talking to myself

Have you ever given advice to someone or tried to encourage a friend, only to realize later that the words you spoke were precisely the words you yourself needed to hear?

It happens to me a lot.

In the most recent occurrence, I was chatting to a friend who is about to relocate to a different city with her husband and three small children. When I asked her how she is feeling about the upcoming move, she was a bit hesitant. She admitted to being worried about how the kids would adjust, how life would be different for them in such a new and unfamiliar place.

I tried to encourage her with the fact that even if they are in a new place, her role as a wife and mother remains the same. No matter where they are living, she can still maintain stability for her family by carrying out the same tasks with the same love she has demonstrated all along and that in itself will be a great source of comfort to her family and a way to ease the transition.

I should tell myself the same.

The 'discouraging news' I referred to in the last post is related to the physical place in which I will be carrying out my duties as wife and mother in the coming year or more. While I had hoped and anticipated it would be somewhere else, this 'somewhere else' does not seem to be in the Lord's plan for us, at least not in the next twelve to eighteen months.

So while I fight the temptation to be discouraged and frustrated, and while I battle to get my mind to shift backwards across and ocean and an equator, I must remember that the physical place is not the 'be all and end all.'

No matter where we are, my role remains the same. I am to love my husband and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to my husband, according to Titus chapter two. All things that I fail at miserably with each day, but all things that are not dependent on a particular setting. With the help of God, they can be done anywhere.

No matter where I am living, as a mother of three, I am to train up my children in the way they should go, so that in the end they will not depart from it, as Proverbs 22:6 promises. I am to take the truths of Deuteronomy chapter six and impress them on my children, to talk about them when we sit at home and when we walk along the road and when we lie down and when we get up. Again, tasks I fail at miserably, but tasks that matter not in which home we are sitting or on which road we are walking, or where it is that I lie down or where I am when I get up. The commands remain the same.

Somebody please remind me of this the next time I want to complain.