having kids, that must be the fear of the lord on your life. how many times, even per day, do i open my mouth and say "when I was growing up..." I obviously had an excellent childhood if I so openly share about my childhood multiple times in a day. thinking of the habits formed, the patterns learned, the mistakes made, the problems solved...its a lot of responsibility.
tonight i was telling some friends about how i didn't like mexican food growing up. often on sundays i would myself getting free refils of my shirley temple, staring at the menu, wishing i liked the food at azteca. on any given sunday i would order either a. cheeseburger b. chicken bruger or c. sopa de tortilla
this last time i was home with my family in april, i went out to dinner with mom and dad, it happened to be mexican food. i explained to them that i didnt like mexican food when i ordered a cheese burger. and i thought, wow, after all these years of not liking mexican, my family thinks i do like it. did i ever tell them i didn't like it?
i remember one time in a restaurant, i was maybe 5. we were out to eat with another family that had 6 kids, bringing the total number of people to 14 people. it seemed like so many of us at the time, having eaten out with outreach teams twice the size, it seems reasonable now. anyway, i remember the waitress taking orders from most everyone, but she skipped me. when the food started coming out to the table, i didn't get any food, (remember, i didn't order any). the food was all distributed and then terri said something to me about what i got and i burst into tears. i think my mom had decided we weren't all going to order and share with each other a couple of meals, but i just thought i had been skipped. yet i knew i had been skipped, but i never spoke up. my first voicing of "i was skipped" was when i burst into tears when the waitress came. i think dad or mom took me away from the table to see what was wrong with me because i couldn't stop crying.
i am not a verbal person. voicing my needs, my opinions, my desires, visions.... its still strange sometimes. mom and dad you did an amazing job raising us kids!! i look back now and see how complicated it must have been, four monster running around the house making a mess and demanding cheeseburgers instead of tacos. and i see how much i was shaped, habits i formed that i am still reshaping in order to be like jesus. and i'm learning it is not always right and is definitely not helpful for me to be non-verbal and just to go with the flow... even though that is what i am most comfortable with. as God shapes me as a leader, this is something that is being confronted regularly.
i have a ways to go in this process of learning to communicate. this week we have someone sharing on fear of the lord. its arguably one of my favourite topics to talk about with a new group of birth attendants. what does the term "fear of the lord" mean?!?!
well, its changed my life.
