As a nanny team working with preteen and teenage girls, the New Faith Family crew has a truly unique opportunity. Short-term mission teams and sponsors frequent the JAZ home, so the girls are accustomed to people coming and going. But this nanny team gets to stay. Two months is short (and grower shorter every day), but it was long enough for Nehemiah to rebuild the city gates, and it is long enough to develop genuine, trusting relationships with the Angels. We are all learning an unexpected lesson about the Angels: sometimes love says "no." At first the girls were all beautiful, sweet, and we bent over backward to keep them happy. Two weeks later, they are still beautiful and sweet, but "yes" is not always best for them. Part of the nannies' relationship with the Angels will involve discipline - teaching them to wait, to do their own long-division problems, to set healthy boundaries. Not as parents, but as caregivers and mentors and women of God who dearly love them.
If you love someone, you don't feed them ice cream for every meal just because they ask. There have to be some vegetables involved.
And we pray that we would be ever mindful of the why of discipline, of "no," of "wait" - God disciplines us, his children. He does it for our good. He does it out of love. He grows us slowly, patiently, and wisely. He waits out our whining when we are toddlers in the faith so that one day we will be mature sons and daughters.
Proverbs 3.12 - "the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he received."
Hebrews 12.11 - "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it."
Our prayer is we would take the Lord's discipline seriously and delight that He grows us in love - that it would produce righteous fruit in the lives of all who spend time at the JAZ home, and that the Angels would learn to accept and love His discipline in the same way. Pray that they would grow to be mature women of God, lacking nothing!