Link Love
If ever I felt inclined to lament the lack of children, God never gave me time to do so. In response to every private, fervent pleading I've made before God, his answer has been a different door slammed open: a missions opportunity, a new writing assignment, a sudden book contract, an unexpected job, an unsought promotion, the chance to care for aging parents, a student needing extra help, another telling me I am her "true mother," or another taking my motherly advice to heart at last.
In a life spent moving from place to place, the predictability of landscapes both new and familiar has been a comfort, a well-worn bead to click against another through every iteration of hunger and praise. One of the many pangs of such constant motion is to leave each place both loving and mourning all you have come to know, and to go forward with five kinds of homesickness equally shared, the scent of new terroir on your skin and your spirit forever dogged by the genius loci endemic to each site.
Iām learning quickly that my privileges are my blind spots. I am a married white woman with a graduate education. I do not understand the plight of a poor single black mother in Memphis who worries how rent will be paid and how her children will eat. The evils of poverty and racial discrimination, as two examples, will remain generic evils for me until I seek out stories different from my own. I, too, must learn to listen if ever I am to participate most fully in the body of Christ.
We are socialized to think women talk more. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are hogging the floor when men are actually dominating. Linguists have concluded that much of what is popularly understood about women and men being from different planets, verbally, confuses "women's language" with "powerless language."
"We have to pay attention to detail and care for the contractors we work for," Yates says. "As a tradesperson, I don't know any other way to do that than by doing a really good job. We believe that God exists; therefore, the things we do and make now matter. The whole apprenticeship process is also a discipleship process."