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Welcome to New Zealand’s
MUM-e-Mail
- a newsletter to enthuse, educate, and entertain
mothers of pre-schoolers and their supporters
June 2005
Mothering Maxim
To most of us, patience is what we need when our schedules don’t match up with life.
Mum Moment - Patience
Coconut: A coconut is undoubtedly the toughest of all fruits. Its stone-like shell insulates from all but the most damaging of outer attacks, and protects the sweet meat seed within.
Hurry up and wait. Usually we think of patience as perseverance through the most trying of circumstances. Racing to the doctor’s office only to arrive and be told that he’s running late. Selecting the Express Lane at the market and then noticing the customer in front of us has way overdone her limit of twelve items. A weather delay ruining our return flight from a business trip. A traffic snarl keeping us from a preschool performance. There’s a very real kind of patience that has to do with such quandaries: patience with situations.
But this isn’t the kind of patience addressed in the Bible’s Fruit List. The word in the list actually means patience with people. More than that, this kind of patience is also patience with people’s problems.
This kind of patience is holding your hands back while your five-year-old creates her fifty-third-in-a-row set of bunny ears to loop (whoops – missed it again!) into a shoelace bow, all the while puffing, “I can do it myself!” This kind of patience is sucking in our breath when our husband returns from the store with the WRONG kind of cereal when we had specifically written down the name for him. This kind of patience is listening – a looooonnnnnnggggg time on the phone to our lonely mum who drones on and on and on about her life but shows little interest in ours.
Patience is hanging in with people and their problems … sometimes to the point of forgiveness but always to the point of love. No wonder this fruit is so tough to peel, much less practice in the raw day to day of life!
- from Naked Fruit, by Elisa Morgan
From A Mother’s Heart
Are you holding on to a grudge, stuck in unforgiveness, or unable to move toward a person who’s wounded you or someone you love?
Ask God to grow the fruit of patience in you for this specific relationship.
Be honest about your emotions, as they need to be processed.
Process what steps you might need to take to demonstrate patience in this spot in your life.
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Mum’s Mail
Patience is …
You're invited to finish this sentence [several times?] and click your reply to mumemail@... [do it now?]. Include your first name and town/country. We'll publish responses in a couple of weeks - next time in MUM-e-Mail.
Mum etc - Snippets and e-bits that may interest you …
[these websites and their contents are not necessarily endorsed by MOPS NZ]
http://www.churchsigngenerator.com/ - make your own and use as an advert for your MOPS group.
http://city-on-a-hill.com/choose.aspx - enjoyable CDs [ncl. graphics]
http://web2.airmail.net/dpelc/yellow/ - God’s Yellow Pages – handy guide
http://www.parentsinc.org.nz/ - Ian and Mary Grant http://www.parentsinc.org.nz/default.asp?sectionID=18 - helps. See list LHS.
Love your children (and their grandparents) - and catch a glimpse of the big picture,
Shalom
Johanna Whittaker
on behalf of MOPS (NZ) Inc.
© 2005 by MOPS New Zealand Inc and MOPS International.
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