Grab your favorite drink, get comfortable, and let’s get ready to be encouraged.As I’ve stated before, my hope is you will be curious and intrigued to the point of checking this book out (in its entirety) for yourself. {Please note: these are all direct quotes from the book, Captivating by John & Stasi Eldredge.}
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Captivating
Chapter 10 ~ Mothers, Daughters, Sisters
* (pg 168) Mother is the source of life. Mother is powerful. Mother is strong. Mother can nurture, and mother can destroy.
* Whether good or bad, whether redemptive or destructive, our relationships with our mothers affected us to the core of our beings, helping to shape us into the women we have become.
* (pg 169) We are not all mothers, but we all had one. Or longed for one.
* The desire in a daughter to please her mother is matched only by her desire to be separate from her.
* Mothers rightly teach their daughters how to behave and what to believe.
* A mother hopes that her daughter’s coming into her own is a passage to celebrate. But often it takes years for a mother and daughter to reconcile their differences – let alone enjoy them.
* (pg 170) Girls’ hearts flourish in homes where they are seen and invited to become ever more themselves. Parents who enjoy their daughters are giving them and the world a great gift.
* Mothers in particular have the opportunity to offer encouragement to their daughters by inviting them into their feminine world and by treasuring their daughters’ unique beauty.
A Long Road Home
* (pg 172) All mothers fail their children to varying degrees. But she also loved me. That was what was most true.
* (pg 173) I don’t know exactly when a softening began to occur between my mother and me, but slowly we became more graceful with each other. I do know that it began after I had looked honestly at my childhood and grieved deeply the wounds my parents had dealt me, inflicted by action as well as inaction.
* I had looked squarely at my youth. I’d been angry. I’d been sorrowful. And after a season, I was able to forgive. I began to see my mother with new eyes… I began to understand that in those years she had been treading water with all that she had just to stay afloat.
Our Last Year Together
* (pg 173) I still felt like a failure to her, a deep disappointment. Her words continues to pierce. It was then that God showed me that the way my mother made me feel was exactly the way I made her feel. A disappointment. An embarrassment. A failure.
* (pg 174) She wanted me to like her, know her, and enjoy her just as much as I wanted her to feel that way about me. And I had withheld my acceptance from her. I realized for the first time how deeply I had wounded her.
The Cost
* (pg 175) It is one thing to suffer. It is something far worse to walk alongside one you love who is suffering intensely and be unable to do anything about it.
* I have heard it said that having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body. How a mother aches to protect her child. And yet all the while, from infancy to adulthood, a good mother is training her child to move ever more away from her, to need her less and less.
* (pg 176) A mother’s heart is a vast and glorious thing.
* My mother’s heart was expansive, having been enlarged by suffering and years of clinging to Jesus while being misunderstood, dismissed, and judged by those she loved most.
* I tell you this story because I want you to know that redemption is possible. Healing is possible. Ask Jesus to bring it to your and yours.
* Then, if you can, go call your mother. Tell her you love her.
To Mother
* All women are not mothers, but all women are called to mother.
* (pg 177) To mother is to nurture, to train, to educate, to rear. As daughters of Eve, all women are uniquely gifted to help others in their lives become more of who they truly are – to encourage, nurture, and mother them toward their true selves. In doing this, women partner with Christ in the vital mission of bringing forth life.
* “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6 NKJV) This verse is not a promise about faith. It is not speaking of training a child to follow Christ or promising that if you do, the grown child will continue to follow him.
* The proverb is about raising a child to know who he is and to guide him in becoming ever more himself. In the way he should go. Not in the way you would like him to go in order to validate you as a mother and a woman.
* It speaks of teaching a child to live from his heart, attuned to it, awake to it, aware of it, and when that child is grown he will continue to life a life from the heart. It is about seeing who a person really is and calling him out to be that person.
* The nurturing of life is a high and holy calling. And as a woman, it is yours.
* Yes, men are called to this as well. But uniquely and deeply, this calling makes up part of the very fiber of a woman’s soul – the calling to mother.
* (pg 179) All women are called to mother. And all women are called to give birth.
* Women give birth to ideas, to creative expressions, to ministries.
* We birth life in others by inviting them into deeper realms of healing, to deeper walks with God, to deeper intimacy with Jesus.
* All women are made in the image of God in that we bring forth life. When we enter into our world and into the lives of those we love and offer our tender and strong feminine hearts, we cannot but help mother them.
My Sister, My Friend
* The gift of friendship among women is a treasure not to be taken lightly.
* (pg 180) Women friends become the face of God to one another – the face of grace, of delight, of mercy.
* A woman must have women friends.
* To have a woman friend is to relax into another soul and be welcomed in all that you are and all that you are not.
* (pg 181) Friendship is a great gift. One to be prayed for and not taken for granted. If you do not have the kind of friendship you long for, ask God to bring it into your life, to give you eyes to recognize it when he does.
* When God gives a friend, he is entrusting us with the care of another’s heart. It is a chance to mother and to sister, to be a Life giver, to help someone else become the woman she was created to be, to walk alongside her and call her deep heart forth.
* Friendships need to be nurtured and guarded and fought for.
* We love our friends by pursuing them – calls, little presents, cards, invitations to play, to go for a walk, to go to a movie. We offer our hearts.
* We need to pay attention to each other, really seeone another. That truly is the greatest gift.
Awkward Love
* And let me say clearly, true friendship is opposed.
* One woman often feels less important to the other, or accused or needy or misunderstood. Honest communication in love is the only way to live and grow in friendships.
* There are ebbs and flows. There may be too much dependence. There may be real hurt and disappointment. In fact, it’s inevitable in our broken world.
* (pg 182) But with the grace of God firmly holding us, reminding us that he is the source of our true happiness, it is possible to nurture and sustain deep friendships throughout our lives.
* We need each other. God knows that. He will help us. We have only to ask and surrender, to wait, to hope, and in faith to love. We must also repent.
* For a woman to enjoy relationship, she must repent of her need to control and her insistence that people fill her.
* Fallen Eve demands that people “come through” for her.
* Redeemed Eve is being met in the depths of her soul by Christ and is free to offer to others, free to desire, and willing to be disappointed.
* Fallen Eve has been wounded by others and withdraws in order to protect herself from further harm
* Redeemed Eve knows that she has something of value to offer; that she is made for relationship. Therefore, being safe and secure in her relationship with her Lord, she can risk being vulnerable with others and offer her true self. But it is not the truest thing.
* In your friendships, in all your relationships, you will disappoint others and they will disappoint you. That comes with the territory of being human.
* (pg 183) Perhaps it would be good to say just a few words about circles of intimacy. Jesus had the Twelve, but he also had the three.
* Jesus understands well that friends disappoint…yet he continues to love. You can only have one, two, maybe three intimate friends in your life at any given time. That’s just the way of the heart.
* There is room for more dear friends, but they are a little further out, in the next circle, like Jesus’ Twelve.
* And then there are your acquaintances, loose friendships, as Jesus had in the other disciples. It is natural and good to have circles of friendship. Friends will move from one circle to the other, but you can’t possibly sustain intimacy with everyone.
* God invites us to risk trusting him and enter into redemptive friendships with others – to open ourselves up to the possibility of being hurt as well as to the possibility of tasting the sweet fruit of companionship.
* Eve possesses a bottomless well of longing. Jesus alone is the never-ending fount, which can slake her thirst. No other source, no other relationship will fully satisfy. God made us that way. On purpose.
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How about you?
Do you have your closest group of friends?
Or, do you need to pray for God to bring you a dear friend?
If you are praying for a friend, let me know. I will join you in prayer.
I have three very dear sister-friends.
Sister-friends I pray for regularly; sister-friends whom I love dearly.
I do not ever want to take them for granted.
God will bring you that dear sweet sister-friend; He created us to need that relationship.
