Let Me Be A Woman / Elisabeth Elliot / Children / Mothers Day Series

Prayer #16 for Your Children:  Peace

Father, let my children "make every effort to do what leads to peace".  (Romans 14: 19)

Prayer #17 for Your Children:   Hope

May the God of hope grant that my children may overflow with hope and hopefulness by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15: 13)

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Let Me Be A Woman by  Elisabeth Elliot

Chapter 16:  A Paradoxical Principle

When you pour yourself out, when you make the satisfaction of somebody else's desire your own concern; you yourself will be a source of refreshment, a builder, a leader into healing and rest at a time when things around you seem to have crumbled.  

How can this possibly be true?  I don't think it can be explained unless you are doing it.   Wives and mothers in particular, have had this role for generations and I hardly know a mother who regrets pouring her life into her family or whose family does not revere her for all she has and is to them, even when  there are grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Men are to be servant-leaders, but in our society, this is not the norm, so in my estimation, is harder for men to grasp this concept, see modeled and then become that, certainly impossible unless their focus is on the Lord.


The bottom line:  We become better leaders when we serve rather than try to dominate and others respond to our leadership more positively  at the same time.

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Chapter 17:  Masculine and Feminine

It was God Who made us different, and He did it on purpose...Yours is the body of a woman. What does it signify?  Is there invisible meaning in its visible signs--the softness, the smoothness, the lighter  bone and muscle structure, the breasts, the womb?  Are they utterly unrelated to what you yourself are?...  

Womanhood is a call.  It is a vocation to which we respond under God, glad if it means the literal bearing of children, thankful as well for all that it means in a much wider sense, that in which every woman, married or single, fruitful or barren, may participate--the unconditional response exemplified for all time in Mary the virgin, and the willingness to enter into suffering, to receive, to carry, to give life, to nurture and to care for others...