Mother and Daughter Retreats

I'm gasping with a mixture of shock and panic as Briana's 17th birthday quickly approaches.  Sometimes in the back of my mind I hear a rushing, repetitive refrain:  one more year, one more year.  One more year until she is 18; one more year of high school; one more year until she is able to vote and be considered an adult.

This last year, 2012, even with its busyness and many changes, was a good year for the two of us as we twice got to slip away for some mother/daughter time while being surrounded by friends and immersed in the Word.

We had the wonderful opportunity to go to a Bright Lights conference, a ministry of older girls discipling younger girls created by Sarah Mally, with some longtime friends from Missouri.  This mother and I began the homeschooling journey together with our firstborn daughters as they started kindergarten twelve years ago.

Our daughters have also become close friends over the years and attending the conference together was especially sweet as we had so recently moved away from this support system.

The conference was incredibly encouraging and focused a lot on developing RADIANT purity--purity comprised not of a list of rules, not mandated by parents, but from a desire to bring glory to God.  They brought their message through straight-talking Scripture, personal stories and examples, and entertaining skits.

My favorite part was Sarah Mally's chalk drawings.  As she taught how to be a young woman who trusts the Lord, she drew on a large board with chalks.  She's quite a gifted artist and filled in the entire sheet with all sorts of colors, but most of the time it just looked like a big blob.  It was impossible for me to figure out what she was making as she seemed to randomly grab this color, then that and randomly shade in the left side, then the right.

At one point it was still without identifiable form but the colors were so beautiful and then it looked like she was actually destroying the picture as she seemed to scribble over it with dark colors!  As she continued speaking about trusting God--with our futures, with our purity, with our dreams and struggles--a beautiful picture finally took shape. 

As a person whose stick people are barely recognizable as such, I was quite impressed with her artistic ability.  But I have to admit I was even more impressed at the subtle message she illustrated.  We, too, are beautiful works of art in progress in the hand of the most gifted Artist of all.  We can't see the end picture.  We don't understand why this color is being used in our lives right now, or why work is being done on the left side when the right side is clearly unfinished.  We might even have times of horror in our lives when we think we are starting to look pretty good and that beauty is seemingly ruined by harsh black strokes.

But just as Sarah had a plan and a vision for her final product, so does our Master have a vision and a purpose for us.  Not one brushstroke is wasted--each is purposeful to be used in creating the final masterpiece as He conforms us into His image.