When I was a Girl

When I was a girl, more then anything in the world, I wanted to be three things.

A wife

A mother

A teacher

When I was a girl, I would spend hours playing in my room with my Barbie and Ken dolls.  I had elaborate weddings for them.  I would dream about being a wife and living a perfect life. When I grew up I ended up marrying my high school sweetheart, Toby.  Well, if the truth be known, he was my middle school sweetheart.  We dated in middle school for a month and one day, but that romance did not work out.  We decided to be friends until we ended up dating again in high school.  That is until we broke up again.  In fact, he left me at the senior prom.  Yes, he just left me at the prom.  That never happened with Ken and Barbie. But I married him anyways, after he got his act together by spending a little time in the Army.  I was a wife.  

When I was a girl, I would spend hours playing my room with my Cabbage Patch Dolls, they were my children.  I would dream about being a mom, about how perfect it would be.  A year and a half after Toby and I were married we welcomed our first child, Baylee.  Two and a half years later, a second daughter, Emilee came along.   She was a Christmas baby.  About two days after Christmas, Baylee and I came down with awful stomach bugs and fevers.  It was a mess.  Baylee would throw up and then like typical two year old, would feel fine,  run around the house, make a horrible mess with her new toys, just to start feeling sick again in a few hours and start the cycle all over again.  I on the other hand, just felt awful, the whole time.  In fact, when I called the doctor about Baylee I ended up crying on the phone with the nurse because I was terrified that poor little baby Emilee was going to starve because I was dehydrated from all my throwing up and was clearly not going to be able to make enough milk to feed her.  That never happened with my Cabbage Patch Dolls.  We all eventually got our acts together.  And figured out how to live our lives.   I was a mother.

When I was a girl, I would spend hours playing with my stuffed animals.  I was the teacher and they were the students.  I would teach them to read and write.  In school, I struggled, but in my make believe classroom, everyone enjoyed school.  I would dream about being a perfect teacher.  As I raised my beautiful babies I also started to attend college.  I slowly worked my way towards my degree in Elementary Education.  Ten years after I graduated from high school I walked across the stage at UCF and soon started my first teaching position.  Within the first week of teaching I had a child throw a temper tantrum and flip his desk over because he was frustrated.  A few weeks later another child removed his cast from his broken arm so he could beat another student with the cast.  Then there was the child who stabbed his friend with a pencil, just for fun.  This never happened with my stuffed animals.  I eventually found my way and made it though the first year.   I was a teacher.

When I was a girl, more then anything in the world, I wanted to be three things.

A wife

A mother

A teacher

I am still a wife and a mother, but I soon found out that my idea of the kind of teacher I thought I should was different from the teacher God had planned for me to be.  After 5 years in first grade God called me out of the classroom and into the local church.  For me the voice of God came into my classroom over the intercom at the end of the school year.  “Excuse me Mrs. Young, there is a Pastor Dan here to see you”.  Needless to say I was a little worried, pastors don’t come to your work unless someone is dead.  But that was not the case, Pastor Dan was just coming to offer me a job working at the church at the Children’s Director.  At the church, I still got to be a teacher.  I was able to work with children and truly enjoyed the work I was doing but I soon started to feel like maybe God had bigger plans for me then the plans I had when I was a little girl.

I never dreamed I could go Seminary, as a little girl I didn’t know women could be pastors.

So off to school I went, a Master of Divinity I earned, a pastor I became, and a pastor is a type of teacher.

A wife, a mother, a teacher.  That is me.

Video Eblast for Sunday, January 21, 2018