12 Days of Reflection - #2: Discipleship

Decision #2 - I will actively participate in discipleship with a godly mentor.

I was going to start this post out with the definition of discipleship.  I googled "discipleship definition" and found, well, a ton of stuff.  Apparently, people comprehend a great deal in the term, and it was difficult to narrow it down to one succinct definition.  So here's what I came up with:

discipleship - n. the act of helping another grow by walking through life together

Not the greatest, so I'll elaborate.

As 2013 kicked off, I was feeling totally overwhelmed by my life.  I have been around enough to know that I needed someone - a 3rd party in my life to help inspire me, encourage me, push me, challenge me, and hold me accountable.  I prayed about someone and almost instantly, God brought Jennifer to my mind.  I first met her several years ago when I had her kind and brilliant daughter in my class.  She and her family began attending our church and one day, maybe two years ago, she saw me at church and casually asked how I was doing.  The floodgates flew open.  I was tired.  I was stressed.  My house was a disaster.  We'd eaten take-out every night that week.  I was about to kill, like, 8 kids at school.  She listened, nodded, and told me she'd pray for me.  She walked away and I felt like an idiot.  She had probably expected me to say "Fine, and you?" But no - I complained her ear off for 15 minutes.  The next day, I had an email in my inbox.  It was full of encouragement, affirmation, recipes, time-saving ideas for the kitchen, ways to involve my son in cleaning the house, on and on and on.  I couldn't believe that this near-stranger had taken so much time and energy to respond so completely to my ramblings.  It meant so much to me that I printed it off, glued it in my prayer notebook, and highlighted things I wanted to remember.  I have gone back to it several times.

So when her face popped into my head, I got really excited.  She is a wife like me, a mom like me, a teacher like me, a details person like me - and most importantly, she is someone I want to be like. I pulled out the laptop and typed a Facebook message to her asking if she'd be interested in meeting with me.  She said she would love to.

Since then, we have met to talk about God, marriage, parenting, cooking, in-laws, husbands, the Bible, money, babies, teaching, parents - everything under the sun.  We have shopped, cooked, eaten, exercised, and even sat in the back of the resource room closet at church because that was the only room available.  I have been painfully honest about things I would have rather kept secret, and she has spoken truth to me when I really needed to hear it.  In short, God has used her to grow me, mature me, change me into the woman He wants me to be.  Not that I'm anywhere CLOSE to there yet.  But thanks to Jennifer's investment in me, I am certainly closer.

Definitely one of the best decisions of 2013.