I recently read a wonderful post by Randy Elrod titled In Search of Heroes – Where Are The Female Mentors.  You can read this and his other fantastic blog entries at http://www.randyelrod.com.  His posts always make me think.  This particular one also made me respond.  I ended my response with a the statement, “I don’t know why women feel they are too busy to be more than friends.”   I went back to his post again today to read some of the other responses and the last line of mine hit me squarely in the chest, why do I pretend to be too busy to be more than a friend.

I have a few – a very few – very close friends.  Those friendships are held close to my heart and I cherish every moment spent with these women, whether in person or on the phone.  Age isn’t part of the equation in my friendships, neither is status or economic situation.   I can’t even explain what brings this little group together other than our mutual love for Jesus Christ and our off the wall sense of humor.  When one of us hurts, we all hurt… so pretty much we are always hurting, but we always manage to laugh til we cry when we are together.  That’s how we ‘self-medicate’, because after all, laughter does good like a medicine… These women are more than just friends to me.

I also have a larger group – thanks to Facebook a much larger group – of women that I love and communicate with.  I cheer them on and chuckle with them, and I call them friends, but what is the dynamic in this?  I do truly love these women.  A lot of them are friends from my childhood.  Some of them are women I would never have gotten the chance to know at all if it weren’t for social media.  But do I, or even can I make a difference in the lives of these women?  Will we ever be more than friends?

Randy was talking about mentoring.  There is a vast need for mentoring among females and not just for young women, but for women at all stages of life.  We need to come along side each other and say… “I’ve been where you are, let me help you through this.”   We try to do it all, don’t we?  I’m a good one for buying books about the stages I’m in.  When Larry got sick I bought every book I could find… but I was so busy with everything that was going on that I had zero time to read the stupid things.  They all got donated after he died.   I’ve been friends with young women and continue to be.  It’s nothing formal, but they know I’m here and they can come hang out or call or email or whatever whenever they need me.  Having 4 sons, I love this!  If they wanted something more formal, I would be open to that.  But I’ve never thought of it as mentoring until I read Randy’s blog.  I’m not a hero, but I think there is some untapped hero in each of us that we need to share with each other.

I challenge you ladies, this week…. find one woman to reach out to and say, “I’ve been there, let me help you through this.”  Let’s be more than just friends, o.k.?

This is an older post that I wrote about two years ago.  January 24th is also the anniversary of the day that Larry and I met in Casper, Wyoming at a Corrosion Control Conference.  It’s been two years since the accident and 16 years since the day we met and yet both days seem like yesterday….

We discovered that my husband’s tumor had begun to grow back when he had a grand Mal seizure while driving us home from his parent’s house on January 24, 2009. The seizure started on County Farm Rd at the entrance to Pearl Lake. Larry’s right arm flew up and back, his head jerked back to the right and his face became very distorted. I could hear Larry try to tell me something, it sounded like, “okay.” I told Larry to pull over and hit the brake, instead his right foot pressed down fully onto the gas. I yelled repeatedly for him to hit the brake, but he couldn’t respond. He had lost consciousness, his eyes were rolled back, and his mouth was foamy.

Our seven-year-old son, Noah, was in the back seat. I could hear him screaming, “I’m scared! I’m scared!” We were headed toward a T-intersection across a highway/main street of Sheridan, MI, at 8:20-ish on a Saturday night, with the gas floored. My normal reaction to anything that I consider a crisis is to gasp and freeze. And what I consider a crisis starts pretty small – like something falling off the kitchen counter. I tell you this so that you see God in what happens next.

God told me to put the car in Park. I found out by watching Myth Busters the following Saturday night that that automatically puts the car in to neutral, which stops feeding gas to the engine.

I then grabbed the steering wheel and turned it to the right as hard and fast as I could. (“Jesus Take The Whee”l) The car finally turned to the right on the sidewalk in front of the building on the other side of the highway – a building that just happens to be a CHURCH. We missed a parked car and went back across the highway heading straight toward a very large tree in the front yard of a FUNERAL HOME.

Before we got to the tree we lightly struck a LIGHT POLE on the front passenger side, just enough to slow us down and we stopped about ten feet later.

The car was not hit hard enough to cause any airbags to go off – nothing hit Larry in the head.
Larry was buckled upright in his seat – he couldn’t fall over and hit his head.
Twice we were headed towards a head on collision – didn’t happen
We crossed a main street/highway twice on a Saturday night – no traffic and no pedestrians
ALL THREE OF US WALKED AWAY WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A SCRATCH, A BUMP OR A BRUISE!

I fished his cell phone from coat pocket, fortunately his right coat pocket, and called 911. I was able to tell them easily where we were and since we were still only a few miles from Larry’s parent’s house his father was able to come quickly to get Noah.

It took about 7 minutes for the ambulance and first responders to arrive. It was only about 1 minute or so before that that Larry woke up. Hearing Noah say, “Daddy I love you so much! Do you remember me?” Broke my heart.

When the ambulance did arrive, the EMTs were the same two women who’d taken us to Lansing the first time in November. I had to crawl out Larry’s side because my door wouldn’t open anymore. After they had him out and onto the stretcher one of them helped me out and when she saw me she said, “Oh I remember you, are you all right?” She opened her arms to me and held me while I cried. She already knew the first part of our story, God was holding out His arms.

I didn’t have my cell phone with me that night and Larry’s phone is filled with business contacts. The only personal phone number in there that I could find was our son, Drew, in Virginia. Our son, Wade, had changed his number the day before – not in there. Our son, Scott, had gotten a phone for Christmas, but it had never gotten programmed in. So the only one I could call was Drew. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance I called Drew and in a near hysterical state asked him to call everyone else for me. And he did. I didn’t know until the next day, but he’d even called my parents in Nebraska for me. He kept everyone updated for me. He’s actually better at that than anyone else in our whole family – even me. He once called us from Virginia to tell us that the high school gym was on fire. I can see the high school gym from my back door – didn’t know a thing!

I was praying all the way to the hospital that someone would be there, I so didn’t want to go through this alone. After we got there and I walked into the ER waiting room, our son Scott and his girlfriend Shanae (who had both been with us at Larry’s parent’s house, but left earlier than we did), and my friend Leslie were there. I went out to get a bottle of water from the vending machine and when I looked up our Pastor was there. A little while later our friends Chris and Tara came to the ER to see how things were going. Chris is an ER Dr. and the one who initially diagnosed the tumor. It was his night off, but he was there. We’re never alone, God is always with us.

The EMTs that took us to Lansing were both Christians and the driver has a son who is a miracle survivor of a heart birth defect. The night nurse in the Neuro ICU was a Christian and one of the few nurses who will pray with her patients. She prayed with us at 1:30am, before she even had Larry hooked up to the monitors. I got to stay with Larry the entire time. Not one nurse made me leave at night.

Every nurse we had was a Christian, the anesthesiologist was a Pastor’s son. Everyone who came in work with or treat Larry left with a bigger smile and a lighter heart than when they came in.

We know that God was telling us that Larry’s tumor was growing back and needed to come out again. It was beginning to grow closer to the right motor strip which could cause weakness or paralysis on the right side. When the surgeon was telling us this Jesus told me, “I’m at My Father’s right side, everything is going to be okay.”

God is so amazing. He is in every detail of our lives and He loves us so much.

Romans 8:15 (New Living Translation)

¹⁵ So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.”

On  January 29, 1964 my parents received a telephone call from Lutheran Family Social Services.  This was a phone call they had been waiting for for months, but didn’t expect quite yet.  They weren’t prepared yet.  The call went something like this:

“Mr. & Mrs. Zalman, we have a baby girl for you if you’re still interested.  You can come to Omaha tomorrow to see her and make your decision then.”  Decision?  My parents had been waiting for over 9 years to have a baby.  Conventional methods weren’t working, for no apparent reason, so this “decision” was already made.  But formalities had to be followed. 

The next day my mom and dad drove the 2 1/2 hours to Omaha to see the tiny baby girl who LFSS had waiting for them.  The four-week old baby girl had dark brown, almost black, hair and big blue eyes.  In the photographs she appears to fit perfectly in her new mother’s arms.  LFSS wouldn’t allow mom and dad to take me home that day, they had to wait until the next day just to make sure that they REALLY wanted me… really?  The only decision they had to make that night was what to name me.  They really weren’t prepared for this phone call yet.  I think several names were tossed around.  One was Roberta Sue, after my daddy Robert.  I love my daddy, but I am rather glad that name didn’t win.  No offense to the Roberta’s out there.  My actual name was chosen from the newspaper of all things!  My parents are both avid newspaper readers.  One of them stumbled across a movie ad for either The Balcony or A House Is Not A Home.  I’m not sure which movie, but I do know that it was a Shelley Winters movie.  My mom’s name is Sheila, so that cinched it, Shelley it was.  I was given her middle name of Ann along with it the next day when it was time to take me home and then the three of us left the hospital to head back to the central Nebraska town that would be my home.

This was 47 years ago, long before car seats were even a glimmer in the eyes of the auto industry.  My car seat was the arms of my mother.  My mother.  She may not have given birth to me and I may not have the genes of my father in my physical make-up, but in the first moment when they looked at the tiny baby girl lying in the bassinet waiting for someone to love her, I was forever grafted into their hearts.  I became their daughter and they became my parents.   So it is with God.  When we look to him and say, “Father, I believe!”  We are forever grafted into his heart and He in ours.  Not physically born of Him, but definitely born for Him.   Just like me .  Not physically born of my mom and dad, but definitely born for them.

My birth-mother carried me inside her, under her heart for nine months; knowing that in the end she would go home without me.  She wanted me to have what she couldn’t give me.   Two parents, a complete home.  She gave me the two greatest gifts she had to give…. Life and a family.   Sound familiar?  Jesus came to give us life in abundance and when we place our faith in him we are all members of the body of Christ – family.  We are adopted.  Being adopted into God’s family is mentioned 3 times in the book of Romans in chapters 8 & 9.  I encourage you to read it for yourself!

John 15:5 (New Living Translation)

⁵ “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.

This verse has always brought to my mind a vision of grapes.  I love grapes, I love to look at grapes.  So much so that I’ve been decorating my kitchen with them for nearly 20 years. I’ve been called the original grape-nut, and with good reason.

Grape-nuts are such a simple cereal.  Hard enough to break a crown and only 4 ingredients, all of which I can pronounce.  I like that, at least the last part.  Each grape-nut is so tiny.  By itself it doesn’t seem like much.  It amazes me that something so tiny can bring a grown person to their knees in extreme pain.

Last week I spent three hours in the ER with a brand new experience – kidney stones.  From the pain I was experiencing, I was sure that this kidney stone had to be a full size boulder at least.  It took several days for this boulder to “pass”.  When it did, the rock that had been rolling my life was no bigger than a tiny little grape-nut!  What?!  This itty, bitty, little grape-nut nugget is the boulder that has been controlling my life for weeks?  How could that possibly be?  Are we so fragile that we can be brought down by something barely larger than a grain of sand… smaller than the smallest piece of gravel?

At least it took a river rock to bring Goliath down. Not me. Good grief! One little grape-nut and I’m on my knees.  But then, being on my knees isn’t such a bad thing.  I should spend more time there, in prayer, keeping my roots well grounded in my Vine.

I spent a week with my parents after Christmas.  My youngest brother and his wife had their first baby just before Christmas, so I had ulterior motives for the visit besides spending time with my aging parents.  My father is about to turn 81 later this month and his health has been declining for many years.  He still lives at home thanks to the efforts of my mother.  Her health is beginning to show the wear and tear though.

Holding my two-week old niece at the dinner table, watching her sleeping, angelic face, I was struck by the irony of life.  My niece is completely dependent on the adults who love her to sustain her and keep her alive.  She needs us to feed her, clothe her, and keep her clean.  She can’t go anywhere without someone taking her there.  My father has come to the place in his life where he is also dependent on others to take care of him.  He is completely dependent on my mother to sustain him.  Without her care he would be in a nursing facility.   He relies on my mother remembering to take care of him as much as my niece relies on her parents remembering to take care of her.

While I was there I attended the funeral of the father of one of my high school classmates.  The funeral was on my birthday, two days before hers.  In front of me sat a new mother with a very new baby boy.  During the opening prayer of the funeral service the infant was voicing his own invocation.  Not understandable to us perhaps, but just as dear and perfectly understandable to the Lord, and to Tommy Thomas who was listening in with the Father.  I’m sure both were having a hearty chuckle over the baby’s prayer, since both have a tremendous sense of humor.

When I came home Thursday the cycles of life hit me again.  Different cycles.  Not the early spring and late winter cycles that come back around and have so many similarities, but the late summer / early autumn cycles.  The cycles where the leaves of life are changing and beginning to fall off the tree.  This cycle can be rewarding and fun when you’re sharing it with the one you love.  It is just down right lonely when that one is gone and everyone else has forgotten you.  The house is empty.  Everyone else has their own life to lead, their own plans.  Sometimes I think I need a change.  I just don’t know what to change.  Maybe I’ll check the drier to see what cycles it has.  I know there is a “refresh” cycle… maybe that will help.  I’m not quite ready for the “wrinkle release” cycle, so I’ll save that one for later.

Maybe I’ll just take a nap.