towards my car again.

Do you have a Roger in your life and is he waiting for someone to take an interest?

Opening our arms and extending our hands to the needy should also mean turning our hearts and minds to these people, the lonely because they truly are needy – of company, of friendship and of love.  Make sure you extend yourself this Christmas.

Hi everyone, thank you for visiting this blog.  I’m so sorry I haven’t updated here for awhile. Some of you who read my other blogs will know what’s been happening in my life but for those of you don’t, we sadly lost a daughter at the end of September and life has been very hard.  I know that God is with us but it’s so hard to remain joyful and thankful when inside you are hurting and asking lots of questions as to why?  Maybe God will let us know that in the future but perhaps we’ll never know until we meet him face-to-face.

So family life has changed and we are still adjusting to those changes.

But with the other things in my life it’s almost like nothing has happened – how can the world continue on when we’ve had such a devastating event in our lives?  It’s a really strange paradigm to be in and those of you who have lost close family members will understand what I mean I’m sure.

I have been putting together another book this year called “It Happened By Design” and it’s a series of God-incidences from a number of contributing authors. Had I been the only author I would have held off till the new year to publish it but because I’d promised the other authors to get this out before Christmas I still went ahead with it, although it was delayed for a few weeks.  I know they all understood and were patient with me.

The new book is now available online to order in Australia or at Amazon.com and there is a book launch on Monday 1st December for the Amazon.com promotion.  Why not pop over to that site to check it out?