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illian Mae Downs Cole was born in the 1890s. Raised in a tiny town in rural northern Maine, she lost sisters, a brother, her parents and her husband … all by the time she’d reached her 50s. Natalie Estelle Bartlett Greer was born in 1917. She never drove a car, never owned a home, and was widowed with six young children in her early 40s. She worked as a waitress, walking the two miles to and from her job every day for more than 27 years. The legacies these women left were void of wealth — at least the kind equated today with inheritances. Instead they bequeathed legacies richly embedded with respect for diligence and perseverance, strength and grace.
Their deep-rooted Christian faith anchored them and is evident today in the values they passed down. I should know. Lillian was my great-grandmother, and Natalie was my paternal grandmother. They were the sources of my Christian foundation. I strive to pass their — and my own — values on to my own children.
A mother of five, I fear for the uncertainty of my children’s futures. Knowing the option for a good education exists for each of them provides little security in a world of violence, laziness, and dying morality. Integrity has fallen by the wayside. Ask young people today to define the word, and many cannot. Ask those who can to identify a person with integrity, and you may find yourself questioning their ability to judge character.
As people today grow farther away from God and his church and nearer to the lure of bright lights and fast money, they seem to believe they have freed themselves from burdens suffered by the conventional set. Those who emerge scarred and broken need only search their souls and their histories for examples of strength and prosperity. When we lay aside all material wealth and seek prosperity of heart and mind, we often imagine those who have gone before us. A need for comfort sends us back to places from our childhood that conjures images of tranquility and security. At the root of these memories lie the caregivers, the healers of our illnesses and sorrows, the strongest part of anything that grows.
At the root of everything is the Lord. He is the nurturer and sustainer of all life. He is the force behind the strong Christian women in our pasts. Examine their characters closely, and you will find their hearts and minds were centered in the Lord.
The hard-working women from our past have not left us. They are deep within our roots. Grown and sown and reaching depths and heights unknown to us yet, they remain forever planted in our souls.
| The women in our past are deep within our roots. |
Why, then, don’t more of us seek the truth and wisdom described in those verses in our prayers? Are we afraid its language is antiquated? We need to look beyond the eloquence of words to the core of their meaning. The truth is the truth. Flowered or complicated or elegantly dressed, the underlying implication remains intact. Use the head and hands of a hard-working woman, and you will dig and toil until the rubble is cleared away and honesty rises to the surface. Your prayers will be answered God’s way.
I write, I raise my family, I honor my husband, and I worship the Lord. In my mind, these things are not extraordinary. They are labors of love, each and every one of them. But sadly, to some women, they are a foreign concept. Their days and nights of striving for excellence in areas where excellence remains virtually undefined will allow them to achieve temporary rewards. Eventually, a yearning to return to basics will tug at them from places within themselves they have long since forgotten. A tangible need for goodness and purity will pull at their heart. An undefined space requires filling.
The dictionary’s definition of “fulfillment” parallels satisfaction. One cannot achieve satisfaction without completing hard work. Some of the hardest work we’ll ever do involves admitting to ourselves that our path may not be the right one. Changing courses and steering ourselves toward what appears unattainable is most difficult as we swerve to avoid the edges of cliffs and detours along the road.
Our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers of days gone by had life, in essence, strategically simplified. Yes, their labor was different from what we see as work today, their assets fewer by present standards, and their efforts sometimes completely unnoticed. But how different is that really from our lives today?
Read the chapter in Proverbs about the hard-working woman. Read translation after translation, and hear the very same message of truth, toil, and improvisation. My beloved grandmother died on December 12, 1999. At her funeral my then 17-year old daughter read from the Book of Proverbs about the praises of the hard-working woman. It not only honored and accurately described my grandmother, it served almost as a rite of passage.
I learned so much from my grandmother. I’ve worked to ensure that I have laid a firm foundation from which my own daughters and sons will grow. The moral is unchanging. I am thankful for the examples set before me by my great-grandmother and my grandmother. I pray for wisdom so I may pave the way for my children to learn from a hard-working woman.
Are you praying for this wisdom as you raise your children, thus creating memories for those future times when they may need to return to the basics?
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