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Timbrel Archives:
Women connecting, ministering, witnessing
Sample articles
From storm's fury to God's eye
New care circles draw new women
No regrets: Imprisoned in cause of
peace
* * * * * * * *
From storm's fury to God's eye
By Laurie
Oswald Robinson
with Elaine W. Good
Timbrel,
May-June 2006
After months of churning in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Donna
Duplessis experienced how prayers of God’s people brought her from the
storm’s fury into the “eye” of God’s healing presence.
Expressions of relief and joy etched once-weary faces Feb. 25 at Pine Lake
Fellowship Camp in Meridian, Miss. It’s when Donna and about 90 other women
received the shawls provided by a Mennonite Women USA Sister-Link project.
“This shawl is the most beautiful reminder of how much God loves us, and
how much God’s people love us,” says Donna, who lost her home in Katrina
and is a member of the badly-flooded Lighthouse Fellowship in Buras, La.
“It always amazes me how the hearts of people so far away are tugged for
the hurting and how much they care and want to provide comfort and support.
Every morning since the retreat, I take the shawl down from where it’s
draped on my closet door and wrap it around me. When I wear it, it is
easier to pray and to feel calm.”
Donna and other women came from hurricane-ravaged areas in southern Louisiana
and Mississippi to the retreat, “Wrapped in God’s Love,” sponsored by
Mennonite Women of Gulf States Conference. They worshipped, shared their
grief and received 170 prayer shawls, knitted and prayed over by women
across Mennonite Church USA who wanted to show solidarity in time of loss.
Elaine Good, past president of Mennonite Women USA (MW USA) and coordinator of the prayer shawl effort, brought the gifts on behalf of MW USA. The organization’s Sister-Link projects connect groups and individuals in relationships to meet needs and strengthen the church locally and globally.
Duplessis and other participants received shawls from Good and Elaine
Maust, retreat speaker and co-pastor of Jubilee Mennonite Church in Meridian.
They wrapped shawls around recipients’ shoulders with hugs and blessings.
“It was such a privilege to be there, seeing how grateful these women were,”
Good says. “I want to say thank you for every one of those prayers. Every
one of those stitches will give much courage and hope to the women who received
them.”
Good and her husband Leon lugged 160 shawls—attached with personal notes
and addresses from the knitters—in the trunk and back seat of their car.
They drove hundreds of miles from their home in Litiz, Pa., to Mississippi.
MW USA groups from the Lancaster and Atlantic Coast area conferences provided
the Good’s travel expenses.
Women from 14 states sent shawls to Good, who received her request of
150 long before the Jan. 31 deadline, and she turned some away. Ten shawls
from Texas also came directly to Maust.
Maust encouraged the women to grasp new hope both through the prayers of
those who knit the shawls and through David’s prayers in the Psalms. She told
stories of how David cried before God.
“If any of you are like me, the last six months you have been sowing in
tears, cooking for work groups in tears, listening to people’s stories
in tears,” Maust said. “We are those who sow in tears but will reap in
joy. ... I imagine David being in a prison, lying on a cot with tears pouring
down his face.
“Yet he could sense God was kneeling down at his cot, catching his tears.
Our tender, gentle God can do anything he pleases, and yet he is tender
enough to catch our tears.”
For reprint permission, contact the editor. See also the Mennonite Church USA article about this Sister-Link or more about prayer shawl ministry).
* * * * * * * *
New care circles draw
new women
By Laurie
Oswald Robinson
Timbrel,
May-June 2006
A card is such a small gesture. But Glenna, a longtime member at Eden Mennonite Church in Moundridge, Kan., hopes it will draw women into connected community; those who have not been part of a close-knit group or younger women who work all day and don’t sew or quilt.
Annie Schrag and others in the women’s mission study group began in 2002 to envision new possibilities for women. The new Women’s Fellowship at Eden began in 2005 with the formation of seven care circles. These circles became an avenue to reach women who may live only a few miles down the road but are far from such a source of caring.
“These new circles give us a new way to really know each other, to care about each other, to pray with each other,” Glenna says. “Whether they choose to attend or not, we want women to know that we care about them and pray for their needs.
“We are in a society that assumes everyone is being taken care of. I think we’ve forgotten how to ask, ‘How are you doing, really?’ We have forgotten how to put our arms around each other and to say, ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ or, ‘I’m sorry you’re sad,’ or ‘I’m very happy for you.’”
The seven care circles make these connections possible. The faciliators who led each group were willing to serve when asked and join with others in their circle group to plan the programs and service projects that engage everyone. Activities range from sharing a meal to visiting the elderly to studying the Bible or a book to tying quilts for Mennonite Central Committee.
No matter what the activity, the circles are meant to foster one-on-one nurturing, spiritual care and connection across generations. [The new care circles] invite women to not only serve with their hands for people around the world but to share their hearts with people at home.
Though this being together is another option for gathering, it is not meant to replace tried-and-true sewing groups, named “Mary Martha” and “Dorcas,” says Annie Schrag, one of the women who helped envision the new circles.
or decades these groups have provided meaningful connection for women, now in their mid-50s through 80s. These groups sew, quilt and do other service projects, and provide meals for such events as funerals.
But a fast-paced 21st-century, coupled with the large size of the congregation, calls for circles that incorporate women of all ages, lifestyles and interests. All the some 200 women at Eden—whether a deeply engaged member, a more loosely-affiliated associate or an occasional Sunday-morning attender—were placed in a circle. Each circle has from 30 to 36 women, though about eight to 10 women attend regularly. Ages range from 20 to 80, and women in existing groups were also placed in a circle.
“Our congregation is so big that one can miss a Sunday morning without anyone knowing,” Annie says. “These smaller circles help us to know when someone is hurting or missing from the congregation.”
Glenna adds, “The circles also provide leadership opportunities for those who may have the gifts but have never been asked. For example, there was one woman I suspected would make a good circle facilitator. After I invited her to consider it, she responded really quickly, ‘You are the first one who has ever personally asked me to do something.’
“Our bulletin invites people to join commissions and committees, but the personal touch can be lacking. The personal touch works well in inviting women to come to a circle.”
Karen Stucky, a 42-year-old working mother and facilitator for Circle Six, is one of the younger women drawn to her group’s flexibility, diversity and intergenerational focus.
“This gives me an opportunity to build relationships in the evening when I can come,” Karen says. “I am so inspired by these women, especially those who are older. There is one former pastor’s wife in our group who has taught me so much.
“And despite our different ages and experiences, we accept each other. There’s lots of love and prayer here. It provides us all with someone to listen—but we also have a lot of laughs, too.”
For reprint permission, contact the editor. See also the Mennonite Church USA article about this Sister-Link).
* * * * * * * *
No regrets:
Imprisoned in cause of peace
By Melanie
Zuercher
Timbrel,
May-June 2004
The year was 2002, the weekend before U.S. Thanksgiving. Sonja had come from her home in Wichita, Kan., to join the annual protest against the School of the Americas (which has been renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at the Ft. Benning Army base.
Since it was established in the 1940s, the SOA/WHISC has trained 60,000 Latin American men in combat skills and psychological warfare, ostensibly “to fight communism in Latin America” and later “to fight the war on drugs.” However, the targets of the military violence perpetrated by SOA graduates have been heavily civilian—“the poorest of the poor and those who advocate for them,” Sonja says.
Sonja, a member of Lorraine Avenue Mennonite Church in Wichita and an associate of Mennonite Church of the Servant there, had heard friends talk about attending the SOA protest but had never gone herself. When she did decide to go, she told her mother, “Don’t worry—I won’t be doing anything that will land me in jail.”
Yet when she arrived at the protest site, Sonja heard people who had chosen to do civil disobedience in the past express doubts about “crossing the line” this year, because of rumors that the judge who would hear their case intended to come down on them as hard as he could.
“I began to think, ‘Somebody has to do this or the government will accomplish its objective in shutting off our voice,’ ” she says. “Losing my job and income didn’t seem like a good enough excuse. I was feeling these nudges from God.
“I woke up at four the morning of the planned civil disobedience, and my mind was crystal clear. I knew God wanted me to do this—I needed to commit to speak out, because I could.”
The single, 53-year-old mother of two grown children went around the fence that separated where you could legally protest and where you could not. Along with others, she was handcuffed and put into one of the waiting buses. She spent one miserable night in a freezing cold stockade before being released on bond the next day.
In February 2003 Sonja had to return to Columbus to stand trial. She was sentenced to three months in Carswell Federal Prison at Ft. Worth, Texas, which she served from May 6 until Aug. 1 of that year.
“The most profound part of this experience,” she says, “is that by my obedience to this difficult request of God’s, my faith grew by leaps and bounds. I learned that when you can’t rely on yourself anymore, God is still there. And God took care of me—not always the way I expected, but I was always taken care of.”
Sonja, a psychiatric nurse at Good Shepherd Hospital in Wichita, fully expected to lose her job when it came time to serve her sentence. But no. “The clinical head of the psych. department was a devout Catholic,” Sonja explains. “She had heard of the School of the Americas, and she felt strongly that she wanted to support me in any way she could.”
The supervisor stood up for Sonja and got her a six-week unpaid leave. And then her co-workers said they would pass around her shifts for the remaining weeks. Today, Sonja still works at Good Shepherd.
Before 1999, Sonja says she had spent many years “not connected to the church, and away from the peace movement.” In 1999, she turned 50, completed a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, and spent the last two months of her father’s life caring for him.
“I began to take stock of my life,” she says. “I decided I wanted to be committed to radically following Jesus. For me, that means a literal commitment that my life belongs to God—my time, my money.”
She has no regrets about her decision to cross the line at Ft. Benning, or the time spent in prison. “I know the power of nonviolent action now, having experienced it—the power of speaking the truth boldly. The truth is, while the president sends the U.S. military to ‘fight terrorism’ in Iraq, we are quietly training terrorists in our own backyard.”
Obeying God’s call, feeling the support of her church community, and “lending myself to the spirit of speaking the truth” have all added up, she says, to “an experience of grace.”
For reprint permission, contact the editor.
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5.31.2006
