Thistle Farms - Becca Stevens on Practically Divine

One minute you’re an adult, and in a flash, your mother’s old sayings strike through time, crash through hours of therapy, and ring inside your head.
Just thinking about mom brings waves of sayings into my consciousness. It makes me wonder if she’s sitting on a cloud above my head, throwing sayings like lightning bolts to keep me on track.
“You need to set goals for each day,” I can hear her saying when I was a teenager, above the hum of her vacuum at 6 AM on Saturday mornings. She ran the machine around my bed like an alarm.
“Do you think laundry does itself?” might be the next sentence coming from her overworked and financially strapped lips.
She found the divine in the practical. Her theology was simple, pragmatic phrases that stick with me like sitcom theme song lyrics.
“We are dirt and angels,” she’d muse during the chores of keeping a family afloat on less than a living wage. There were no retreats or vacations. Just sweet, practical ways of finding wonder and joy.
“Don’t make me come in there,” I can hear her yelling. Why would I do that? I remember thinking. That would be ridiculous since you are in a bad mood and I haven’t done whatever I was supposed to.
“You made your bed,” meaning no matter the situation, don’t complain, because you got yourself into it. Now it’s time to deal with it.
“Who promised you fair?” was her answer when someone whined.
“People can’t make you feel anything. How you feel is your choice,” she’d say if something happened at school.
Dear Lord, Mom. So much advice for a kid.
Things fell apart in our family after a drunk driver killed our dad and left us poor and vulnerable. The traumas that followed were layered like cake tiers - held together by filmy sheer will and a bunch of tried-and-true sayings.
Mom did keep us together, and now I think those sayings were as much for her as they were for us. She was a practical, thirty-five-year-old widow who threw her beloved sayings out to us like an inheritance.
I can be sitting in a meeting or preaching a sermon or talking with my own children, and those sayings pop into my head. It’s all I can do to not say them out loud.
#PracticallyDivine
BeccaStevens.org

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there aren't too many people I can Trust so thoroughly and with such ease. and It Is Still almost impossible for me to explain how much that means to me today. I am sorry for much of my disrespect. you know what I mean? I love you Lady.

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