The Hard Work of Building Bridges
Maybe it’s time we suffered together. Maybe it’s time we stopped wielding our privileges and started leveraging them for others.
Dorina Lazo Gilmore is a mama to three active girls and currently teaches at California State University, Fresno. When she isn’t chasing her girls around, she loves to write, cook and create. She’s published three books for children, a volume of poetry and blogs at www.AlohaGilmores.blogspot.com. She also shepherds mamas as the Coordinator of MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) at The Bridge Church in Fresno.
Maybe it’s time we suffered together. Maybe it’s time we stopped wielding our privileges and started leveraging them for others.
This is the difficulty. We learn to edit. We start to look around and compare. We recognize other great artists, and we feel the weight of expectations. We squelch the creative for the practical.
God is a Master Artist. He reimagines and refashions and redesigns our most tragic life circumstances into His own masterpiece.
It’s time for us Christians to live and breathe and speak and act like we are Christmas people. We need to believe in the Hope brought by our Christ-King and fight for it.
Rather than a pat-myself-on-the-back moment, this was a stoop-lower opportunity. I was acutely aware that feeding Mary or offering someone dignity through a smile or learning their name or advocating for the homeless is really not about charity or me changing the world as much as it is about obedience to the gospel.
When I spoke my wedding vows, I never dreamed those words – “in sickness and health until death do us part” – would mean burying him 11 years later.
I write today for the children and mothers and wives and others who will find Father’s Day bittersweet.
God had faithfully prepared me for that devastating season of losing my love, the daddy of my three daughters. I already had learned the transforming wonder of counting gifts.
My friend and I signed up for the 10k. We figured we could do anything for 6.2 miles – even if it meant we had to hike, walk or crawl. We heard the scenery at the San Joaquin River Gorge Trail (just 45 minutes from my home in Central California) was breathtaking. I longed to try something new. How hard could it be?
Let’s just say it was hard. Maybe the hardest race I’ve ever run in my life.
Worship is an opportunity to make our day, our life into a prayer. What I discovered this month is that worship is not limited to formal choirs and Sunday singing. In fact, worship is so much more than music.