From Generation To Generation: The Faith Of Our Mothers
Self Help
What's A Mother/Father To Do?
Parenting For The New Millennium
I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you. -- 2 Timothy 1:5
Speaking of the Los Angeles riots, a leading national business newspaper said, "Of the thousands of images beamed around the world during ... rioting in Los Angeles, none seemed sadder or more troubling than the spectacle of parents taking their kids with them to loot."
Youngsters, some toddlers and grade schoolers, helped their parents tote away bags and boxes of stolen merchandise. When confronted, they didn't display hatred or angry self-defensiveness. Instead, they gave feeble replies or seemed puzzled by the very nature of the question. They seemed to be neither moral nor immoral -- there was no guilt. Rather, they seemed to be amoral, without any morals at all. Loaded down with merchandise, it was not "shop 'til you drop," but "steal 'til you kneel."
Property buyers in Los Angeles then either delayed or cancelled many purchases. They feared economic downturn, even ruin, in the wake of the riots which left 10,000 buildings torched and damages totaling up to three billion dollars. Many of the buildings and businesses were minority-owned.
One minority storeowner wept over the destruction of his business that had taken him years to build up. Now it was gone -- in a matter of hours; the work of years destroyed in hours.
"This is a disaster for downtown L.A.," said Chuck Lamb, president of the California Association of Realtors. "This is not a race riot -- it's a class riot," said Lamb. It was not so much black against white, as black against black, black against Hispanic, and Hispanic against black, and Koreans and blacks against one another. With 52 dead, and hundreds wounded, and 11,000 arrested, the L.A. riots left an indelible mark on world-consciousness.
Also indelibly marked on the world consciousness was the beating of white truck driver, Reginald Denny. On his way to help a black friend get her car started to get out of the riot area, Denny was pulled from his truck at a stoplight and beaten nearly to death by a gang of four or five, while millions watched on television.
But before that, of course, was the amateur videotape of the L.A. policemen brutally beating the speeding drug addict, Rodney King. What seemed to most of us to be a foregone conviction of police brutality ended up as an unbelievable acquittal. What seemed to be an obvious case of excessive and brutal and perhaps racial use of force was exonerated by a jury convinced by defense attorneys that police were operating within department guidelines. Most of the world found that difficult to believe.
The Rodney King episode opened up again the terrible problems besetting our country. It opened up the awareness that minorities are far more likely to receive unfair and brutal treatment at the hands of police than are majority people. It opened up again the wrenching poverty of many and the terrible economic pressures.
It opened up the frustration of police departments with the rapid rise of violent crime and the early release of violent criminals into our streets. And it opened up the questions of gangs and drugs, and of our community and family structure, and whether or not we have substantial moral backbone to sustain our civilization.
It is appropriate for us to turn our attention to the family, to mothers and fathers, to children and grandparents, to examine whether we are indeed preparing our children with faith and ethics, sound doctrine and morality.
In this Second Letter to Timothy, Paul advises the young minister in Ephesus to remember the faith and morality he had learned from his boyhood from two very significant women -- his grandmother Lois, and his mother Eunice. Paul urges him to remember the faith they passed on to him and to rekindle it for the arduous tasks he faces in sophisticated Ephesus.
The faith of the mothers was to be passed on from generation to generation. Timothy should do two things: stand in the faith, and stand on the faith.
I.
Let's consider first standing in the faith. Remember and rekindle that faith, says Paul to Timothy, and thus to us.
A number of sociologists have observed that Americans seem to be losing a basic moral code and moral fiber. Think of many Wall Street scandals depicted by best-selling titles like Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Barbarians At The Gate. Or consider one political scandal after another coming out of Washington or Albany or New York City or Little Rock, Arkansas. Morality, among many of our financial and political leaders, not to mention sports heroes, celebrities and even televangelists Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker, is sadly lacking.
Charles Colson, one-time aide to President Nixon, now born-again Christian, believes our country is struggling against an onset of barbarism and moral breakdown. We have been cast adrift in the sea of relativism where anything goes if you can get away with it, says Colson. With Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he believes the West is suffering from "spiritual exhaustion."
Then, quoting the pungent British writer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colson affirms, "Having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction (Western man) keeled over, a weary, battered, old Brontosaurus, and became extinct" (Against The Night, p. 23).
The crisis in Western culture is not due to invaders from without, says Colson. No, unlike the Rome of old destroyed by barbarians at the gate, we have invaders from within. "We have," says Colson, "bred them in our families and trained them in our classrooms. They inhabit our legislatures, our courts, our film studios, and our churches" (Ibid., p. 24).
Colson is not alone in his views with the decline of civilized morals and spiritual values in our society. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago laments what he calls the spiritual vacuum in many American families. Bloom says, "The dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape passes belief" (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 57). Bloom notes that country, religion, family, and the ideas of civilization have lost their compelling force.
University of California sociologist Robert Bellah is in some agreement with Professor Bloom. The relation between parents and children is anomalous. Children, caught up in extreme individualism, develop a certain amnesia with respect to who their parents are, says Bellah. So much so, children forget both ancestors and descendants, and presume to give birth to themselves.
Is it any wonder then that many leaders are calling for a restoration of family values? When President George H. W. Bush visited the riot-torn area of Los Angeles, at a prayer service in a church, he called for faith in the American family to battle the causes of urban unrest. Said the President, "To struggle against hard times, to overcome the devastation of poverty, of racism, or of riots, we need our family. All across this nation, we've got to renew our fight to strengthen the American family. It isn't a burnt-out area in Los Angeles. It isn't California. It is in the entire country."
The President went on to say that "we've got to teach right from wrong. Government cannot do that." And we might add that we can no longer expect our value-neutral educational system to instill ethics, morals, and high principles. We are not getting that teaching from many politicians and business leaders. And many sports heroes and celebrities have been letting us down. "Kids are being raised by TV and their peers," says George Batsche, president of National Association of School Psychologists. "And it's obvious that things have gone awry."
Where then do we turn to learn the values, ethics, morals, and principles that hold a civilization together? We shall have to look to the church and to the family. We shall have to look to the scriptures and to grandmothers and mothers like Lois and Eunice who so influenced Timothy that he influenced millions for good for centuries.
So the challenge is out to you mothers and grandmothers. Have you abandoned responsibility for the faith and moral education of your children? Have you abdicated to television and peer groups? Are your children totally out of control when it comes to moral behavior? Are you setting aside times and opportunities for educating your children in the faith?
Churches, through church school, youth and confirmation programs, through retreats and camps, through seminars and service projects, through worship and fellowship, are directed to teaching the faith and ethics to our young.
But churches need the cooperation of mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, to set priorities, to stand together with the church for the moral education of our young. "The most powerful teacher of values is the parent," says Bennett Levanthal of the University of Chicago Psychiatric Department. So parents and church need to stand together. If we don't do it, who will?
II.
But if we are encouraged with Timothy to stand in the faith, we also are encouraged to stand on it, or to say it another way, to take a stand on it.
Paul says this to Timothy in a number of ways, reminding Timothy that "God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control." He urges Timothy not to be ashamed of his faith but "to take his share of suffering, for the gospel is the power of God." He urges him to follow the pattern of sound words, "to guard the truth that has been entrusted to him."
If Timothy is encouraged to do this, so are mothers and grandmothers. And if within our homes and churches women are to take a stand for morals and ethics, so are they to speak out in the larger society. Paul says that we have not been given a spirit of timidity and fear, but of power to witness to our faith. We are not to be ashamed of the gospel. Nor are we to fear being mocked and vilified by taking a stand for our values.
However, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger thinks many American Christians have precisely that -- a spirit of timidity, or to put it in his words, a "failure of nerve." We Christians keep retreating and retreating and retreating, afraid to affirm our faith, afraid to stand up for our values, afraid to witness to our convictions and beliefs -- afraid, afraid, afraid.
Wanting to avoid unpleasantness, we avoid confrontation and retreat more and more into our private paradises in the hope things will hold together long enough for us to enjoy our retirement and live out our lives. Many of us have had an escapist mentality, insulating ourselves from festering societal ills, and avoiding confronting those who seem to be betraying our deepest values with their absolutist rhetoric. Reluctantly willing to grant sexual explicitness in the name of free speech, we have lacked courage, in the name of free speech, to affirm our faith, and to give witness to our own values for a civilized society.
Notable women have made a difference in our social and ethical history, are making a difference, and can continue to make a difference. So why not mothers and grandmothers of the church?
We need to teach our children the intricacies of racist attitudes and do our best to eradicate bias and prejudice. And this is a task not only for whites, but for blacks, Hispanics, Mid-Easterners, and Asians. The task of promoting understanding, appreciation, and cooperation among the various ethnic and racial groups is a task for us all, but especially for mothers and fathers with impressionable children in their care.
Taking such stands is not always popular, but it is necessary. We Christian parents must be willing to take our share of suffering, to risk mockery and verbal abuse, in order to stand up for greater social justice and equality. We need to find ways for more people to participate in the wealth and good life of our nation, so that the causes for riot and violence will be diminished. But as it stands, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. And most everyone, it seems, can be bought for a few dollars.
The problems of Los Angeles and the nation are great indeed. But close-at-hand, mothers and grandmothers can do something to help our community. One of the biggest problems we have with our youth is drug and alcohol abuse, especially on weekends. Many parents, in search of their own good time, leave their children home alone on weekends, just inviting trouble. Keg parties abound. And young people have no place to go except to the parties.
Churches could make their church buildings a weekend center for youth, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Why not program up with dollars and personnel to lead our young people to happy, healthy weekends where sobriety replaces drunken stupor and where good activities replace sexual promiscuity?
If charity begins at home, if the source of many national ills is to be found in the decay of our own families and communities, why not take hold, and take a stand on our faith, and say, "It doesn't have to be this way." Our young people do not have to be stoned on alcohol and drugs. They do not have to be emotionally abandoned so as to seek love and esteem in premature, premarital sex. They do not have to have their lives at risk with drunken drivers.
Unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases, abortions by the thousands, psychological disorders by the hundreds, do not have to be the norm. Mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, can take a stand. They can find ways to make a difference. They can bring health and wholeness in place of brokenness and disease, because God has given us not a spirit of cringing cowardice, but of courage and power.
We all have a responsibility to pass on our faith and values from generation to generation so that police brutality, racial prejudice, wanton lawlessness, and violence will be a thing of the past.
We can do it -- mothers and the churches, fathers and the community. In an age when nobody but the church is teaching morals and ethics, the church even more needs our support -- in prayers, in participation, and in dollars. Mothers and grandmothers have the responsibility along with fathers and grandfathers to pass on the faith -- from generation to generation.
Prayer
Almighty God, who sometimes seems as distant as the farthest galaxy, and as remote from our problems as an unknown universe, we are yet bold to address you as God and father, for we sense your nearness too. In the awe and wonder, in the beauty and mystery, we sense an intelligence which is more than chance and a presence which is greater than the pulse of life. Be pleased, Almighty God, creator of the universe and sustainer of the tiniest baby's hand, be pleased to draw near to us to satisfy our soul's longing with your presence.
In this special time in history we pray for our women -- the girls, the mothers and grandmothers, the students, the young women unmarried, the divorcees and singles and widows -- women in every stage and circumstance of life.
Be especially close to widows who mourn their beloved, that they might be whole and strong, willing to enter life with their adjusted identity.
Aid those women divorced, that despair may not overcome them, and that new opportunities will open for them to become the persons they really want to be.
For young women seeking careers and marriage, grant the blessing of your Mind and Spirit, that they will choose wisely for happiness and fulfillment.
For wives and mothers struggling with marriage and children, we pray an extra measure of strength, that energy given will not be wasted, but returned in the dividend of healthy, loving children and thoughtful, loving husbands.
And for grandmothers and women grown old with aches and pains, we pray the blessing of your grace. May they be encouraged in their inward beings to be strong, never to lose hope, and to share the wisdom of the years that is theirs.
For women oppressed, we ask liberation; for the poor, sustenance; for the lonely, companionship; for the misunderstood, a sympathetic listener; for the sufferer, healing and relief; for the arrogant, humility; for the rich, compassion; for the powerless, a sense of accomplishment; for the depressed, hope and a sense of worthwhileness.
Grant, O Lord, these favors, that our women might be enhanced in their living and experience the joy and gladness of your kingdom. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Speaking of the Los Angeles riots, a leading national business newspaper said, "Of the thousands of images beamed around the world during ... rioting in Los Angeles, none seemed sadder or more troubling than the spectacle of parents taking their kids with them to loot."
Youngsters, some toddlers and grade schoolers, helped their parents tote away bags and boxes of stolen merchandise. When confronted, they didn't display hatred or angry self-defensiveness. Instead, they gave feeble replies or seemed puzzled by the very nature of the question. They seemed to be neither moral nor immoral -- there was no guilt. Rather, they seemed to be amoral, without any morals at all. Loaded down with merchandise, it was not "shop 'til you drop," but "steal 'til you kneel."
Property buyers in Los Angeles then either delayed or cancelled many purchases. They feared economic downturn, even ruin, in the wake of the riots which left 10,000 buildings torched and damages totaling up to three billion dollars. Many of the buildings and businesses were minority-owned.
One minority storeowner wept over the destruction of his business that had taken him years to build up. Now it was gone -- in a matter of hours; the work of years destroyed in hours.
"This is a disaster for downtown L.A.," said Chuck Lamb, president of the California Association of Realtors. "This is not a race riot -- it's a class riot," said Lamb. It was not so much black against white, as black against black, black against Hispanic, and Hispanic against black, and Koreans and blacks against one another. With 52 dead, and hundreds wounded, and 11,000 arrested, the L.A. riots left an indelible mark on world-consciousness.
Also indelibly marked on the world consciousness was the beating of white truck driver, Reginald Denny. On his way to help a black friend get her car started to get out of the riot area, Denny was pulled from his truck at a stoplight and beaten nearly to death by a gang of four or five, while millions watched on television.
But before that, of course, was the amateur videotape of the L.A. policemen brutally beating the speeding drug addict, Rodney King. What seemed to most of us to be a foregone conviction of police brutality ended up as an unbelievable acquittal. What seemed to be an obvious case of excessive and brutal and perhaps racial use of force was exonerated by a jury convinced by defense attorneys that police were operating within department guidelines. Most of the world found that difficult to believe.
The Rodney King episode opened up again the terrible problems besetting our country. It opened up the awareness that minorities are far more likely to receive unfair and brutal treatment at the hands of police than are majority people. It opened up again the wrenching poverty of many and the terrible economic pressures.
It opened up the frustration of police departments with the rapid rise of violent crime and the early release of violent criminals into our streets. And it opened up the questions of gangs and drugs, and of our community and family structure, and whether or not we have substantial moral backbone to sustain our civilization.
It is appropriate for us to turn our attention to the family, to mothers and fathers, to children and grandparents, to examine whether we are indeed preparing our children with faith and ethics, sound doctrine and morality.
In this Second Letter to Timothy, Paul advises the young minister in Ephesus to remember the faith and morality he had learned from his boyhood from two very significant women -- his grandmother Lois, and his mother Eunice. Paul urges him to remember the faith they passed on to him and to rekindle it for the arduous tasks he faces in sophisticated Ephesus.
The faith of the mothers was to be passed on from generation to generation. Timothy should do two things: stand in the faith, and stand on the faith.
I.
Let's consider first standing in the faith. Remember and rekindle that faith, says Paul to Timothy, and thus to us.
A number of sociologists have observed that Americans seem to be losing a basic moral code and moral fiber. Think of many Wall Street scandals depicted by best-selling titles like Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Barbarians At The Gate. Or consider one political scandal after another coming out of Washington or Albany or New York City or Little Rock, Arkansas. Morality, among many of our financial and political leaders, not to mention sports heroes, celebrities and even televangelists Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker, is sadly lacking.
Charles Colson, one-time aide to President Nixon, now born-again Christian, believes our country is struggling against an onset of barbarism and moral breakdown. We have been cast adrift in the sea of relativism where anything goes if you can get away with it, says Colson. With Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he believes the West is suffering from "spiritual exhaustion."
Then, quoting the pungent British writer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colson affirms, "Having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction (Western man) keeled over, a weary, battered, old Brontosaurus, and became extinct" (Against The Night, p. 23).
The crisis in Western culture is not due to invaders from without, says Colson. No, unlike the Rome of old destroyed by barbarians at the gate, we have invaders from within. "We have," says Colson, "bred them in our families and trained them in our classrooms. They inhabit our legislatures, our courts, our film studios, and our churches" (Ibid., p. 24).
Colson is not alone in his views with the decline of civilized morals and spiritual values in our society. Alan Bloom of the University of Chicago laments what he calls the spiritual vacuum in many American families. Bloom says, "The dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape passes belief" (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 57). Bloom notes that country, religion, family, and the ideas of civilization have lost their compelling force.
University of California sociologist Robert Bellah is in some agreement with Professor Bloom. The relation between parents and children is anomalous. Children, caught up in extreme individualism, develop a certain amnesia with respect to who their parents are, says Bellah. So much so, children forget both ancestors and descendants, and presume to give birth to themselves.
Is it any wonder then that many leaders are calling for a restoration of family values? When President George H. W. Bush visited the riot-torn area of Los Angeles, at a prayer service in a church, he called for faith in the American family to battle the causes of urban unrest. Said the President, "To struggle against hard times, to overcome the devastation of poverty, of racism, or of riots, we need our family. All across this nation, we've got to renew our fight to strengthen the American family. It isn't a burnt-out area in Los Angeles. It isn't California. It is in the entire country."
The President went on to say that "we've got to teach right from wrong. Government cannot do that." And we might add that we can no longer expect our value-neutral educational system to instill ethics, morals, and high principles. We are not getting that teaching from many politicians and business leaders. And many sports heroes and celebrities have been letting us down. "Kids are being raised by TV and their peers," says George Batsche, president of National Association of School Psychologists. "And it's obvious that things have gone awry."
Where then do we turn to learn the values, ethics, morals, and principles that hold a civilization together? We shall have to look to the church and to the family. We shall have to look to the scriptures and to grandmothers and mothers like Lois and Eunice who so influenced Timothy that he influenced millions for good for centuries.
So the challenge is out to you mothers and grandmothers. Have you abandoned responsibility for the faith and moral education of your children? Have you abdicated to television and peer groups? Are your children totally out of control when it comes to moral behavior? Are you setting aside times and opportunities for educating your children in the faith?
Churches, through church school, youth and confirmation programs, through retreats and camps, through seminars and service projects, through worship and fellowship, are directed to teaching the faith and ethics to our young.
But churches need the cooperation of mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, to set priorities, to stand together with the church for the moral education of our young. "The most powerful teacher of values is the parent," says Bennett Levanthal of the University of Chicago Psychiatric Department. So parents and church need to stand together. If we don't do it, who will?
II.
But if we are encouraged with Timothy to stand in the faith, we also are encouraged to stand on it, or to say it another way, to take a stand on it.
Paul says this to Timothy in a number of ways, reminding Timothy that "God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control." He urges Timothy not to be ashamed of his faith but "to take his share of suffering, for the gospel is the power of God." He urges him to follow the pattern of sound words, "to guard the truth that has been entrusted to him."
If Timothy is encouraged to do this, so are mothers and grandmothers. And if within our homes and churches women are to take a stand for morals and ethics, so are they to speak out in the larger society. Paul says that we have not been given a spirit of timidity and fear, but of power to witness to our faith. We are not to be ashamed of the gospel. Nor are we to fear being mocked and vilified by taking a stand for our values.
However, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger thinks many American Christians have precisely that -- a spirit of timidity, or to put it in his words, a "failure of nerve." We Christians keep retreating and retreating and retreating, afraid to affirm our faith, afraid to stand up for our values, afraid to witness to our convictions and beliefs -- afraid, afraid, afraid.
Wanting to avoid unpleasantness, we avoid confrontation and retreat more and more into our private paradises in the hope things will hold together long enough for us to enjoy our retirement and live out our lives. Many of us have had an escapist mentality, insulating ourselves from festering societal ills, and avoiding confronting those who seem to be betraying our deepest values with their absolutist rhetoric. Reluctantly willing to grant sexual explicitness in the name of free speech, we have lacked courage, in the name of free speech, to affirm our faith, and to give witness to our own values for a civilized society.
Notable women have made a difference in our social and ethical history, are making a difference, and can continue to make a difference. So why not mothers and grandmothers of the church?
We need to teach our children the intricacies of racist attitudes and do our best to eradicate bias and prejudice. And this is a task not only for whites, but for blacks, Hispanics, Mid-Easterners, and Asians. The task of promoting understanding, appreciation, and cooperation among the various ethnic and racial groups is a task for us all, but especially for mothers and fathers with impressionable children in their care.
Taking such stands is not always popular, but it is necessary. We Christian parents must be willing to take our share of suffering, to risk mockery and verbal abuse, in order to stand up for greater social justice and equality. We need to find ways for more people to participate in the wealth and good life of our nation, so that the causes for riot and violence will be diminished. But as it stands, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. And most everyone, it seems, can be bought for a few dollars.
The problems of Los Angeles and the nation are great indeed. But close-at-hand, mothers and grandmothers can do something to help our community. One of the biggest problems we have with our youth is drug and alcohol abuse, especially on weekends. Many parents, in search of their own good time, leave their children home alone on weekends, just inviting trouble. Keg parties abound. And young people have no place to go except to the parties.
Churches could make their church buildings a weekend center for youth, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Why not program up with dollars and personnel to lead our young people to happy, healthy weekends where sobriety replaces drunken stupor and where good activities replace sexual promiscuity?
If charity begins at home, if the source of many national ills is to be found in the decay of our own families and communities, why not take hold, and take a stand on our faith, and say, "It doesn't have to be this way." Our young people do not have to be stoned on alcohol and drugs. They do not have to be emotionally abandoned so as to seek love and esteem in premature, premarital sex. They do not have to have their lives at risk with drunken drivers.
Unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases, abortions by the thousands, psychological disorders by the hundreds, do not have to be the norm. Mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers, can take a stand. They can find ways to make a difference. They can bring health and wholeness in place of brokenness and disease, because God has given us not a spirit of cringing cowardice, but of courage and power.
We all have a responsibility to pass on our faith and values from generation to generation so that police brutality, racial prejudice, wanton lawlessness, and violence will be a thing of the past.
We can do it -- mothers and the churches, fathers and the community. In an age when nobody but the church is teaching morals and ethics, the church even more needs our support -- in prayers, in participation, and in dollars. Mothers and grandmothers have the responsibility along with fathers and grandfathers to pass on the faith -- from generation to generation.
Prayer
Almighty God, who sometimes seems as distant as the farthest galaxy, and as remote from our problems as an unknown universe, we are yet bold to address you as God and father, for we sense your nearness too. In the awe and wonder, in the beauty and mystery, we sense an intelligence which is more than chance and a presence which is greater than the pulse of life. Be pleased, Almighty God, creator of the universe and sustainer of the tiniest baby's hand, be pleased to draw near to us to satisfy our soul's longing with your presence.
In this special time in history we pray for our women -- the girls, the mothers and grandmothers, the students, the young women unmarried, the divorcees and singles and widows -- women in every stage and circumstance of life.
Be especially close to widows who mourn their beloved, that they might be whole and strong, willing to enter life with their adjusted identity.
Aid those women divorced, that despair may not overcome them, and that new opportunities will open for them to become the persons they really want to be.
For young women seeking careers and marriage, grant the blessing of your Mind and Spirit, that they will choose wisely for happiness and fulfillment.
For wives and mothers struggling with marriage and children, we pray an extra measure of strength, that energy given will not be wasted, but returned in the dividend of healthy, loving children and thoughtful, loving husbands.
And for grandmothers and women grown old with aches and pains, we pray the blessing of your grace. May they be encouraged in their inward beings to be strong, never to lose hope, and to share the wisdom of the years that is theirs.
For women oppressed, we ask liberation; for the poor, sustenance; for the lonely, companionship; for the misunderstood, a sympathetic listener; for the sufferer, healing and relief; for the arrogant, humility; for the rich, compassion; for the powerless, a sense of accomplishment; for the depressed, hope and a sense of worthwhileness.
Grant, O Lord, these favors, that our women might be enhanced in their living and experience the joy and gladness of your kingdom. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
