So I know this is really late, but I've been meaning to write about Mother's day. I'm very happy that because God put this adorable little girl...
...into our family, I can celebrate Mother's day.
I guess the hard part about infertility is that it doesn't go away. If it were up to us, we would have had more kids join our family long ago! Maybe the pain of "secondary infertility" is lessened when you have one child, but it's still there. Theresa always talks about having a baby, and she prays for a brother or a sister, but apart from our prayers, there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
Having said that, prayer is powerful. All I have to do is look at her...
... and I remember that God did answer our prayers.
I love her so much and for me Mother's Day wasn't about me, but about the incredible blessing I have.
While we wait for God to answer our prayers, I suppose, Theresa's always got her cat -
 |
| Theresa and her baby - the cat |
... to whom she sings "rock a by baby", carries like a baby and teaches children's action songs (even clapping hands - poor cat!). And because she smiles 74% of the day while she's awake, any lingering sadness quickly dissipates.
Anyway, that isn't the main reason for this post. I particularly wanted to talk about Mother's Day here but I thought it'd been a while since I showed some pictures of our pikinini.
Two things happened on Mother's Day that I wanted to share because I guess it's good for mothers in Western Culture to see how other mother's live.
First story is that at our church on Mother's Day, the person preaching was talking about submission and how wives ought to submit to their husbands. I think he chose this topic in particular because recently one of the leaders of the women's group in our church approached our pastor because her husband, also a leader in our church, had been out late at night with other women, drinking, and then beating her. The pastor didn't really know what to do and didn't think it was such a bad thing. Domestic violence is terribly common here. 64% of women between the ages of 15 - 49 say they have been sexually or violently abused by a partner. The stats are terrible here. Sadly, I think the preacher thought the women ought to be put in their place. He said that if your husband is a drunk, beats you, wastes all the family income on alcohol, you need to tell him that you love him and you need to forget about all those things he does.
I'm not sure whether the preacher read the subsequent verses, you know, the ones about husbands loving their wives like Christ loved the church. Because you can't read a verse like that, remembering what Jesus' love drove him to do for us, and not squirm in your seat if you're the kind of husband that abuses his wife. I do obviously uphold the Bible about submission, but women in the Solomon Islands don't struggle with submission, they struggle with being abused!
The second story is that the day after Mother's Day one of the women who work here told me what her pastor preached on in their church. He got all the women up the front of the church and he said to the congregation, "I'm going to pray for these women. Men these women are precious to God. He loves them. He died for them. They are temples of the Holy Spirit. And men, you need to love your wife, care for her, look after her, treat her well, uphold her, teach your children to respect her. God loves these women and they are very precious to Him."
Then he prayed for the women.
And my friend told this to me like she was so astonished, like she was surprised at what he said. What? Women? precious to God? loved by God? Temples of the Holy Spirit? She almost couldn't believe it. It sounded too good to be true. She's one of those 64%, you could say, and the truth that the pastor spread that day was beautiful to her.
