Make Me Smile Monday :)

When I was a little girl I thought my mom was Snow White. Well, I didn't really, but I thought she looked just like her. With her black hair, fair complexion and hazel eyes she was my very own Snow White and just as any little girl would be I was very proud to have "Snow White" for my mother. :) 

My mom taught me how to cook and bake from a young age. She taught me to clean, embroider and cross-stitch. She taught me to be compassionate towards the "underdog", that even though not everyone knows it we're all equal in God's eyes. She taught me that when the time came to marry I should choose a man who genuinely shared my faith, who treated his mother and sister(s) with respect. She taught me to watch out for watch for certain warning signs (substance abuse problems, anger problems, problems holding a job, being irresponsible with money etc.). In my little girl heart and mind she was perfect!

The interesting thing about growing from a child into a woman myself is that while it did mean discovering that she is in fact human I also discovered strengths of hers that as a child I couldn't fully appreciate in the same way. 

My mom. She's so beautiful! You can see why I thought she was Snow White!  :)

If I had to choose just one word to describe my mom it would be advocate. My mom's an RPN and works with the elderly, and has for years. She cares for them with great compassion and respect. It's not about the fact that she is a nurse, although that is great it's about how she's a nurse. She makes an effort to get to know each of them as people and in doing so I know she adds a little sunshine to their day. I've seen her in action first hand. When we were kids, every once in a while she would take my brother, sister and I over to the nursing home so we could meet the residents and we got to know quite a few of the residents living there. I knew even then she was bringing us because she valued them so much and she always told us how seeing children could brighten the day of the sick and the elderly. Then when I was 12 years old my mom encouraged me to begin volunteering as a "tea girl" at the nursing home where she worked. I went every Saturday for about an hour and a half and I would take the tea cart from room to room offering a drink and a bedtime snack. I volunteered there until we moved a few years later. After high school I got a job working as a Nurse's Aide there and got to see my mom in action in an even greater capacity. She was always incredibly kind and patient with the residents. She knew who they were. She made conversation. She would joke with them and make them laugh. And all because she cared not out of a sense of obligation. The residents knew and loved my mom back because they knew she cared.

In more recent years I've been amazed to discover how incredibly deep this compassion goes. It's a part of who she is. I don't even  know if I can do it justice in explaining the heart she has for the residents and her nursing peers, but I'll try. 

First and foremost her heart is for the residents. She'll speak on their behalf if she feels their care is being compromised. She'll intervene for them is she feels something is being overlooked. She will lovingly fight for them if their not getting the respect they deserve. She knows first hand how the care of the residents is connected directly to the nurses. So she lends her voice to management on their behalf, letting them in on the struggles that are just naturally a part of being a nurse on the floor.

I think that this compassionate heart of hers is God-given. That God has placed her in different places to be there for people when they had no one else to be there for them. 

My prayer for you this Mother's Day mom (and always) is that you would "have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is" and that this understanding would be what gives you the strength to love the people God places in your life with that God-given compassion that fills up your heart! 

I love you mom and I'm so grateful for the many incredible things you've taught me. Thank-you for nurturing me and helping to make me the woman I am today. The woman I'm becoming.   

   

Stained Glass Windows

Recently I was visting another church building for a service. The building had a different style then ours and I enjoyed looking around and noticing the differences in the building itself. It had solid wooden pews. Our building sports wooden pews as well but with cushioned seats. There was a theatre style floor while ours is flat. There was a large space in the front where a very large choir could gather and a piano, but at our church we have room carved out for a full set of drums instead. There was a balcony, which we don't have. And their super high ceiling came more to a point at the top while ours is flatter and not quite as high. It was a beautiful room really. What really captured my attention though, were the colourful and intricately designed stained glassed windows.

It was just one of those moments. I was sitting in this beautiful room looking up at these windows when it struck me how very ironic it is to have stained glass windows in a church.

Stained glass windows have a rather clear purpose. They are made simply to be beautiful. (And sometimes they tell a story.) And even though you can admire their beauty from outside you can't fully appreciate the beauty from the outside. They're designed to have light shine through them. And you have to sit inside the building to be able to admire their sparkle and shine as sun light comes pouring in reflecting the colours of the rainbow. You can see little pools of colour splashed on the floors and the walls of the room. As the sun moves though the sky so does the direction of the beautiful colours. It's the light of the sun that gives them a deeper kind of beauty. But we can only really see it from the inside. So I suppose, the purpose of the stained glass window is having something beautiful to look at only for those who are...on the inside.

But what about the beauty of what God has done through Jesus Christ? The Bible says, "God shows and clearly proves His [own] love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us." In Him all of creation has been redeemed. All of creation! Which includes every person. Everywhere. No matter what they believe, where they live or how they've been hurt. No matter how angry they are at God, what their religious beliefs, if they choose to deny His existence, or change their idea of who He is to suit their own taste. They may not be for Jesus, but Jesus is for them. And that is a beautiful truth!

So even though I can appreciate the beauty of a stained glass window, and I recognize the hours of time, the planning and the care that went into making them -  I don't want to be a stained glass window. If I were a stained glass window, I would simply be living life, letting His light shine into my life so I can enjoy the "colours of the rainbow" all to myself. I would hide behind walls I've built for myself, walls built by the world I live in and and I would never share this beauty with others.

My prayer for me - and for the church - is that we determine not to be stained glass windows hogging the beauty of the sun all for ourselves, but that we would choose to embark a journey. A journey that involves getting out from behind the walls we've been containing ourselves in (and unfortunately sometimes our God) and begin to discover how we can share this infinite, eternal, all-embracing beauty everywhere we go. And that we would in fact be willing to "go"!

Make Me Smile Monday :)

So, Jason has been playing some Star Wars Lego on his X-Box lately. Are you familiar with this game?

This game to me is rather family friendly. None of the kids play it, but I don't mind if they watch while he plays. Watching Jason play Star Wars Lego sometimes wins out over watching a movie* and as a result the kids have learned a bit about the "Star Wars Universe". The other day Jason was leaving to go pick R from a birthday party and as he was putting on his rain jacket (a dark blue jacket from Old Navy) he was playfully telling S he thought his jacket looked like a Jedi coat., which S thought was just great. I didn't realize how great until this morning when we were all leaving the house (I was heading to the school and Jason was leaving for work) when S enthusiatically said to all of us getting into the van, "Daddy's wearing his Jedi coat!" It was one of those moments when it's so hard for me not to laugh as a parent when R looked over at her older sister and said in complete sincerety and even a little bit of surprise asking, "Where did daddy get a Jedi coat?"  

*Watching daddy play his video game gets treated like watching a movie. Typically they watch no more than 3 shorter movies during the week and we often have a family movie night each week when Jason and I sit down to watch a full length movie together with the them. They actually don't watch any TV, unless it's sports with dad! :)