My Lesson in Accepting Others
by Kathy Eberlykathy eberly
In November, I published my first book Extraordinary Life Lessons from Ordinary Christian Women. It contains many stories about different women young and old who have impacted my life.
I’ve been privileged enough to meet many famous Christian and non-Christian women—there was the time that I met Judy Martin Hess of the Martins, she told me how to find the restroom at Target Center in Minneapolis, there was the first time I met Lisa Whelchel at Day Set Apart for Women---Her children pummeled my daughter with snowballs. It’s a great picture! There was the time at Women of Faith in 2003 when I worked with Sheila Walsh’s husband Barry manning their booth that whole weekend: just Barry, and my friends Denise and Dawn and me. It was exciting! I got a chance to know him fairly well. On the last day an attractive woman came up and thanked us for helping; asking if she could have her picture with us, “sure” I said thinking, who is this strange woman, only to find out it was Sheila herself.
The first time I saw her she was wearing a mini skirt and singing in church. I don’t recall what the song was but my daughter reminded me just the other day that apparently it was not to my liking. She appeared to be rowdy, disrespectful and just not someone I wanted to know. But my 16 year old son did want to know her. He had decided to take her to the young people’s Valentine’s banquet—apart from banishing him from seeing her or locking my 5”11 son in his room, I didn’t see what I could do. The night of his “big date” I prayed. I prayed hard. I prayed for car trouble to cancel the date. That didn’t happen. Then it came to me. God said to me that I needed to dig deeper than the surface. After all, He had seen all of my flaws and He loved me. She must be in his life for a reason.
So that next morning I went up to Tiffany and her friend Alyssa at church. I put my arms around them, rather forcefully and said, “You are welcome at my house anytime.” I didn’t realize at that moment what those words would do in my life and in theirs. You see; the rest of the story was that Tiffany’s parents were divorced. She was bounced between both parents, her mother had been in prison and there were more details that I hadn’t checked into: things like Tiffany had had cancer since she was 9 years old. Oh sure, I remembered my son saying to pray for Tiffany before I met her but I just hadn’t offered to know.
Suddenly the phone would ring and I would no longer be hearing—“Is Rob there” but instead I would hear, “I need to talk to you. Can you help me?” I would be asked to be her foster parent, to just listen, to hear her cry about the injustices of life.
And then one day the call: “Hi Tiffany! No the kids aren’t here right now! What’s going on?” And I listened as she told me what I feared. The cancer was back. Permanently and would I tell my kids? I remember that day. And the sobs and tears and my heart broke. And the last day when the phone rang in the night to tell me she was with the Lord. Just two days before my birthday. Amazing! It’s hard to explain how much love I had for Tiffany. God grew that love from a cold heart.
The lesson that I learned through this was that God uses whomever He needs to use to teach us a lesson. I Samuel 16:7 states that man looks at the outward appearance but God looks at the heart. I know that because of Tiffany I now try harder to not judge a book by its cover.
Article submitted Monday, March 01, 2010 & read 204 times.
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» left by Fran Larson(40) (151 days 11 hours ago.)
We are all guilty or pre-judging others at one time or another, but I am glad you got a second chance with Tiffany. Good luck with your book!
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