Question of the Issue:  How has God discipled you, or is using you to disciple others?
 
From Oak Harbor, WA
 
Jesus, My Discipler
 
I was raised in a home where Jesus was proclaimed as Savior and Lord, but it was also a home where there was a degree of isolation.  Having a mentor was not the way of life.
 
As a young adult I came to the conclusion that there was no other way to live my life and make decisions but with Jesus as my savior and following the ways of God.  I found myself in places that did not lend themselves to having a human mentor.  God was my mentor.  Jesus was my mentor.  When I needed advice there was no “Titus woman” to teach me how to live and love.  However, God was always there with His Spirit and His word to lead me down the path He had for me.  His word says that He will be a light to my feet, a lamp to my path.  Sometimes I felt like the light was a bit dim and the pathway very foreign, but He always showed up to hold me as I made my way over the various bumps and valleys on that path.
 
In the absence of a human mentor, I would regularly call out to God and He would show Himself through His word, a sermon I would hear, or the voice of a friend.  As I continued to make His word important and literal, the journey became more and more steady.  I began to more and more trust the One who was guiding me.  I remember dealing with issues in the early 70’s that really shook my world.  But after calling out to God, doing the best I could to obey Him and moving forward with what I understood, my world began to “shake” less often.  Another way to explain it would be to say that when I first made the decision to let Jesus lead me I knew I was standing on the Rock, but during difficult times I felt like I got shaken off the Rock.  The more I walked and talked with Him, listening and taking His advice, that Rock became solid and I didn’t get shaken off it.  It became a solid resting place.
 
One of the wonderful things God did as my mentor and discipler was to bring me a very good friend.  A woman my own age who was growing and living through difficult times.  A woman, like myself, who knew there was no other way to walk but with God.  We were a comfort to one another as we grew in the knowledge of who God was and as we walked the path we had chosen in life.  The one thing that God did in that relationship was to keep us from becoming too dependent on one another.  He let us have a most wonderful, close friendship, but every once in a while He would separate us.  It was as if He was making sure we stayed reliant on Him and Him alone, not on each other as sisters.
 
As a teenager I chose to marry a man who was unable to walk closely with the Lord.  Because of woundings in his life he continually fell into various sins.  I was very young and walking in many unhealthy understandings, but each time I would call to the Lord for wisdom and understanding He would move me a little closer to health.  He would let me understand that I was making unhealthy choices and He would show me how to make the healthy choice.
 
I remember one time when my husband called me in the middle of the night.  He had spent the evening drinking alcohol at the local tavern and had ended up not having a way to get home.  He asked if I would come and get him.  I woke my two small children up, put them in the car, and went to where he was to bring him home.  The whole time I was doing this I was thinking, “This can’t be right.  I want to help him.  I want to be submissive.  I want to obey him.  But this can’t be a healthy situation.  I don’t know what to do.”

The next time he called me in the middle of the night to come and pick him up because he was too drunk to get home, I woke the children up, put them in the car and went to where he was.  This time I was thinking, “I HATE this!  This is unfair.  This is not right for the children.  This is not right for me.  How can this possibly fit in with submission and loving help when I feel so hateful about doing this?”
The third time it happened God finally got through to me that this was a terribly unhealthy behavior that I was doing.  I came to realize that if I was being asked to do something that made me feel so hateful and resentful, I needed to be able to talk to God about it.  But I also needed to be able to say, “No, I am unable to help you out in this area.”

The next day I talked to my husband and told him the understanding I had come to.  I told him that if he called me in the middle of the night that I would be unable to come and pick him up.  He would have to be responsible as an adult to get himself home.

Well, you can be sure he called me to come pick him up within a short period of time after making that declaration.  It was with much fear and anxiousness that I did not bend to the unhealthy decision to help him out of an action caused by his own lack of responsibility.  I stood my ground and told him over the phone that he would have to find his own way home.  He called back a couple hours later.  He had proceeded from one tavern to another.  Instead of being 10 minutes away from home he was now 30 minutes away from home and was asking me to come and pick him up, PLEASE.  Well, I had to laugh.  And I did laugh.  And the fear and anxiousness fell away.  It struck me as extremely funny that he had found a way to get even further away from home in his drinking ventures.  Initially he had been only 10 minutes away.  Now he was 30 minutes away.  Somehow he had managed to find a ride.  It just wasn’t to the right place.  
 
This is a long anecdote, but the lesson was so helpful and liberating.  We have many books on the Christian bookstore shelves about “Boundaries,” these days.  I didn’t have the benefit of reading them.  God helped me learn how to establish boundaries through events like this and many others.  He taught me that what I thought was love was sometimes helping other people be irresponsible.  He taught me that sometimes for my own health and the health of my children there needed to be boundaries of respect and love that were kept.  That might mean having to go through a period of confrontation, which we all dislike.  But the benefit of not experiencing hateful and sinful emotions by understanding God’s view is so wonderfully freeing that the confrontation is totally worth the effort.

As I would have questions about how to live the life I was in, God would take me to verses in the Bible that would show me what to do.  He always encouraged me to stay meeting with other people who believed there was no other way to live except to be directed by Him.
 
Submitted by: Amanda Eerkes

This is part 1 of Amanda’s submission.  She and her husband, Ron , pastor New Covenant Foursquare Church in Oak Harbor, WA.