My college friend Dana Gage, a pastor’s wife near Nashville, has a very good blog called Garlands of Grace that Chrissy and I frequent. I commend it to you for it’s excellent perspective. The postings and themes are God-centered and deal primarily with topics of parenting and wifehood. We think you’ll enjoy Dana’s takes. With her permission, I’ve reprinted her most recent article below. I hope that you make it a part of your regular blog reading.
Closing the Generation Gap
Today I drove 45 minutes on winding roads to visit my dear friend, Mrs. Jeannine Stewert. It’s a long trip with two preschoolers, but they love rummaging around “Miss Jeannine”’s stylish log cabin, inspecting her assorted vintage trinkets, pulling out her tin cans of toys for little boys, and dashing every half hour to the coo-coo clock. Miss Jeannine freely dispenses cookies and doesn’t mind if little boys swing on her porch swing while watching the hummingbirds and butterflies.
Miss Jeannine and her husband, Carl, much like their home, are beautiful, but they represent a way of living that no longer exists. They both admit they have trouble even understanding the young people at our church. Miss Jeannine is almost 70; she never went to college, she married young, had four children, and never worked outside her home. Times were hard; they had very little money, but Carl would work two jobs before asking his wife to help support the family. Even now Miss Jeannine spends her days gardening, canning, housekeeping, and reading. At church she sings in the choir, plays the piano, and teaches my son’s Cubbies class. She doesn’t have a cell phone and she prefers writing personal notes instead of using email.
The younger gals at church (myself included) have very little in common with Miss Jeannine. Most all of them went to college, married a little later, waited even longer to have children, and most help their husbands financially support the family. We don’t have gardents, and we use cell phones to talk, take pictures, and send emails.
As Miss Jeannine and I sat in her wingback chairs, sipping peach tea, she spoke lovingly of our young ladies. She’s afraid they work too hard at too many things; so many of them are tired all the time, she says. And, she doesn’t understand why we have a hard time understanding how fulfilling and rewarding being a mother and making a home can be. Though she’s very “traditional,” she’s definitely not old-fashioned, and there’s nothing prudish about her. She enjoys beautiful art and music, and even though she’s a loyal helper to her husband, she has her own opinions!
So how can Miss Jeannie, and older ladies like her, teach us younger girls, when we have so little in common? Did Paul’s inspired instruction for women teaching women not take into consideration the 21st century “generation gap”? Even if we our lives will not exactly mirror the lives of our mothers and grandmothers, we can still learn from them about what it means to be a woman and a mother. Our homes and vehicles may change, but the instructions to guide the home, show hospitality, love husbands, and love children have not changed.
I believe that a significant way for older women to “teach” the younger women is to simply give them encouragement. Voices at work, from friends, and from the television, discourage women. We’re constantly being told that we need to live self-fulfilling lives–we need someone older to tell us that’s a lie. We need someone to remind us that we will be old one day and that we need to be cultivating “inner” beauty if we want to be as beautiful as Miss Jeannine one day!
A few words of encouragement can go a long way to helping a young mother or a single working girl at your church. If teaching and “mentoring” is not your strong point, then start by finding someone to encourage. Tell a single mom that you appreciate her bringing her children to church. Send a note to a homeschool mom and tell her that she is doing a great work for God’s Kingdom. Get to know a single gal and remind her of her valuable place in your church community. Miss Jeannine asked me what she could do to help the young women at our church. “Pray for us,” I said, and “encourage us!”
