Tub or beyond?
April 6th, 2009 Tim Posted in SevenLakes Info |
(Nancy) The current CrossPoint life lesson series is called Beyond the Tub. It’s a call to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zones (”the tub”), for the cause of Christ. What’s your story?: life in the tub, life beyond the tub or somewhere in between?
This series is particularly timely for my family. My husband, Tim, mentioned some of the reasons when he gave the life lesson on March 22nd at the Seven Lakes campus. For me personally, one of the areas God seems to be calling me to risk considering life outside my comfort zone is exploring the possibility of making “home building” my full time vocation. Wow: “seems”, “risk”, “considering”, “exploring”, “possibility”, those are a lot of qualifying words! On the one hand, our kids are 13 and nearly 11 years old, seems like a weird time for mom to consider coming home. On the other hand, I can’t get a certain phrase out of my head. Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church did a sermon series on the book of Proverbs a few years ago. In one of the sermons, “Women as Home Builders”, Driscoll discusses the important and Biblical role of women to build a home where one’s husband, children and neighbors are ministered to. He mentions many areas of home building including finance, instruction, nutrition, aesthetics, hospitality, fellowship, and evangelism. He makes a great case for it being a crucial Kingdom ministry: http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/proverbs/women-as-homebuilders. The phrase I mentioned is regarding women going “back to work” after their children are grown “to do something of real significance”. He does not think this is sinful but invites women to consider the eternal significance of ministering to unchurched neighbors and/or to younger Christian women, the latter in a “Titus 2″ fashion. He reminds women that millions of dollars, generations of legacy and, potentially, scores of people who don’t know Christ are in the hands of Christian women who make home building their primary vocation.
When I think about this possibility of going beyond my safe tub, I am both excited, a little fearful, and woefully untrained. It wasn’t that my Mom did a bad job, she was and is a great mom; it was more that I wasn’t really interested. I could live in that childhood regret or live in the regret of things I could have done differently when my children were little OR I could prayerfully seek the Lord’s guidance in going beyond the tub.
As we have heard in the life lessons and read in the Beyond the Tub book, there are many stories of what God has done and is doing through CrossPoint and there are many more stories and generations to come. I invite you to seek life beyond the tub.
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