Women Together

For most of our marriage we have found our ministries intertwined. So it was  very natural that when Tracy held a one-day conference for the men of APC, I prepared a conference for the wives as well. 

Assisting Tracy in the conference on APC's core values was Bruce McKanna, pastor of our home church in Illinois. While the men were meeting, Bruce's wife Katie and I shared with the eleven women present about the heart of the godly woman.  Proverbs 4:23, Psalm 1, and the book of Esther formed our Scripture base.


Our time opened with singing, introductions, and a game. Because they were already "breaking the ice" with one another, and due to time constraints, I did away with the ice breaker. BUT, we did play a game, one that highlighted using the memory because later we were going to talk about memorizing Bible verses. During the three minutes they looked at the 20 items on the blanket, their faces were intent on remembering. The winning team recalled 16 items and won a cooking spoon made out of mukwa wood.


Before sharing from Proverbs 4:23 about watching our hearts, my teammate Tricia and I made our acting debut and portrayed what happens when a nine-year old fails to watch the bread carefully. Another visual I used for this verse was showing them what happens when a source of water is clogged up with rags--it dries up. Very much like our spiritual hearts when we don't keep watch and let sins dwell there. 


One way of keeping watch over our hearts is by delighting in God's Word as shown in Psalm 1. I had been trying to kill a Norfolk Island Pine for about a week by denying it water--it looked pretty sad by the time I used it for the conference that day! This led to talking about the importance of memorizing Scripture. Katie had brought over index card ring binders for the ladies as a gift, for which they were grateful. I learned the following day that Pastor Ngosa's wife began memorizing Scripture right after the conference!

Katie tied everything together with illustrations from Esther~the lives of the women Zeresh and Esther. Zeresh, Haman's wife, "fed" her husband poisonous words while Esther wooed her husband. At break time we served the women cookies called "Haman's Ears," which our teammate Andrea had made. A time of application, it reinforced the bad example of Zeresh~what do we pour into our husbands' ears? 

Esther delivered her people and portrayed the true Hero of the book of Esther and the Bible, the Lord Jesus. Katie did a great job drawing this out, one to which I hadn't given a lot of thought. 

God answered prayer that day~our hearts were knit together as women, the ladies were blessed, I remembered most of what I wanted to say, and I didn't fall once! But, that's another story . . .