Inner Delight

Confronting and overcoming obstacles while sitting around a dining room table this past Saturday wasn’t about the food. In fact, that peppermint popcorn? Yum! The only obstacle between those kernels of buttery sweetness and my mouth was having only two hands to deliver them. What I’m talking about transpired with a small group of women who’re responding to God calling them to write…to write their stories, explore ideas together and share them with others, learning how to do that effectively. There are casserole-sized doubts and pressure cookers of misgivings and feelings of lack in each of us. As we opened our hearts we found serving platters of encouragement, affirmation, camaraderie, and strength, with a smorgasbord of humor on the side. And I came away with a feeling that I’ve struggled to identify. 

It is a sense of something special and wonderful happening, like when you’ve got the soup kettle on the stove,

and the ingredients are starting to simmer, smelling absolutely heavenly and promising. It finally came to me as I journaled later. I'm calling it "inner delight" and it lines up with a prophetic word given to me quite awhile back. 

It was about 30 years ago; I was attending a women's Bible study in a small church with a friend. During the small group discussion and prayer time, one of the women said that she had a "vision" pertaining to me. She “saw” me leading/teaching/mentoring women in some way. At the time I kind of scoffed at the idea, being a busy wife and mom raising four kids and I couldn't imagine women wanting to follow me anywhere or listen to anything I had to say. And this whole idea of “prophetic vision”? Lets just say it was a dish I was dubious about sampling.

Looking back I can see how God has led me through doors that I wasn't expecting, stage right and stage left and behind the scenes, has brought me through a variety of experiences, including leadership training and positions, and now He shines a light on this particular spot, the spot He intended all along. The inner delight that comes of being where He has called and prepared me to be as He overlooked

my initial scoffing, and the knowledge that He gave me the desire of my heart—His recipe for inner delight. Could be the woman in that Bible study group had a preview glimpse of it for me.

And these women I am privileged now to sit with at a table are ladling out all kinds of tasty words to savor.

Mad Hatter

I’ll bet some of you are wondering if there is any significance to me wearing a hat in my blog photo. Why, yes. There IS a story behind that. Would you like me to tell you? Okay, I will.

Hats intrigue me although for a long time I hated ‘em. Growing up I heard a lot of dogmatic teaching on 1 Corinthians 11, which talks about hats, you know.

Did you know that a hat can be a harmful weapon? Sad but true. My own hat was used as a weapon against me one time.

The church I was raised in taught that 1 Corinthians insists women must wear hats—head coverings, whenever they are assembled to worship the Lord in a gathering of believers. We were also admonished that women must never cut their hair. One hot summer Sunday morning, as was the current fashion in 1971, I arranged my long hair into an upsweep with a curly wiglet on top. And then discovered to my frustration none of my usual hats would fit. So I grabbed a bright yellow triangular shaped scarf with fluttery fabric petals all over it, covered my hair entirely with it and tied it in a neat bow at the back. Now I’d heard a rumor that our senior elder’s wife disapproved of this type of head covering but since I thought it inappropriate to believe rumors and she had never personally told me this, I merely discounted the rumor and went off to church. I mean, my hair was completely covered, which was the whole idea, right?

           

No sooner had I sat down but I noticed our senior elder’s wife leaning over to him and whispering something to him while glaring angrily at me. He immediately jumped up, strode over to stand in front of me and in a stage whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, said, “How dare you come to the Lord’s table with such a hat on! You go home right now and change it.”

           

As you can imagine I was humiliated and mortified. And rather indignant, too! Instead of going home, I went to a nearby park and cried for two hours. My feelings were crushed.

           

I did get an apology of sorts a few days later as in “IF I offended you, sister, I’m sorry” but it was the beginning of the end for me at that church. No disclosure was ever given as to why that particular head covering was so offensive, and let me tell you, the hats worn by many of the women were by no means unostentatious.

A couple years later I left that sect and didn’t wear hats for a long time, except for my wedding. I finally realized a few years ago that hats appeal to me; hats are cute and fun, so why not wear them because my joyfulness is expressed when I wear one. And no worries about offending someone if I don’t wear one or wear the ‘wrong’ one. I’m pretty sure my praises to God are acceptable whether I’m wearing a hat or not.

           

It was really rather silly, don’t you think? Good thing there’s forgiveness for silly because I know I’ve been silly a time or two about stuff that doesn’t matter. And I’ve worked at forgiving the mad hatter as well.

And now I collect hats. Don’t have a huge collection—hats tend to take up space, you know, when they’re not covering up the space between my two ears, so I haven’t gone overboard amassing them. Only have about two dozen that I store in hat boxes. Occasionally I give one an outing. Here are a couple more photos of me joyfully doing so. 

This cute little cocktail hat was given to my daughter by an aunt. My daughter passed it on to me for safekeeping.

Although I never go out for cocktails, I feel rather flirty with the feather and veil in place.