Standing in God’s Sufficiency

Following my 50th birthday in October, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and praying about aging well. It’s my prayer that as my body  weakens that my spirit and character would strengthen, becoming increasingly beautiful!

For years I’ve been studying the older women around me to see how they’re meeting that goal, and I’ve been inspired by so many.

The excerpt below is from the book proposal I told you about in this post. This is a different Ruth than I wrote about in this post, but I’m starting to think that there’s something powerful carried in that name! 🙂 Here’s an important lesson that I learned from Ruth that I want to attain in my own life:

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I watched our passel of energetic children run outside, and then turned to seek out Ruth.  I found my gray-haired, sparkly-eyed friend in the kitchen cleaning up the mess of our extended families with the rest of the women.  I waited for a moment alone after all the work was done to speak with her.  Ruth, a dear family friend in her eighties, had lost her husband and life-long friend, Sam, the previous October.  I was concerned about her despite her happy demeanor.

“Ruth,” I asked, “how are you really doing?”  She smiled as she explained how she missed Sam every minute of every day, but then she went on to quote her sister who had become a widow years before.  “I have stood in front of my Sunday school class for thirty years and taught about the sufficiency of God.  If I can’t live it out now, what did it really mean?”

I love Ruth.  She’s a woman with a lot of spunk just like me, and she is a person of strong convictions.  She is confident and decisive, but she is weak in all the right places.  She is reliant on God and has found that He is all she needs.  Ruth has practiced depending on God throughout her life, and now she finds her provision, companionship, comfort, and purpose in Him.

How do we become dependent on God?  How can we experience the truth that He is enough in every stage of our life?  How can we battle our culture’s self-fulfillment, me-time, do-what-feels-good, self-actualizing mentality in our quest to become godly women?  In actively observing the lives of women around me, there are some patterns that begin to emerge that are worthy of emulation. These women have found that God is enough.  They have discovered that God is sufficient in every season to help meet every life challenge.

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God alone is sufficient. That’s the way I want to live until my last breath!

What lessons have you learned from the older women around you that you want to live well?