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Older women … teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
Titus 2:3-5 (ESV)

I met a young mother in my bible fellowship who was struggling over her fifth-grader with learning difficulties. She was so in love with the Lord and so hopeful for the hearts and souls of her children whom she steers towards Truth.

We spent hours walking in the park as I helped her review all the options for helping her son.

It’s a beautiful thing to have the vantage point of experience and be able to share the success that I’ve had with schooling. It was just as Paul wrote to Titus in the early years of the church, “Older women … teach what is good, and so train the young women.”

She soaked in every word and added her own experience. Together we concluded some beautiful truths about raising kids and God’s love.

I loved making this new friend. It reminded me of my attitude and faith when my kids were little.

Tom had just died and the world was so raw and real – God’s presence was evident through all of it. I was both so tragically grieved, but also enveloped in God’s care. So much so, I was optimistic about where I and the kids were headed.

I prayed and read the Word with the boys all the time. We held teen study groups in our home, served in the community, and developed a habit of prayer for anyone we met.

Every choice I made, every interaction, and the moments of prayer were done with confidence that all things work out according to God’s will. I’m grateful I have enough maturity to remember that, because…

time passed.

My boys went to college and into a world that rejects Christ. Sometimes I notice that culture seeps into their conversation, and it causes my faith to get suppressed by “realism”.

I start telling myself things like, “young adults are leaving the church in droves. What was the point in sacrificing so much to raise them in the Word?”

I know differently. It’s easy sometimes to get weary and have your flesh rise up.

Like when I first met this young mom all full of excitement for the Lord. I confess I felt cynical. She’d talk about curling up with her son to pray and read the Bible. She had the same dedication to raising her kids in faith I had at her age, and I was skeptical. The way the world is now, would her son indeed be walking with the Lord the way she expected him to ten years later? I felt terrible for feeling that way.

So do those moments disqualify you, as an older woman, from mentoring young women as in Titus?

It’s rough to admit that my faith can momentarily cool with life’s disappointments. Fortunately, it warms up again. I simply cannot deny what’s really True. I do really believe, and He encourages me that I CAN trust Him. The story is not finished with our young adults.

I think of myself as a non-believing young adult. I had a charismatic boss who openly shared his faith each and every time we met. “What a Jesus freak” I’d say to myself. I put up with it because as an executive, he could boost my career. It took years until life beat me up, God became real, and that seed took root in my heart.

Decades later I finally told this executive I had accepted Christ. Did that mean he should have assumed during that long wait that he had wasted his time?

You as a role model isn’t dependent on an unfinished outcome.

Our lives don’t have to be perfect to mentor. We don’t have to have all the answers or know exactly how things turned out. We know when we have or haven’t walked in the Lord, and these are the pearls of wisdom that will benefit a younger generation.

Lord, please encourage my sister widows that they can mentor younger women, even in their brokenness and incomplete stories! Amen