Please enjoy this incredible post from November 9, 2011 by A Gentle Mother.
If I could only be like her
I was inspired to write the following article after a struggle I had had in my own life. The Lord brought a woman into my life whom I quickly began to place in a higher place and thus began the compare game. Thankfully it did not go on for long and the Lord dealt ever so gently with my heart. This woman is now one of the best friends I have ever had!! The Lord has used her in my life to help me through intense healing that needed to take place in my life. I am thankful Iwas able to go from “If I could only be like her” to “I look forward to walking this life together and helping eachother grow in the Lord!”
We all know her. She is the woman who has it all together. She has the love of 1 Corinthians 13 down pat and she never falters. She always smiles at her husband and is his constant encouragement. She is gentle and kind and practices unwavering patience with her children.
And when difficult times come? She never doubts or even dares to question the Lord. Her faith stays strong and steady. We can almost bet on it that her home is orderly and constantly peaceful. She never reaches her limit.
And her children!! So polite and helpful are the older ones, and the little ones so obedient and cheerful! Her husband adores her and is never cross at her. He must make a sufficient living, too, so they never go without.
We think about her, watch her and are amazed, but after a while of doing so we grow discouraged. “I can never be like her,” we say. “What is wrong with me to be lacking all of that in my life?” We compare. We grow frustrated and we may even begin to judge her. We may even go as far as deciding we do not like “little miss perfect”. Yes, jealousy is usually the root that begins to grow deep in this soil here.
But what if…just what if she was able to ask us if she could come off of the pedestal, please. Afterall, she did not place herself there, we did. What if she could tell us that she does not have it all together and though she does long to live 1 Corinthians 13 out in every area of her life, she will never perfect it this side of Heaven. She will not stop trying, but she grows discouraged too.
What if we knew she scowled at her husband this morning, after her short night’s sleep and hardly feels strong enough to encourage him to face his giants for the day. She is not always gentle, does not always want to be kind and her patience does run thinner than thin at times, just as our own.
When difficult times come, she is not exempt from the grief process that the rest of us feel. She trusts, but she struggles.
Order and peace do not always reign. She strives for this, but does not always succeed, and she wants to be free in us knowing this.
Her children are not perfect and she wants us to be fair in allowing them to be as they are, where they are at, without any pressures to perform.
Sometimes her husband’s smile fades and caves under intense pressures. Sometimes he struggles to provide.
She really wants us to know these things. She doesn’t want us to long to be like her, but to love her and to walk this life’s journey beside her. She wants us to know she does try. She does CHOOSE God’s strength and His joy, but none of it comes easily.
She doesn’t want to be put up in a higher place in view of others, or to be compared with others any more than we would.
And who knows? Who knows that if we can let all of this go we might just find the friend we were always waiting for.
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