I am finally opening to the heart of the message of The Elijah’s Mantle series. In the chronology of Elijah and Elisha’s story of A Mentor and His Apprentice, there is an 8 year gap of information of Elisha and his apprenticeship. The power of Elijah wasn’t in his mantle, it was in the faith and relationship with Yahweh that Elijah was teaching Elisha. Elijah taught Elisha how to walk in faith daily, so that when Elijah eventually dropped his mantle (symbolic of the power of God he carried through his faith and experience), Elisha would know what to do with it.

This doesn’t just apply to prophets-in-training. It applies to women of faith encouraging each other. We might not have eight years of apprenticeship with one woman of faith – in a 24-7 way that Elisha did, but God has maybe uniquely designed women to mentor each other – one mantle at a time, so that eventually we have a closet full of mantles of the many lessons imparted to us as we grow in relationship to our Savior, our Creator, and the Holy Spirit.

I want you to start thinking about the mantles you have in the closet of your soul – the apprenticeships you have experienced – that have grown your God-designed story apprenticeship by apprenticeship, mentoring experience by mentoring experience. Below is a mantle fitted for a child. It would be years before the knowledge contained in the mantle could be worn with comfort and wisdom. It is more of a kindness mantle than a faith mantle, but those are needed in our soul closet, too.

I grew up on Main Street of a small town that has since been pulled into the boundaries of a fast-paced city. Once, though, it was small-town America where the milkman tucked cool pints of sweating milk bottles into galvanized metal boxes in early morning deliveries. Front porch swings and rocking chairs were as important during the warm months as the lazy-boy chairs by the fireplace in the cold, blustery months. Backyards firs, pink dogwoods, iris beds, forsythia, and white azaleas provided plenty of opportunities to amuse children.

Jump a fence; climb a tree – we were homespun; we were free. . . Even at five and six years old.

One 6-year-old morning, peering through backyard hedges, I was caught, spell-bound, watching an argument unfold between Laura Mae and her widowed sister. The argument was about boundaries. Ms. Schindler was responsible for the inside work. Outside work was Laura Mae’s province.

That morning, breakfast finished, the milk collected from its box, Laura Mae looked up at her sister standing on the back porch, looking down. They were refined little ladies. Laura Mae in her neat dress, with her stockings rolled down around her ankles, vexed for her mowing to be so interrupted. As a row erupted between the sisters, Laura Mae seemed to lean into her mower – the authentic old-fashioned kind – with a wooden handle, cast iron, pressed steel, with a rear wheel and cutting cylinder – no gas. no oil. Powered by plain grit and determination.

I tried mowing one of those mowers once in later years. After five minutes, I was totally depleted and exhausted at the effort, not able to match Laura Mae’s strength nor stamina.

Robert Frost might believe that “good fences make for good neighbors,” but a strategicly stacked flowerbed with enough room in-between rows of grandmotherly flowers built up to to the height of, oh, say, a six year old – well, that makes for good neighbors, too – depending on where you’re standing and what’s going on.

That morning, I watched Laura Mae and Ms. Schindler bicker. I stood in the in-between rows of grandmotherly flowers totally enthralled. . . until they noticed me in the bloomed-out patch of tall flowers grandfather had planted for grandmother. The two ladies stopped immediately, calling out a friendly, southern, “Mornin’ Maryleigh.”

I muttered a “Good Morning” and ran, mortified.

In-between The Moment of Great Mortification and the next 12 years, there wasn’t much interaction between my grandmother’s house where my mom, brother, and I lived and Laura Mae’s house. A few times I overcame my shyness to visit, sit on their front porch in their pink wooden rockers and talk a while.

I grew past bee catching and porch-wall climbing as seasons turned. Ms. Schindler died and Laura Mae was left alone in her parent’s Victorian house with blue-and-white-tiled fireplaces, ornate trim, and black walnut woodwork. In the dining room, stained glass glittering around the clear windows. In the winter, the bare forsythia allowed her to watch us eat dinner around the kitchen table. Grandmother fried the chicken. Mom made the gravy. I set the table and cleaned the kitchen. My brother was in charge of the garbage and kindling for when we needed a fire.

In the summer, the stairwell window allowed Laura Mae to sit, watching all the comings and goings, teen antics with my friends, still picking violets, surprise parties, dates, proms. – and me mowing our yard. Maybe she watched me mow the lawn with the gas-powered mower, or ride my bicycle up to my front porch after work, letting it drop on the ground, as I ran up the porch steps, and the front porch door slapped shut behind me.

I don’t know how much time she spent in that stairwell watching us or if any of the scenes from her view created a story that warmed her heart or made her cry, or maybe made her lonelier. I imagine she saw a lot of expressions cross my face – the good, the bad, and the ugly, probably.

We saw less and less of Laura Mae. One night someone through a brick through her kitchen window by our forsythias. She called us before she called the police.

One day shortly before I graduated from high school, Laura Mae, now 80, called my grandmother. She wanted me to come sit with her. She was dying and afraid. She didn’t want to be alone.

“She wants you to come sit with her,” my grandmother said. “She thinks she’s dying and doesn’t want to be alone.”

The literalist in me was terrified. Could she actually die while I was there?

I walked across Grandmother’s front yard, crossed the driveway, walked through her yard, up the steps, opening the porch door and stepped into the porch. Grandmother had told me to just go in, but I knocked anyway before I opened the door and stepped into the house.

I’d never been in her house before. Her bed had been moved down to the sitting room. There was a window, but the room was a dark, lonely-looking room. It must have been a house bustling with life at one time, when Laura Mae and her two sisters had been young, or when her nephew had come to live when my mom was growing up. It was an empty, lonely house now. Laura Mae was its story-keeper.

She’d called me over to share one of its stories. . . her story, her biggest regret.

Tucked into her bed in the downstairs sitting room, she told me her story, a “My-life-is-not-my-own” story that needed passing down. A young man turned away because she was expected to take care of her parents. A life turned away – no children, no husband – because her parents chose a different path for her. Oh, how she regretted that. She did not want me to make that same mistake; she feared I would stay home and take care of my mother and grandmother. She wanted me to live life overflowing.

“Don’t do what I did,” Laura Mae told me.

 Live. Experience. Learn. Pass it Down.

For that one or two hours that afternoon, Laura Mae was the mentor and I her apprentice.

She was a woman alone who for those few hours was no longer alone.

She wanted to fulfill the soul’s desire to pass down something of herself in a way that would impact a life for good.

She wanted to be an Elijah to my Elisha, a Naomi to my Ruth, an Elizabeth to my Mary.

I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good apprentice. I didn’t stick close to her like Elisha did Elijah, or Ruth did to Naomi. I didn’t have the wisdom to be a Mary to her Elizabeth, though our age gap was probably similar. Yet, the only mantle she had, she threw on me that day in the late Spring before I graduated and left home. It is a story that I have carried with me – and the poignancy of it, the missed opportunity of my younger self has impacted the wife, the mother, the grandmother I have become, the neighbor I have become.

I would like for her to have taught me how to mow a lawn with a true push mower without wilting after one row. Maybe she taught me to be braver, to push aside shyness, take a risk that maybe a neighbor doesn’t want a friendly porch-sit. . . but maybe they desperately need one.

I didn’t reject her mantle. I kept it. . . until I knew what to do with it.

Elisha had eight years with Elijah. I had only a few hours. Elisha stayed close to Elijah until God’s chariots carried him away – and he picked up Elijah’s mantle. Because of those eight years, Elisha knew the stories, knew the lessons in the stories, knew what to do with the mantle thrown down.

I did not know what to do with the mantle Laura Mae offered me. . .but I do know that I did not reject it.

Elisha had the opportunity to not pick up Elijah’s mantle. Ruth was offered the opportunity by Naomi to not pick up her mantle. Ruth’s sister-in-law declined the offer. Mary could have thought, “What can an older expectant mother have in common with me?” and because of the age difference, not spend time with Elizabeth.

We all have the choice. . . to spend time with the teller of soul stories. . . Elisha would have missed a double portion blessing if he had left the side of the teller of soul stories.

At home when asked about it, I talked about the story of her beau and how she turned him down, but I didn’t go further. A few months later, I went away to college, fell in love with a red-headed engineer, and God led us to a little mountain in Tennessee. I took Laura Mae’s story with me. The older I get, the more I understand the risk she took, the overwhelming desire of her heart to pour into someone else, to pass down a meaningful message in a story is really what living is all about, that is what we are designed to do. All the better when our stories point to God and his faithfulness.

Maybe the message of her Laura Mae’s mantle is the importance of risking rejection in order to comfort a soul. My shyness was born out of a fear of rejection, of a “Don’t be comin’ round here.’ Growing up, maybe I needed to have walked over to sit on her porch more, rock in her pink rocker or pink swing a bit. Maybe she saw that I needed strength and courage to move past that fear of rejection, of doing the wrong thing, of getting into trouble for putting a step seemingly wrong. I think she was not wanting me to live a life not regretting I had lived more, loved more, experienced more.

Rejection is a risk God wants us to take if it means saving a soul or encouraging a soul.

Laura Mae was a woman alone left. Her broom tree moment might have been in a stairwell – and her mentorship was a few hours with a bed-side apprentice. She took a risk, calling for an 18 year old to come sit by her bed and listen to her soul-story, the one she pulled out of a lifetime of stories with which to mentor a life.

I am blessed to have one of Laura Mae’s stories, one that is a mantle in the closet of my soul, one that encouraged me to be brave, to take risks.

What mantles are in the closet of your soul? Did you also have to willingly take it up? Or are there some you have left behind?

Remember Me Monday: #110 Link-up

“I’ll make a list of God’s gracious dealings,
    all the things God has done that need praising,
All the generous bounties of God,
    his great goodness to the family of Israel—
Compassion lavished,
.    love extravagant.”
~ Isaiah 63:7, The Message

In the Old Testament, God repeatedly, quietly and loudly, tells his children, “You have forgotten me!”  (Jeremiah 3:32, Ezekiel 22:12, to name a few). It’s a heart cry from a father to a child who has forgotten all the love, all the saving, helping, little and big blessings – and it leaves me stunned when I realize our Father, the creator of the universe, who knows things I cannot begin to fathom, who authors storylines that leave me amazed, delights in all of us so much, He cries out, “Remember Me.”

While every day is a Remember God Day, I am inviting you to join me on Monday mornings to come by and remember what God has done for you, for your family. Maybe God sent a cardinal darting out in front of you, as if to tell you, “I’m here,” or broke a child’s fever after you laid it all down at His feet in a 2 a.m. bedside vigil. Maybe He stood with you in the wait of a prayer sent out, or brought someone you loved to Christ. Maybe He healed your broken heart, gave your courage, or you gave Him your dreams as a love offering only to have Him give them back in an unimaginable way. Maybe God helped you survive to bedtime after a crazy Monday, or forgive yourself for missing it with your kiddos –– Whatever it is, let’s Remember Him. . . in a “Remember Me Monday” love letter.

“My mouth will tell of your righteousness,
Of your salvation all the day long,
Though I know not its measure.
I will come and proclaim your mighty acts, O Sovereign Lord”
~ Psalm 71:15-16.

Let us delight in Him by telling the  stories of what He’s done!  If you wrote a blog post remembering what He’s done for you, join the linky. If you didn’t but still want to praise Him for what He’s done – write it in the comment section. Then visit a comment before or after yours! One of the beautiful things about the blogging community is the relationships it builds!

Rules?  Write long or short, a list or a story, include photos or not. Just Remember Him and what He has done, and let the gratitude of your heart guide you. Let’s make Monday so Rejoice, that the goodness of God spills into the rest of the week! (Link opens Mondays at 6 a.m.)

Places I’m Linking at This Week:
  Instaencouragements, Legacy Link-Up, 
Recharge Wednesday, Scripture & a Snapshot
 Grace&Truth, Sweet Tea & Friends
Let’s Have Coffee Wednesday