girls.

Something stood out to me when I listened to Geoff’s message this past weekend. When he said that women need to feel loved, beautiful, valuable and safe, my first thought was, “Are the men treating us like that?” But the next (and more persistent) thought was, “Do I treat the women in my life like that?”

Sometimes we cast the entire responsibility onto men for making sure we’re being treated the right way. But I see just as much damage coming from women toward other women as I do from men! You ladies know what I’m talking about. We get competitive and catty. We get jealous and judgmental. We gossip and tear down, and if we’re on the receiving end of such treatment, we walk away feeling unloved, ugly, unvalued, and in danger of receiving even more pain from each other. I think this is a major reason a lot of us avoid women-oriented groups or events...

(By the way, if you have trouble thinking of an example of this in your life, just try to remember what it was like to be a girl in the 7th grade—that ought to bring up a shudder-worthy mental picture. We tend to start early, don’t we?)

What I realized is that I, too, have the responsibility to treat the women in my life as loved, beautiful, valuable and safe—no matter who they are. And in terms of godly character, we can’t expect the men to do what we’re not doing ourselves. Let’s step up and be the women God created us to be…and let’s start with how we treat each other.

delight.

There are a few sounds I delight in lately...

• my favorite two-year-old clapping his hands and saying, "Yay Sarah!" when the band finishes the service
• my band doing an impromptu jam - just because they can
• this baby's laugh
• the intro of AKUS' Choctaw Hayride...oh yeah.
• my phone beeping with a new text message
• calling a loved one who's suffered from unemployment for almost a year and finally hearing them say, "I can't talk right now - I'm still at work."