With Mother's Day just behind us, I found myself remembering a gathering we went to in Minneapolis MN in February of 2018 to hear Judith Franklin speak. She was the personal assistant to Pastor Bill Johnson from Bethel Church in CA and was speaking about God's love, and she was also sharing her gifts of visual encounters and prophetic words with the audience. Joel had read one of her books and I, another, so we both were interested in hearing what she had to share.
Towards the end of the session, while she was speaking, she suddenly pointed her finger, looking at me, and began to speak. I actually looked behind me to see who she was talking to, and she let me know it was me she wanted to address.
She said, "I have been looking at you and speaking to you the whole night. You have a tender heart for others. You do hold back with it some. You have a lot of wisdom to teach people. I could learn so much from you. If I ever needed a hug I would come to you. I wish you could be my mother. I'm your age, but I wish you were my mother. So much love. Just keep loving others."
While she was speaking, I found myself arguing with her in my head! I kept thinking, she does not really know me.........And certainly she was wrong about wanting me to be her mother. I said nothing out loud, but later shared my thoughts with Joel. He reminded me that God was speaking through Judy and I needed to receive the words spoken over me, embrace them, and step into what God was seeing in me.
It took me time to to absorb these prophetic words that came from an author I looked up to, and I expect I am still in the process of embracing them. What I have come to realize, though, is that God sees us through eyes of love. He sees His children and what we can be, desire to be, even what we are.. He loves us and delights in us. He finds us amazing, and He dotes on us, His children, and sometimes we forget that.
So, how do we see our children? One of our daughters says that we are our kids biggest cheerleaders. Still, we can get caught up in the parenting and the challenges that come from raising kids to wholeness, and end up seeing only the negative. But God........ God truly wants us to see the good. We don't deny the rest of it all, but God truly wants us to speak over our kids, our grands, our families that which is good and love on them. He wants us to see the good even while there may be some "ugly" going on.
Too often we are hard on ourselves, so maybe we also need to look in the mirror, reflecting back what God sees. Maybe we need to see that we are enough, we are good. Maybe we need to embrace what God says about us through His Word and through the words of others.
What stands out for me right now in Judy Franklin's words is one short sentence. "Just keep loving others". Lately when watching the news, when listening to our elected officials speak hate and division, when social media promotes the negative, this message needs to be spoken. Just keep loving others. Maybe when famil,y is saying and doing things we don't agree with, .or we are ourselves behaving badly....... we need to hear it, we need to do it.........Just keep loving others.
Just Keep Loving Others
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