Welcome to the April 18th edition of Faith & Life Lessons.
You will see this email full of tidbits from my week. My goal is simple. I hope that from how I live my life, you can find a thing or two that helps you as you try to live a life that matters. I am always trying to do one thing - make Christ-focused decisions in love, work, and life. And this was my week.
The Story of My Week
I have been working on a course that I planned to release this month.
I decided to share the name of the course with a few people for feedback.
One of the friends I shared it with gave me a motherload.
She asked me the kind of questions I typically would ask someone else.
It's funny that because I was the one working on developing the course, I completely forgot some of the typical filters necessary before putting something out there.
It reminds me of why I need accountability in my life. Accountability to other people gives me a better view of areas I have blind spots.
This is one of the reasons I try to have Growth Friends. One of the goals of such friendships is to give them the right to question my decisions and life choices.
They question me and offer their input.
Thank God for the blessing of such relationships.
Things I Learnt
1- I See Differently: Becoming a parent has altered my view of how I see other families.
It’s also improved how I respond to any parent with an issue on their mind.
During the week, a member of a couples’ group I’m on requested prayers for their baby.
He was going in for surgery with full anesthesia. It was not minor surgery.
I could feel the sense of fear which the parents might be going through as they wrote to us.
I prayed and prayed again on the day of the surgery.
I waited for a news update.
I was relieved when they posted that it went well. They even added a picture of him sleeping after the surgery.
Only a parent can feel deeply the concern another parent is going through over the health of a child.
And in communities like a couples’ group, we can pray passionately for each other’s cares.
I hope you have a community of people in the season of life that you are in and can pray with you because they feel as you feel.
Sometimes you need priests that feel your pain to communicate them deeply in prayer.
2-Pathways in the Spirit: one of our neighbors invited the family over for a barbecue. While we were there, our son did not eat. My wife eventually got him to eat a piece of chicken.
A funny thing happened when we got home. Not long afterward, our boy had drowned down at least 4 slices of bread.
We are pretty tight with the neighbors we visited with. Their son and our boy are the same age, same class and best friends.
So, it wasn't an unfamiliar space to him - he visited often with them.
This was not the first time. Our son would typically keep the hungry tummy till he gets home.
As my wife and I talked about it, I realized this was exactly what my parents said about me when I was a munchkin.
I wouldn't eat at any place we visited at. I waited till I got home.
Maybe it's DNA, maybe it's not.
But I do know that life pathways are created by people who live before us. And we follow after them as we come into the same fork-road and make the same choices.
This is usually the case for parents and children. Children end up following similar paths which their parents carved and lived out.
It's the spiritual legacy that follows after the lives have been lived.
Abraham dug wells which were part of his spiritual legacy that Isaac and Jacob came to as part of their spiritual and life journeys.
I hope I live every day to create spiritual pathways that my children and their children's children can find life blessings through as they come to follow them.
Postscript
May you walk this new week in the joy of the Lord. May you make choices that create a spiritual legacy that blesses anyone who chooses to follow in them. Amen.
Tata,
Tola
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