Our latest guest blog comes from a wife, mum, writer and speaker who has learned a valuable lesson about not writing off the older generations. In response to this week’s need-meeting challenge, Tania suggests that we can help meet the needs of the older generation by helping them to understand the role they can still play in meeting the needs of others.
It can be in the strangest way that you see a need that needs to be met. I was challenged when I overhead two older ladies at a conference talking about the fact that at their age, they no longer thought God could use them; they felt they were past it. If women of a certain age were thinking this then I really felt God telling me I had to look at why that is not true!
I absolutely love Titus 2:3-5:
“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine,but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.”
It’s the passage that keeps me teaching and speaking, although when I first read it I thought God meant He would bring me alongside someone older; I didn’t realise I’d become the older! Titus is instructed to have the older women teach the younger, not about Bible knowledge and theology but about living.
I learned how to manage my home because I have chatted with older women about life; in their day certain jobs were done on certain days and they stuck to this routine, so it never got out of hand. People didn’t run at the first sign of trouble in a marriage – they worked at it, and yes it’s supposed to be hard work, divorce was not the easy option.
It is so important that younger generations are reminded of what it was like to play outside, to play together, face to face not on the internet, to respect others and to value their own purity. All this wisdom resides within our elders.
The fact that you have lived and learned, played, cried, hurt and struggled means you are desperately needed by God. You don’t have to teach it! You just need to be able to talk.
By following Paul’s advice for the older women to teach the younger how to love their husbands and children and how to be busy at home, without it being a stress, maybe we can make the lives of today’s women just a little bit easier. And the older women won’t be overhead wondering if they are still useful to God.
No matter your age go and find a friend with a 30 year age difference and start learning together. If you are older you need to know how valuable you are; if you’re younger, where better to get some life guidance than from someone who has done it? God placed us in community because we need each other and we can meet each other’s needs.
Tania Vaughan is a wife, a mother, a writer, a speaker and above all else a cherished child of God just trying to be faithful in a mixed up world to the call to share and encourage others in their walk. She blogs at: www.tryingtobefaithful.blogspot.com
This is so true Tanya. I have benefitted from older women’s friendship in the church especially as a young mum with a strained relationship with my own mum. Now I find myself being an older mum passing on what has been taught to me (although still in need of more mature advice all the time!)