I Am No Orphan Girl

I was listening to a song by a newfound artist that has been around for a while, but had never heard of her until now. Her name is Carolee Mayne, and there are two songs I really like. One is, “A League of Angels‘ and the other is, “Orphan Girl.”

I grew up in a broken home (for more than one reason), but basically a single parent household. My brothers were blessed enough to have both our parents around as they grew up, but once I had come into this world I didn’t have much time with my father before he was gone.

I was very close to him, and though my mother is an incredible woman, I was always a “daddy’s girl.”

So by an early age I was a child who had no father, a mother that I felt didn’t understand me and two brothers who were grown and out of the house by the time I was 5. So in a way, I felt like I grew up as an only child, and in many ways I did.

There wasn’t a “true father” figure in my life, and for a very long time, I held on to a lot of resentment over that. My mother had experience with only boys, and now she was left alone with a little girl that she couldn’t figure out how to communicate with. It wasn’t until I was almost grown that I had realized how much resentment she had in her heart, as well. And that all the crud that had happened in that house while I grew up, she had regretted as well, but had no earthly idea how to communicate let alone ask for forgiveness from a girl who grew into a very bitter teenager.

We had our moments. Moments of good memories where we could remember laughing together and bringing each other joy; but almost on every occasion it still felt a little empty. I felt like the joy I exhibited towards her was only because she was my mother, and the joy she had exhibited towards me, was because she didn’t want to show how she was truly feeling inside. She felt she had to be strong, since she was essentially a mother and a father to me; and had no idea how to deal with the events that had happened to my family.

Bless her heart; she did everything possible to ensure I had the best life. She worked two jobs (at one time three), traveled for her company every week, 6 days out of the week, and was sometimes absent for 2 and 3 weeks while overseas. Basically, she was gone… ALOT.

There wasn’t much “affection” shown between the two of us. She loved me, and I loved her. But my heart was so torn over my father, that I had wrapped resentment around me like it was saran wrap, and it pushed us farther and farther apart, until I decided to leave home and live with my grandmother on her reservation.

When I finally came back home, things quickly declined, and our relationship was back to the way it was before I had left. To this day, we are still trying to catch up for lost time. To build a new and loving relationship. But, it’s hard to pick up the pieces when they are shattered in such tiny pieces.

But, I was so encouraged by the song I heard by Carolee Mayne tonight, that I just had to blog it. So many have no family AT ALL. No parents, no siblings. They are either displaced by war or natural disaster, abandoned all together, or had suffered some other unfathomable tragedy. With no identity of who they are and where they come from. No sense of love or ties, just the feeling of being unwanted. Unloved.

Identity is very important, in my opinion, and orphans can be some of the most hardest to regain something they never knew they had. And it can be the hardest for them to learn how to love when it’s never been shown to them (thanks to a WONDERFUL friend at my church for reminding me of this).

Now, I am no orphan, but I have truly felt that way before. Even when you have family, you can be so far apart, so disillusioned by your pain, that you feel so lost and so very alone. There was a point in my life, where I unequivocally had felt this way.

In “Orphan Girl,” there are three important themes (the last two intertwined) Mayne sings about in this simple, but beautiful song: Acknowledgement, Redemption, and Restoration.

Acknowledgement: ” I’m an orphan girl. I have no mother, and no father. No sister, no brother. I have my friendships… but ties of kinship; I have not one of them.”

Redemption: “So, Blessed saviour make me willing. Walk beside me until I am with them again. Lord, be my mother — be my father. Lord, be my sister, and my brother. No more an orphan girl.”

Restoration: “But when He calls me, I will be able to meet my family, at God’s table. I’ll meet my mother, my father, my sister, and my brother.”

Wow… that’s so cool to me. Unlike so many, I have a loving parent, but I understand what it means to be alone. To feel so lost. When we find ourselves lost and feeling utterly and painfully alone, even spiritually, and don’t realize or forget that God (my Father, your Father, everyone’s heavenly Father) is there to love us unconditionally — far more than our earthly families ever could — we will always be found lacking, and those who don’t know God at all, will not only continue to feel lost, but remain lost; and essentially feel that terrible feeling of loneliness and abandonment.

But that’s why I love redemption — the freedom to be set free from the things that bind us. We can be so lost, embittered, and in pain that we don’t realize what is available to us — what can set us free from all that. The love of a heavenly Father that can make NO mistakes, that can love unconditionally, and can bring a restoration that no man on Earth can.

In other words — He can be our all. You may be simply distant from your family, you may not even have family; and it’s tough, difficult, and lonely. I know. But it’s okay. It’s okay when you can truly realize that there is a heavenly Father that can be it all right here with you, right now.

Stewardship Pt. 1

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Wow computers can suck – good thing I like them so much! Anyways….

In my last post (or somewhere thereof) I talked about how I wanted to speak on stewardship. Why? Who knows! To be honest, I’ve never thought hard on the subject, and why it’s so important. But, it’s something that’s been revolving in my mind for some time now. As I stated in last week’s post, there are many definitions for the word stewardship but there’s only a few subjects I wanted to discuss in detail (somewhat) so I formed one that best fit for the overall posts on the subject

When I was 16 and received my first car, there was an almost unspoken rule attached with the gift: act responsibly. This wasn’t just because it was a car, but the fact that it was the knowledge that the only reason I received it in the first place, was because I had earned a significant amount of trust that made it possible for my mother to believe I could continue to be trusted. I didn’t want to ruin that, and so it meant that I was now the steward of not just a car, but a parent’s trust in me, as well.

With stewardship there must be trust. Without trust, how do we expect someone to entrust us with anything if they feel we aren’t trust worthy? Sure, there’s such a thing as blind trust, but if we abuse that trust, is it right to assume that that someone would trust with anything in the future? I think not, and even if they did, they probably shouldn’t.

When credit or a loan has been extended to us, a financer lends the money in the belief that come the time for us to pay it back, we’ll do so. This is why credit is so important. If our credit rating is low, it’s assumed it is because we have placed ourselves in debt with other financers and aren’t trustworthy to be lent money again. This is the case with any type of loan, and it’s the case with just about anything in life.

Usually when people hear “stewardship” they immediately think money. Though, this is very, very important part of stewardship, it also far more than that. Think about friendships, relationships, families, our own lives, and the list goes on and on. I’m a strong believer in saying that this world is not our own, and all that resides in it. It’s important to take care of the things that have been entrusted to us, and that goes for literally everything in our lives.

When my brother was younger, he had gone through three cars in less than a YEAR. It got to a point where my parents had made the decision that they could no longer trust him to not drive recklessly, and vowed to never buy a car for him again (better late than never, I suppose). From that point on, anything he wanted when he was still living under our parent’s roof had to be earned. In the later part of his teenage years, our mother could not trust my brother with anything. It was the error of one area in his life that had affected the household’s entire perception of how trustworthy he was in other aspects of his life.

Here’s another thought… ever heard of the boy who cried wolf? Sure you have. It’s about a little shepherd boy who was watching over his flock of sheep. Out of boredom he tried to entertain himself by pranking the villagers and begun crying “wolf,” but after a few times of the villagers coming to his rescue only to find it being a lie, they decided to ignore him. But, the next time he cried “wolf” it turned out there was a real wolf, but none of the villagers came to his aid believing it was just another lie.

Right about now some of you are thinking, “What does this have to do with stewardship?” And others might be thinking, “Yea, well… I don’t shepherd sheep.” Odds are you don’t shepherd any sheep, but you do play a part in shepherding relationships, businesses, children, etc. This might sound a little strange, but remember that one of the definitions of shepherd means to watch over, look after, or to guide. So let’s throw aside the boy and wolf for a sec, and touch on how shepherding (I think) fits in with stewardship.

When you work for someone else, you are assigned to a position to do a job that plays a part in the whole (the company). Whether your position is small or large, whether it holds a position over others or just a position within itself – you’ve been handed a position that serves the need of many, and not just yourself or your company. When you don’t do your job, you’re usually reprimanded or even terminated. This can result in other employers passing over you because you did your job poorly. It’s the same with relationships. I don’t think a relationship should ever consist of just one doing all the work to help maintain the relationship. Like with just about any relationship, it takes two to make it work – to help it remain healthy, and allow it to grow stronger and ground itself with deeper roots as time passes. So each part has the task of ensuring the relationship remains intact. This is part of shepherding a relationship, and part of being a good steward of one.

Going back to the boy who cried wolf… your reputation is a lot like this too. Throughout life most of us spend a large amount of time working and communicating with others. During these times people learn a lot about themselves and each other. It’s in these times that we harvest friendships, as well as reputations. Whether good or bad, reputations are one of the first things that begin to grow rapidly from an early age. I remember a girl in my kindergarten class that was… well, she had a tendency to be a bit unruly and mean to others. By the end of 1^st grade she had earned herself a reputation of being a bully. Her teachers knew it, we (us kids) knew it, and her parents surely knew it as she had to be picked up from school more times than you could count. Even when she had seemingly straightened up a few years later, those who went to school with her (sorry to say, myself included) couldn’t forget all the terrible things she had done to so many. No matter how many good things she had tried to do later on in an effort to “be kind” to others, her reputation for being a “school bully” remained, and even teachers who remembered what she was like, were leery of her because of that reputation in her K-2 years. Now, I was taught at an early age how important it was to forgive, and I personally was able to, but forgiveness does not mean that you put yourself in a position to get hurt again with the one who betrayed your trust the first time around. I have a lot to say about that, but I won’t go into it her because I could spend a hefty amount of blog space harping about that. And though some of us did forgive (though certainly didn’t forget) most continued to treat her rather badly, and it was wrong to do this, but the point here that I’m trying to make is that once you build a reputation it’s hard to change it. People change all the time, but sometimes changing the mindsets of others about you, is far harder. So in essence, your reputation is something that has to be formed and fashioned, taken care of, and passed on in an effort to allow it to grow and become not just a phase in your life, but an integrated part of your life that it not only becomes a way of life… but YOUR LIFE, period.

I don’t believe for a heart beat that there are people out there that *want* a reputation of being hard, cold, an addict, a liar, a thief, etc etc. A reputation of honesty, hard work, and generosity will get us a lot farther in life. And learning to be a steward and shepherd of not only our own lives but those of others around us, and the things given to us will make things a heck of a lot easier in how not only we look at life, but how we live our lives.

Later I’ll talk about the spiritual side of stewardship that directly ties in with the physical and worldly side of stewardship; and how they can’t be really separated.

Wowsers!

Okay, so I haven’t been on in oh….. 4 days, which was enough to drive me a tad batty!

Friday night my puter decided to kick the bucket, and I went a whole weekend dredging up old backup discs while awaiting new parts for my poor puter-puter.

Sooooo, the post I intended for over the weekend will be coming soon.

Mobo installs, software installs, file restores…. Life is splendid!

Stewardship

The idea of stewardship has been on my mind for several days now. For some reason I had even thought about avoiding this topic all together. Some reasons are more obvious than others, but when it came down to it and I had nothing else to write for the past few days, the only thing left nagging in my brain was this topic, so I thought it was about time to push past the nerves a bit, and blog it!

Before I go any further in talking about this, I figured we all need to know what stewardship is. In the most iconic definition of the word (being that the word itself) is: One who is a steward over something or someone. Doesn’t really help when you don’t know what the heck “steward” means!

There are a few definitions that fit the bill quite well for the term, in my opinion. The most used, simple, and universal definition is: The careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.

Now, looking at that, you can safely determine that the one doing the “careful and responsible management” is the steward. That, my friends, would be you and I. Us. Everyone!

Do you know that every day, all day, you are the steward of something? Our jobs, homes, vehicles, monies… they are all things that we are stewards over. If you work for someone else, you are a steward over that position (which means you are partly a steward of that company), and the service provided to your company’s clientele. If you are a teacher, you are a steward over someone else’s children. If you rent your home/apartment/whatever, you are the steward over that home, as it is not yours. Get that idea? Okay, cool… moving on.

So, we’re all stewards over something, but how does this apply spiritually? Well, there are some obvious answers to this, and if you are thinking I’m fixing to “go there,” well… you’re right. I will be. Soon. But I want to go further, as well.

I want to hit on things like our lives, our money, our homes, our cities, our children (OUR FUTURE)… and, our church body.

For the sake of my future posts on this, as I’m going to be talking on the spiritual side of stewardship, I’ve taken a lot of the definitions I’ve read and have fashioned a definition that I felt best fit what I am going to be talking about.

With all that said, the next several days I will be talking on the careful and responsible management of a heritage passed on from one to another in an effort to maintain the stability of one’s future and its inheritance.

Slightly cheesy, yea perhaps, but it’ll presumably work for the next few entries

‘Til next time!

GenX

Catch-a-fire

Okay, so today was sort of a long day. Our church chose today to be the day to celebrate Pentecost. So I ended up attending 2 worship services, one sermon, lunch, dinner, helped out this really nice elderly woman who was walking to the pharmacy in 100 degree heat (not cool!!!), and then I attended a special service that lasted a little over four hours. Yea, I was exhausted, but it was a good exhausted. I had basically been up since 5 this morning and didn’t get home until a few minutes before midnight. Needless to say, this entry is gonna be SHORT.

So anywho… there was an impartation of spiritual gifts, great time of fellowship and honoring God and specifically the Pentecost itself.

Usually when you sit in church, reggae music doesn’t pop in your head, however it did for me. Yea, I know, I’m weird. But, it wasn’t Matisyahu, but Tobymac’s “Catchafire” song (more rock than reggae since only like two stanzas incorporate it near the end). Anyways, it was the middle of the night service, everyone was just letting God do whatever He wanted to do basically, and the beat and song was pulsing through my brain so much so, that before I knew it, I was humming, head bobbing, and hands going. Then, of course, one of the elders looked at me and busted out laughing and I figured… maybe it was time to stop “dancing to my own tune,” literally!

Here’s a question (if anyone decides to answer that is LOL): Does anyone else celebrate Pentecost, and if so, when do you celebrate it? Or if you have a question about Pentecost, feel free to drop a comment or send me an email via the “About GenX” page.

‘Til next time….