Advent 5

I'm late with this post but it was for a great reason!  We have a Thursday night Bible study group with a few women from my church.  It's a really small group (my favourite way of doing things - too many people and my introvert heart starts to quake and I worry I've said something stupid).  We are doing a Beth Moore Study (Breaking Free) and it's time each week that I treasure.  It is so important to me that I have a chance to connect with other moms, especially when it's other moms with kids of similar ages and values that are similar to mine.  It's so important that we have time with other Christian women on our journey.  I am not, in any way, saying that we ONLY have Christian friends - if I'm totally honest, with a couple of exceptions, all of my closest friends are actually not Christians.  That's o.k. with me because funnily enough, my non-Christian friends share many of the same values as I do and are people who are all about loving and fairness and compassion and kindness and justice.  Our reasons for it are just a bit different.

I do have to say, though, that I really feel that God has been reminding me of the importance of having fellowship with other believers sometimes.  I didn't have much of that growing up - we tended to be in mainline churches with few kids and I never had Christian friends at school.  It was rather lonely and while I ended up with incredible friends who were respectful of my faith, we weren't on the same journey.  I always felt a bit of a gap in my life, a need to have support and mentorship from women of faith that I could lean on when I was feeling lost.  Miraculously, God has planted us in a place where I have so much of that and I can't express how much that has changed my life.  I can sit with people and talk about struggles and challenges of parenting as a Christian parent - balancing faith and believe with respect for others, the ongoing fight against the worst of the world (e.g., greed, materialism, the message to our girls that their sole value is as an object of use for men) and how to allow our kids to have freedom to learn and make mistakes while also shielding them from things they are not ready to battle.  I always stay too late on Thursdays and Fridays at school as I teach, I'm relying heavily on caffeine to get me through but it is with a smile on my face!

I feel as though God has been impressing upon me the importance of having fellowship (and of our need to work to ensure that opportunities for fellowship happen).  That's something that I don't want to forget in the busyness of my daily life.