Eve’s Daughter

This is the second part of Captivating - the first entry was my starter, something to get me going. Here is the rest of it. Finally! It’s only about a month later - which means there are quite a few entries before it, which chronologically come after it.  

Since T (my husband) started reading ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Way of the Wild Heart’ by John Eldredge he has been blown away, and he keeps reading great excerpts from the book to me. Some of the stuff I understood immediately and went “yeah, right,” it just jelled, felt right, smelt right, rang true. But there were other bits he read that just jarred, especially the dreams/desires of a woman’s heart. I thought it was a great book, for T, but I wasn’t really interested in reading it (even though the author recommends women do to understand a man’s heart). However, T kept sharing with me from ‘Wild at Heart’ and apart from the “women stuff” it was sooo good. I could see it was true, and how it was going to be very helpful in raising our three boys to be great men of God and the best that they can be…but I still had my reservations about the truth of it when it came to the dreams of a woman’s heart.

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This is the second instalment of “Girly Stuff & Women’s Conferences“

As I have already mentioned, all of the speakers were good, but the one whose words embedded themselves deep in my heart was Georgie Baxter when she said, “Embrace your Femininity” at the start of her speaking time. I shuddered and felt like gagging! I have a problem with the word “femininity”. For me it conjures up a whole heap of images - pink girly stuff, lots of perfume, giggling and frills or those women who have just got it all together, their make up is perfect, their nail and hair is done, their clothes coordinate, they are calm, together, they’ve done their housework…- I know that this is not all there is to femininity and being a woman, but that’s what the word “femininity” conjures for me. So I hoped her words would impact me, would make a difference and thankfully she didn’t go all “traditional” about being a woman. She said a whole lot of other stuff too that was good too, although I don’t remember it, but I do remember what she said about “embrace you femininity”!

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All this spiritual warfare stuff it is wearing me down. I didn’t know that it was gonna be such hard work - it just never stops, it’s always there, always waiting. Not that there’s demons behind every tree and you can’t ever let your guard down, but it is a war that we’re involved in whether we fight or not. And of course, when you fight, you get targeted. Like I’ve mentioned in another post, our family is often attacked through it’s health and that mostly the health attacks are on T and the kids and I’m beginning to realise that the attacks I’m under are on my mind and emotions. And when I go off, boy do I really go off, and I hate it. 

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In my last installment I wrote…

It’s time to stop moping around, to stop worrying that ”nobody loves us and we’re not good enough…” - that sort of thinking is soul crushing and keeps us in little boxes. God loves us and  that is enough. It’s time to step out and be the women has created and called us to be! And to also now be aware that we are going to be attacked even more!

And the last few days have been nightmarish. At least I was aware of what was going on, but it was so, so, so hard to fight it, especially as this “spiritual warfare” stuff is so new. T and I have ordered some books on the topic - we need to know what to do. One book we’ve got coming is called ‘Spiritual Warfare for Beginners’ - hope it’s good. And we’ve both started to read ‘Victory Over the Darkness’ by Neil Anderson, (lent to me by the same friend who initiated the ‘Captivating Group’ with me) and also recommended by John & Stasi Eldredge on their website.

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This is my blog time, but I’ve had a call from a friend who wants me to call her back. This probably means being on the phone for a while and that means I miss out on my small window of opportunity for writing stuff - I get ½ hour while kids are watching Playschool - supposedly uninterrupted but rarely works that way! So I thought, “I’ll call her after my blog time is over” and then another thought slipped into my mind, “What would God want me to do? What’s more important? Writing my blog or phoning my friend?” Well the answer was, as they say, ”blindingly obvious”. 

One of the many things I’ve been reading about in ‘Captivating’ is the importance of relationships and how we need to fight for them because relationships are something the devil is really opposed to. Which is why keeping a friendship is truly hard work.The devil wants us to stay isolated and believe the lie that we’re alone, that we don’t really have any true friends who really care about us…definately a lie I’ve fallen for, all of my life and especially during the last four months.

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This post was originally written on 18th June, 2007, but I have been adding to it and rewriting it slightly as I have been redoing it and putting the poem up as a pdf which makes it a heck of a lot easier to read than just in a post. As I have been doing this, I have had a few bells go off, or lights come on. These have been italicised

This morning was a toughy. I was up at 5:45am staggering out of bed to get to the baby before he woke the others. The house was cold and I’d just been wrenched from a lovely dream, so I was staggering around trying to put my dressing gown and slippers on quickly. I wobbled over a few times, bumping into walls and doorframes - and I wonder where these mysterious bruises keep coming from! I was up, but that was it, definately not awake and functioning on all six cylinders. At 6am I had put him back to bed, but he was coughing and sounding really bad, so in another twenty minutes he was up again. And there was nothing I could do to comfort him, everything I did was wrong! It was during this time that it all just went pear shaped and I fell to pieces.

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The poem ‘God Believes In Me’ was written sometime in August 2005 (before I realised it would be useful to save the date in the filename so I know exactly when it was written). It came about as my pastor called me up one Thursday asking if I could write a poem for the Sunday service. He told me what he wanted and I set to. In two days I wrote and rewrote, and rewrote a few more times the poem ‘God Believes In Me’. I actually ended up writing two poems and I let my pastor choose which one suited the theme the best.

I read the poem on that Sunday morning and haven’t looked at it since. It’s been two years! I decided to read it again and see if it was as good as I remembered it being, or if I was just delusional. It’s still good, in fact, I am astounded at how good it is! As I read the words I started crying and ended up praying. I know this poem was not just me using my gift with words, it was God-inspired and God-breathed; I really feel the words of this poem have been touched by God.

Suddenly I am ‘afraid’, God has given me a gift, a talent, an ability to craft words, to ‘wordsmith’ and it is an awesome and frightening responsibility that I now realise God has entrusted me with. I don’t think I am a great writer, I know there are writers more talented than I. Yet He has placed in my heart an almost overwhelming desire to write and when He touches the words I write, they become more than just words, they come alive, filled with the essence of God, they become powerful. I am in awe of the responsibility God has given me with words and I am humbled by it.

Click on God Believes In Me to open poem in a new window

The poem is in Adobe Acrobat format. If you can’t open the poem, then you can download a free reader.

There was this young teenage girl at church today. I haven’t seen her for a long time, maybe not even since last year. She is a very attractive girl and looks older than she is, tall for her age. She’s only about 13, but she looks easily 16 or 17.

Anyway, as I said, I haven’t seen her for ages, and she’d done that extra growing up thing that kids seem to do all of a sudden, especially when you haven’t seen them for a while. They even do it to you when you see them every day. My oldest keeps on growing up and changing, looking “older”, looking like a big kid, sounding like a big kid and I’m left standing there wondering where did my baby go?!

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