Women's Equip - June 14, 2012

Dear sisters in Christ
 
It has been a wonderful time here in Boston.  I so enjoy the exchange of ideas around developing women as disciples of Jesus Christ.  I’ll write more about books we’ve read and the insights I’ve gained in the next weeks.  This week I’d like to share with you a poem Jane Toleno wrote a couple weeks ago.  We have such talented, God-gifted women and I am so thankful you are willing to share your gifts with one another.  Enjoy!
 
In This Purple Time of Year – 5 2012
 
Lilac Season is intense and short; it is a deep purple, surprising mystery. And how do I, a woman who has lived with blindness her entire life, understand, relate to, even care about the color purple?
 
The partial answer? I listen every day. I hear pleasure or privilege, consternation or calamity or judgment in people’s voices when they speak about how skin, hair and eye color pops or pales because of how That Shade matters. I hear how color affects lives; whether people of various skin colors have or have not. And, much to my dismay, experience shows me that people who see find it all too easy to exclude other sensory ways of seeing and knowing. Often, their eyes focus so much on the colors they see they miss engaging with all the rest which is so richly connected and visible for me.
 
So, may we spend time together … may we dig a way through the divide of what you can see and I cannot? Let’s delight in filling today’s art plate with what you see and what my senses say is so.
 
I am astonished by people’s reverential descriptions of sunrises, sunsets, earth, water or sky; I yearn for such connections. Then I celebrate how, as my mother used to say and, when asked, others have learned to since, “Jane, this color purple matches…” And she might fill in the blank by saying, “Those deep purple lilacs are the late summer sky color just before it turns into night.”
 
In the mystery of this deep purple lilac season that you see and I cannot, I experience the infusion of all life with heirloom lilac perfume. For once, so much sweetness –it would be too much at any other time of year -- does not cloy. This fragrance offers certain hope. I believe the smell-it’s so convincing. I want to be like the lilacs that come back year after year … faithful to come again in my time.
 
And, with a delicate yet distinctive aroma, I want to speak of hope.
 
Hand in hand with lilac time scents, here where I live now all life is full of the Swing Hi, Swing Low, Back and Forth riffs of frog and toad songs rolling out from rippling wetland grasses. I hear this rhythmic give and taking. It is an orchestra of wetland critter sounds which pushes up and out, crests, drops back and rests, then rises again. This concert is a slow-motion rocking of a timeless great porch swing from dawn to dark, dark to dawn, and dawn to dark to dawn again.
 
And, after swinging in the hammock full of lilac time, after understanding and daring to express my hope, I lie down on the grass in the center of the purple fragrance. I feel earth turn toward evening and spin toward morning while I rest and think. I discover in me a fine hope growing. I am amazed by it; it is fresh and right and good. I acknowledge a giver of life. And in so doing become new. Yes, Lilac Season is intense and short; it is a deep purple, surprising mystery. It occurs to me, this time is a celebration of shared being and knowing.
 
Thank you, Jane, for sharing.  I’m reminded of the words of Jesus in Matthew 6 when He encourages us to consider the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, yet God clothes them in splendor greater than King Solomon’s splendor.  So we  don’t need to worry about what we’ll wear or eat or drink because God knows we need these things.  “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
 
If you would like to get serious about seeking God’s kingdom I would encourage you to get involved in a discipleship small group.  We have 25 women guides  eager to walk with you through Discipleship Essentials, a great primer on the basics of Christian faith.  I hope you’ll either respond to this e-mail or sign up on the website or in church on Sunday.  Some of my most significant spiritual growth happened in a small group of women in Hudson, WI.  Won’t you join a D4D group today?  It will change your life.
 
Next week I want to share with you some of the girl child issues we’ve been looking at here at Gordon-Conwell.  I hope you’ll consider clicking on the link on the right side of this page to sponsor one of our Tanzanian orphans.  The matching funds make this super affordable right now!!! You have the power to change a girl’s life forever.  Step up, women of God!
 
Happy to be coming home and back in the office- Sonja Dixon