Motherhood + Spiritual Discipline Part 1 Show Notes
Kyrie: If you follow me on social media, you may or may not remember that last fall I led a group of women through an Ecclesiastes Bible study created by Kris Murphy. We did this program for, I think it was 13 weeks, then at the conclusion, I had a little tea for us to celebrate completing our Bible study! At is, I had my friend Ms. Suzie come speak to us. I met Miss Susie at the community forum I did at Living Acts Church last February with my husband about my testimony and along with a Q&A about homosexuality in the church and how to respond to it, etc., etc..
I went to that church on a Sunday before the event to share with the congregation what was going on, and if anybody had any questions, they could meet me. There was a older woman in attendance who shared that she had a daughter who fell away from any sort of faith, lives in California, and hadn’t talked to her daughter in like, 20 years, and she's a lesbian and she's does witchcraft, and she's got a pentagram tattoo…
She just felt so encouraged because she was saying how she had just never believed that there could be a way her daughter would turn from that sin, and she had never heard of somebody leaving the LGBTQ+ community for Jesus before. I then I show up at her church, and I think she had had just like some altercation with the Lord that previous week or that weekend that had already kind of caught her attention and then meeting me at church, she just felt like the Lord was really with her. So Ms. Suzie came to my event, and then we just kept texting. I just really enjoyed Ms. Suzie. I remember at first when I first met her, like, her testimony and her story, it just was like, there's no way— you know, sometimes you meet people were their life is like a book.
So I'm not even gonna lie, I went and Google, searched everything Ms. Suzie told me about from the hippies in Colorado that she used to mission to…I know, I'm such a creeper.
I even found her daughter in California. She said her daughter had blocked her on all social media. She hadn't seen a picture of her in years. I found her on Facebook and on Instagram, and she had the pentagram tattoos and even talked about her life growing up. Ms. Suzie homeschooled her kids. She was a single mom. That's her story. So, the daughter, even online, talked about how she was raised in a Protestant family, how she was homeschooled, and she was this, and she was that. So I was like, okay, Ms. Suzie's spitting facts. Her life sounds like a movie, and it is 100% not a movie. So, I can trust this woman to speak into my life. She just has a simple, but magnificent faith. Ms. Suzie is in her 70’s, so she's older, so I asked her to come speak to the girls at my Bible study to do just kind of like a final recap encouragement/ inspiration.
I just felt then, and I feel now that motherhood and spiritual discipline is a must. It is so easy to put your faith on the back burner as a young mom, as a new mom, as a seasoned mom, and not pour into it. I want to emphasize how pivotal it is to have spiritual discipline as a Christian mother no matter what stage of motherhood you're in, no matter what stage of your faith you're in. You have to be in the Bible to make this motherhood thing work. And I'm not speaking from the experience of not being in the word as a mom.
I've had days where I haven't read my Bible and I forget, but it's not like I've ever had a season of not walking with the Lord in my motherhood journey. I've basically faithfully been walking with Jesus for almost ten years now, and for me, I cannot think of a day without calling out to the Lord. I do miss being in the word rarely, once or twice in a week. I am doing the chronological Bible through the year plan and I've been doing that…I think this is my third or fourth time I cannot remember.
I do it every day, and it's become habit that I read my Bible or listen to it every day. I'll say the weekends used to be when I would forget to read my Bible, and then last year it just hit me out of nowhere that by Monday I would be like, oh, I have two days to catch up on. How did I miss two days? And I'm like, oh, Saturday and Sunday I didn't read. Why would I do that? Like out of all times, the weekend is the times that I really need to depend on the Lord. Because you're out of routine. Everybody's home. There's usually a lot to do. You're running errands. You're running like you're you're feeling like you're running thin and, uh, or stretching yourself. Then, um, what better time to sit down and. And be with the Lord on a Saturday morning is when you should have all the time to sit down and and read your Bible. You know it's the weekend. What else am I doing? I'll watch the movies. I'm hanging out. I'm cleaning so I can make all this time on a Saturday to do everything else other than spend time with the Lord. That's so backwards. And it just was like, I just wasn't even thinking about it. Guys. Like, it wasn't even like I was supposed to be like, I'm not doing this. So I I've done it all week. I don't want to do it anymore. I just genuinely it just totally escaped my mind. Um, and so then I started reading the Bible on Saturday and on Sunday before church. Yeah. Even though I'm going to be at church reading the Bible. So more like Sabbath day is the day that I should be spending even more time with him on his day.
Beyond that, there's not been a chunk of time in my walk of motherhood that I have not sought out for the Lord's wisdom in raising my children or growing my family with my husband. I've just been fascinated by the older generations. I'm always really inquisitive of parenting styles of old. I think there's a lot of wisdom to gain from our elders. The Bible also tells us that we should have a respect for our elders, for their wisdom, for their life experiences, for what the Lord has brought them through because they've gone through so much more than we have. They've been on this planet longer than we have. They've seen more than we have.
Ms. Suzie: “ The first one {spiritual discipline} is listening to me. That's a discipline for myself. You can choose your own, but that is {mine} and like I said earlier, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. It's my listening to the word that really and disciplining myself to always be hearing. I have found that reading my Bible out loud makes a difference to me. I don't always do it, but I find that there's something about my ears audibly taking in the word. I often ask my husband to read the word while I'm fixing a meal or something, and go ‘open up to, um, Revelation chapter three. I want to hear that again.’ And just something simple like that so I can hear it, because faith will rise up in me (Romans 10:17).
The second one is study I was telling Kyrie that this morning around 3 a.m. 1 woke up. I don't often have dreams or anything, but I was having a recollection, which I don't know if that's a dream, but I was cognizant of it, obviously, and it woke me up and it was of me with my first born child, because I knew I was going to be with young mothers and I prayed about that before I went to bed.
But I was there nursing my oldest child, and I could never really seem to find time alone with the Lord. I lived in an apartment. There's a lot of noise in the neighborhood, and my child's dad was noisy in the house and things like that. So I would use the time during the night when I was nursing my baby to be alone with the Lord. There was no distraction, no traffic, nothing. I was recollecting that I was nursing my baby, Michelle, and I was holding my Bible because it was a small Bible, a small print. I could hold that and nurse the baby at the same time. I was reading that and something had quickened in my spirit and moved me. I had been brought to tears by the presence of the Lord.
(In the dream) as I was nursing her, the tear rolled down my breast and into her mouth along with the milk. I prayed into that, praying for whoever would be here today that the legacy and the heritage of who you are in Christ would go forth into their future life and to the next generations until Jesus comes.
I would say that it was a big struggle for me to find time to study in the word. I had to make it happen. Like ‘Okay, the kids are down for a nap,’ and I may only have, like, 20 minutes, half an hour or sometimes an hour. I'm going to stop everything, because the temptation would be, okay, ‘I gotta do this. I gotta clean that. I gotta cook that.’
They won't remember that in years to come. But who I am is in Christ. And the attitude of heart and what's flowing from my intimacy with father, that's what they will hold on to. And that's what was being taught to me by the women who are older than me in the little fellowship that I met up with.
They won't remember that in years to come. But who I am is in Christ. And the attitude of heart and what's flowing from my intimacy with father, that's what they will hold on to.
The next one is prayer, which I got to just say that I've had many seasons of prayer, where it was intense and I was desperate, and I was hungry and thirsty after righteousness. I've also had… just to be flat out honest about this- like the dark night of the soul.
When I heard Kyrie speak, I was going through a dark night of the soul because I felt like I had prayed for my oldest daughter who had been molested by her own dad. Not the man I'm married to, no less. You know. She had gotten into the lesbian world and cut me off. It had been 24 years since she'd done that. I got to the point where I never hear from her. I don't know what she's doing. No one will tell me. And the agony in my heart was so deep. For years I couldn't just be around other women who were grandmothers like myself, because they'd be talking about their children and their grandchildren, and I had nothing to say because when the oldest one (who was the leader) when she would do something, then the other two would follow. They all did that. They're 44, 45 and 46 right now. I felt like a failure. Like if I'd only prayed hard enough. If I had only known the magic words, so to speak, of what to pray or how to pray, then somehow my kids would be in the kingdom right now. That was all I was thinking about. I wasn't thinking about God just wanted to be with me because he delights in me, and he wanted to enjoy me and me to enjoy him. I felt like a failure. Like I got to the point where I was deceived into thinking, why pray? God already knows everything anyway. Why ask him anything? He already knows. These were all deceptions that came because of my fear, doubt, unbelief. And I will add pride because pride— it can be being pompous about yourself and bragging, but it can also be giving up and being shy. That's pride too. I don't want anybody to see myself. I don't want to be transparent.
I had always said to the Lord, ‘Show me, show me just one woman who's delved into the lesbian world and come out seeking Jesus. I want to see it in person. Not on the radio, not in a book. I want to see it.’ I was crying out to the Lord two weeks before she spoke. She didn't know that when I heard the hope and the joy that she had, something melted in me. It's possible, it can happen. It started a whole journey.
I have a good foundation in my faith. The very first book that I got, I was pregnant with my oldest daughter when I got baptized, and this was the book that the guy who baptized me, Vern, Frank, gave to me. He'd written this book. I was 19 years old. This was over my head. I could barely grasp it, and I would look at every once in a while and go, oh! I can’t handle it, man. Too much. Just like it was a mystery to me.
All these older people, they were in their 40s. It's like ancient. It was such a mystery (to me). How did they become so holy and godly? I went and visited one of them one day, and I had brought some lunch with me to share with her. She was a lady who taught me how to bake bread, Joanna. And I said, ‘Hey, I brought you some food.’
She goes, ‘Oh, I'm in a fast.’
Like what? I didn't understand that concept, even though as a Catholic, my mother and father would not let us eat after dinner on Saturday night until after we'd had communion on Sunday morning. I said, ‘ How long have you been doing that?” She said, ‘Well, that's just between the Lord and I don't worry about it. You can have your lunch.’
It was part of her lifestyle. And I wasn't putting two and two together. That the reason why she had a kingdom mindset is because she was telling me things…as we're learning how to knead the bread, she
said, ‘ What time did you get up this morning?’ I didn't have children yet, I was pregnant.
She said, ‘ Well, your baby is going to wake up and cry. Do you really want to be waking up to your baby with just that cry?’
I didn't understand what she was saying. She was telling me, you get up before your baby gets up and set your clock, so to speak. And I've never used an alarm clock. She said, just tell the Lord you want to wake up at 5 a.m. if your baby gets up at six. I thought she was crazy. I didn't put two and two together. The mystery of why she was so kingdom minded, why she was so Christ centered, why she was always abiding in the realm of the spirit was because of these things. I didn't get it.
Years of reflection and looking back I did start doing that. I would wake up and she told me what to do. She said, you get up and you drink a lot of water to cleanse yourself out. You need a lot of water and you need living water, and you need to not eat anything until you're in the word. She's telling this, but I thought, I'm going to have to eat a lot of food when I'm nursing. You need to drink a lot of water to make that milk. And then when you do eat and you do break your fast, make sure it's wholesome fruits and vegetables and proteins. I started learning from her. The disciplines alike. She would say things to me like, ‘You want to limit these foods and have more of these foods,’ and teaching me about nutrition. And it's not that my mother and father didn't give us good nutrition. It's just the balance of things. And I learned from these women. I can remember their names- Etta. Joanna. Caroline. Juanita.
I was sick a lot and these women would come to my house and cook things that I'd never eaten before like lentil soup, make me herbal teas that I never had before. They would clean the house and put the baby in my arms and say, ‘you do the baby. We'll do some cleaning and cooking and fold laundry and things to help you. And here, take some of this because, uh, that's wholesome for you to build your health.’ Some kind of dandelion green or something? So I was learning from them, uh, a lot about spiritual nutrition and physical nutrition in a balance. It took years for me to understand that that was me being discipled. I didn't have that in my vocabulary. Um, the whole fasting thing, I dreaded it. It's like fast. I mean, skip a meal…two meals or three days or seven days. How could I do that? But then once I did. I thought, I never want to eat again. You know what I mean? It was just too wonderful. And y'all are not in the season of fasting. Food. It's okay. The Lord will probably have you fast. Something else- social media or whatever the current thing is. But he will always urge us to fast. I think that I didn't know I've gone through seasons where I didn't know how to have a quiet time. I spent a whole lot of time, doing more Bible studies.
You fill in the blank. You listen to somebody blab in a loud voice and fill in the blank and turn the page and fill in the blank, and look in your Bible a couple of times and fill in the blank and read a bunch of stuff. And that was your quiet time and left me feeling like wood, hay and stubble. There wasn't any real life in it. I was doing busy work, kind of like the think and do workbooks when you're in second grade, busy work so the teacher could grade the papers, you know what I mean? And it's what it felt like. And I thought, well, that's not how you do it. And so I decided, oh, I'll just go back to what I know the older ladies taught me.
This is not my first Bible, but it's my oldest Bible and I always encourage people to find a version, not a paraphrase, but a version that you really love and stick with it, at least for your intimate time with the Lord, quiet time just to be with Jesus. Because if you get too heavy into, like, looking in concordance and I'll look in this version, that version, that version, or now with the phone scrolls, scroll scrolling, reading with the phone, you get your mind too distracted and scattered.
I went back to was what one of these ladies showed me in this book called, “Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ,” by Madam Young. This woman lived in the 1500s in France, and she was very beautiful. She was raised in a very worldly way to be like a courtesan of sorts. With that mindset her life was centered around finding her suitors so she can marry into the right families type of thing. It was Louis, the 14th, Court of Versailles, and all the decadence of that period that she was born into a family like that, and she became a believer. I can't tell you exactly how that all happened, but she cried out to the Lord that she didn't want to be beautiful anymore, because she was tired of everyone looking to her because of her beauty. And she wanted to be humble before the Lord. And she got smallpox. It pocked her face and destroyed her beauty. And she glorified the Lord that he'd answered her prayer. How humbling is that? I mean, would I asked for that? Probably not! I'm worried about this that that I got on my nose right now. I don't think that I would have prayed that. But out of that mindset and that heart, she was concerned about the people that she was drawing because of her intimacy with Jesus. There was an anointing on her, and she was drawing people from all walks of life around her who wanted to go visit Madame King. She'd been rejected by her husband's family, because it was an arranged marriage. She had rejection from her mother in-law. Her husband had other women. It was horrible life like that. I can't remember what else was going on in her life. All I know is that she wanted to teach a very simple way of how to have time alone with the Lord.
And it all boils down to, the lectio divina (this is before or right leading up to when this book was written).Martin Luther and everything that he put on the wall, you know, on the door and everything... I don't want to go there…I'll get too deep. So the lectio divina. Here it is:
Read a portion of Scripture. Reflect on that portion of Scripture and go deep. Don't try to read chapters or chapters…I'm not saying you couldn't get into depth by reading the genealogy of Methuselah, because you could. If you looked up every single name and what it meant, you would find something. But I don't tend to go there. I tend to go more to the Psalms and the Proverbs in Isaiah. The Gospels- take a portion, reflect. You're going to go deep, meditate. And ask the Lord to just speak to you and get quiet. Then, you're going to respond by praying out what you just read in application to what's currently rolling through your heart. Then you know you're done with that time period. When a baby cries, when the mail comes or somebody knocks on the door or something like that, or you have to prepare dinner, you know, there's things that end it all, but try to end in an attitude of rest in God's presence.
That is all for part one! Stay tuned, because part two will come soon! Make sure you listen to the episode here!
