My Inner Struggle

I’m a mom and a nurse. These are two pretty difficult and challenging jobs God blessed me with—and at times, it can be quite an emotional roller coaster. Over the last 13 years of my life, I have learned what it means to be a mom to a beautiful, willful, and fierce daughter. And, I continue to learn and grow as a mother.  It is not by any stretch of the imagination an easy duty. I am continually challenged with how to raise my daughter to be more like Christ in an imperfect world. Along with these challenges, I live in doubt and fear. I have doubts whether I am raising my daughter the right way, teaching her the right skills (life skills and home skills) from practical to complex, exposing her to the right influence and so on.

I do my best. We do our best as parents. My husband has been overwhelmingly supportive every step of the way. I’m proud of him. The many big important life-decisions we have made over the past several years we hope are shaping her up to be the young lady we long to see and most importantly, what God longs to see. We enrolled her into Sacred Heart Catholic School here in Patterson and it has been a wonderful journey. Although there have been some downs such as bullying, facing the mean-girls at school trying to mess with her self-confidence and self-esteem—Jewelene got through it and we overcame it together as a family. So far, at 13 years old (a teenager), I feel that Jewelene has great self-confidence with high self-esteem. She gets pretty excited about attending youth group activities at our new church called New Life Christian Center. She loves making new friends and sharing God stories with them. We recently transitioned into a different church in town and left our other family at Adventure Christian Church. We are all doing well as a family and as individuals in this difficult transition. We are embracing what God has to offer and doing our best to be servants of His. We were with Adventure for a good 4-5 years and leaving was one of the hardest things to do in life. But, God heals and recovers.

Back to my doubts as a mom, sometimes I question whether I focus too much on my other job as a nurse. Over the last 10 years of being a nurse, I have been faced with many new opportunities: from being a nursing supervisor at a skilled nursing facility to being the assistant director of nursing services there. Then I went on to working in the hospital as an acute care nurse. It became boring to me and so, I decided to pick up a whole new specialty as a nurse in the operating room. I remember the day vividly when I went into the director of surgical services office asking Sandy Mayer for a job in her department. I got the job. Within 2.5 months I was trained to circulate. A few months later, I was offered another job in the department to scrub open heart surgeries. The calls were rough—I’d be on call 7 days at a time every 3^rd week rotating with two other open heart scrub nurses. In the meantime, I was going to school to attain a Bachelor’s degree in nursing. It got to be pretty demanding trying to juggle raising a little daughter with my husband, working overtime, and going to school. Then God, saw all this and blessed me with a surgery center position where the hours were just what I needed (no calls, no weekends, no holidays). I was able to achieve my Bachelor’s degree goal and graduated from Grand Canyon University. Then, back to the hospital again, this time a Level 2 trauma center in the OR. Two years later, I was promoted to become a clinical coordinator for surgery covering several surgical service lines. This is where I currently leave off. Am I exhausted? Yes, absolutely! In fact, I think I am about 2 years into sleep deprivation. I can sleep in and take many naps all day long if I had the luxury to do so. Am I fulfilled? Maybe. These are many accomplishments and achievements in which I had never planned in my wildest dreams. Did God plan for all this to happen? No doubt about it!

Now, as I sit here on my day off and ponder my life as a mother after dropping off “Oh deer!” at school on Halloween morning—I wonder if I am doing all I can for little miss Jewelene. Sure, there’ll be times when she’ll be faced with trials and tribulations of many kinds and I will want to save her and do whatever I can to prevent all that from happening. But, then I wouldn’t be doing her any favor. James reminds us why Christians and human beings in general face trials and tribulations. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ spoke to the 12 tribes scattered among the nations, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (NIV, James 1:1-4) We can turn our hardships into times of learning, growing, and maturing. This is what we’ve been trying to encourage Jewelene with when she comes home and shares with us her challenging day(s). It doesn’t happen too often but it happens nonetheless. We would give her pointers and tips on how she should handle the situation in the future. There are times when we need to intervene as parents because there are certain things that are out of a teenager’s control. For instance, I reached out to one of the moms at the school to inform her that her daughter was not treating Jewelene kindly. We (as in the 2 moms and 2 daughters) met up for coffee the immediate Saturday morning to discuss the whys and how to resolve the issue. Two months later, things have improved between the two girls. They’re not best friends or anything close to it. But, the poor treatment towards Jewelene has subsided substantially. And, we always check in with her on a regular basis asking how that relationship is coming along. It has been uneventful on that regard.

Things don’t come easy and problems just do not go away if unaddressed. We can continue to wonder why God gives us sufferings, not only to adults but to children and teenagers, also. We must overcome hardships in order for His promises to get fulfilled. Some of those promises include greater hope and faith in Him along with an even greater confidence about the future. The problems that we face on a daily basis will develop our perseverance—which in turn will strengthen our character and deepen our trust in God. Just as Paul stated it clearly on peace and hope, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (NIV, Romans 5:1-5) Beautifully stated right? Hopeful? Very much so! This is the scripture I stand on when I have doubts and fears and am faced with challenges at work and at home.

Reminder: being a mom to a teenager in the 21^st century is no easy task, especially with technology becoming more and more innovative. I just know in my heart that God gives me struggles because out of them—something certain is being produced. One certainty is my greater trust in God—trusting that He will carry me through and help me overcome my challenging days. Yes, as a mom and a nurse! My patience is being tested every day in some way. Some days I want to take my surgical cap off and call it quits. But, I am no quitter because God never quit on me nor will He ever. And, then there are certain days when I just want to go into the room and shut the world out because my teenager is too much to bear—with the attitude and the talking back. But, then I don’t. Because God never did that to me nor will He ever.

With that said I am going to do my best to be an intentional parent in our discipline and raising of Jewelene. I pray and pray that she will grow up to be a Romans 12 Christian. It’s sad and depressing to think that she only has a little over 4 years with us in this household before she’ll move out to go to college. It sure feels like we still have a lot of work to do in the 4 years. Please pray for us.

A Refreshing Kind of Partnership

As a family, we have had the great opportunity of attending other churches in our travels. We travel a considerable amount--weekend trips, international trips, out of the state trips and so forth. What we have enjoyed most in our travels is visiting different churches whenever we can. My husband and I have made it a point to attend a Bible-teaching church when we are out of town on a given Sunday.

 One of my favorite visits was when we visited Santa Cruz for the weekend. On our drive home Sunday morning, we intentionally stopped at Chip Ingram's Church called Venture Christian Church in Los Gatos, California. I had been tuning in to "Living on the Edge" on my podcast during my drive to work. I've grown a lot spiritually-speaking as an individual, a mother and a wife through listening to Chip's teachings along with some words of encouragement and application for work-life and life in this world in general. That Sunday morning, we walked into Venture without knowing what was on the agenda or who will be sharing the message--will it be Chip himself or one of his associate pastors. We were blessed! We got to see and hear Chip Ingram in the flesh. Wow! Just like how he sounds in his podcasts, same demeanor, and everything else. I was just glad to be there. It was nice to finally see in person someone who has shared and spoken God's Word into my life and has given me the spiritual filling I needed.

 Aside from being in awe of seeing someone I have long-respected and appreciated, the question is: what was the message that I was able to take home from Chip's sermon that morning?

 One word: partnership. It was partnership that I needed to hear. After all, we are in this world as Christians of the same kind of Spirit. Just as Paul spoke to the people of Corinth concerning spiritual gifts: "There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work," 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, NIV. What this means to me is we need not to be a church divided. Instead, we must reach out to other Bible-teaching churches, plug ourselves in to what other churches provide in which our own does not, and welcome others into our fellowship as well. There are certainly different gifts, places of service or worship, and activities which vary from congregation to congregation. Therefore, we must NOT limit ourselves to only what our church is offering for the spiritual growth of ourselves and our families--because all of these differences in gifts combined provide the best effects when they build up the body of Christ--the church.

This was what Chip encouraged in his sermon and message to the people that morning. He emphasized that churches must come together and partner with one another to continue on this mission to grow in spiritual thinking and living. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but once you come to the idea or belief that your church is the only true church of God and Christians should only come to your church, you are doing a disservice to Christ himself. Praise God and rejoice in the fact that He uses different Christian churches all over the world to minister to souls like yours and mine.

My encouragement to you brothers and sisters is: do not be afraid to venture out. I am not asking you to be a butterfly—fly to where the “Lord leads you that Sunday.” No! Not at all. It is spiritually healthy and important to be a member of a church that is able to offer you that spiritual filling when you are thirsty—in worship and in your service to the congregation. But, when you find yourselves still parched for the Word, for deeper and more profound messages—you must go and have a conversation with God, one-on-one and you ask him for guidance and where He truly needs to lead you. You’ll be surprised by what He’ll show you. And, when you go to Him in truth and in righteousness, whatever you ask will be given, when you seek,you will find, and when you knock, the door will be open.