Lara Daniels

 

 Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves ~Zig Ziglar

 I hadn’t been too keen in coming to that hell-hole, but Badmus promised that if I came, I would get lucky.

 “But at the cost of what?” I’d asked skeptically, on our way to see the much talked about witch doctor. “Money can’t buy happiness.” 

“At the cost of everything I have now, jare,” he’d replied in irritation. “Look Raymond, it’s only stupid people that say money can’t buy happiness. Me, I say give me money and you’ll see that I’ll be happy.”

 I had mentally shaken my head in disagreement, too unconfident to argue openly that he was wrong. He knew I’d been too poor for so long to say anything in favor of waiting for God to change the tide. 

My doubts about our quest increased the moment we reached Baba’s…

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For Mom, on her Birthday

Eloquence has a funny way of departing when you most need it, just like right now as I sit here thinking of God’s goodness: his gift of you to me to be the woman who birthed me; mentored me; taught me the importance of hard work and self respect; and the need to love God with all my heart. You are the woman I proudly call Mom. You are forever irreplaceable.

And I do not blame eloquence’ disappearance for it is only fair for it to depart since joyful excitement has possessed my emotions as I reflect on the fact that you clock 60 today.  

Scriptures says of you that your Children will rise up and call you blessed, and though you are already blessed because of Christ’s special love for you, I still rise up and shout along with my siblings and their children that you are Blessed.  

Happy Birthday Mom. Praying for Long life, Health, sound mind, Joy, Peace and every good thing you wish for to engulf you from now on and for the many more years that your heavenly Father has given you and Dad.

I love you.

Happy birthday.

How God says “Wassup”

I’ve written about my Niece before.  Her name is Morin and she’s this little cutie, now age 6 with the wisdom of a 93 year old. Honestly, the things this girl spews out of her mouth….it leaves me completely baffled.  Anyway, here’s something she did recently that I read off my sister’s (her Mom’s) post on Facebook.

The story goes that Morin was reading her ‘handbook’ aka the mysterious bible on the palm of her hand(which, by the way, only she can see) and she goes, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will SUP with him…..”

The word SUP has her mom curious, so she interrupts her to ask, “What does SUP mean?”

And Morin, ever the confident diva goes, “It means Jesus wants to say “What’s up?”

So here I am, imagining a scene of the Heavenly Father nodding his head hiphop style and going, “My son/Daughter, Wassup?”  And methinks it’s a believable, realistic scene of God because you know what? He’s just cool like that :). Infact, He invented cool.

So the next time you hear the word SUP from your heavenly Father, perhaps during your quiet moments with Him. don’t be alarmed. It’s just God checking up on you.

Have an awesome 2012 full of God’s SUPs :). I know I will.

To be a Stay home mom versus a Career woman

Just recently, I was reading an article posted on Femme Lounge about mommies deciding to go to work or stay at home. Quite understandably, the issue of the woman choosing her career versus being a stay home mom has been one that has plagued women since the beginning of the industrialization era. Emotions of guilt and sympathy for the baby frequently surfaces when the mom has to leave her baby to go back to work. I remember the dark teary emotions that suffused me the  day I had to resume work after six weeks maternity leave (Yes, I did say six weeks, because that’s all you get in the US of A). It was extremely tough leaving my baby to the care of my hubby (who by the way had a good job as well). I didn’t want to go back to work, but I had to if I wanted my family to have health insurance as my husband’s job did not provide this benefit for their employees.

Now, while I do not have any easy answers to the question of if a woman should stay home or go to work, I do have this to say: Our world has become more complex in the past years…with challenges of economic recessions and the like. More and more women are being required to go back to work, so they can support their families. The reality is that few jobs out there can support a family on a one-person paycheck. The mortgage/rent has to be paid, children’s tuition has to be paid, there’s the cost of rising petrol/gas, and with all this talk of world disasters and poor economy, there’s a spike in the cost of everything. Even food. That single paycheck from the breadwinner is becoming increasingly difficult for supporting your family even if you are cutting down expenses to the maximum allowable. 

There‘s also all this unpredictability in our world now. Nobody wakes up in the morning expecting that tragedy will befall him or her suddenly during the day. Deaths happen. And statistics shows that men die quicker than women do. Even more common are divorces. If your man is the ONLY one in charge of making the bread in your family, what happens if (God forbid) he falls out of love with you and says he wants to call it quits? I know that many women are saying it can never happen to them, but I am a realist, and the truth is that things like this happen in our world simply because no man/woman is 100% dependable. Not every man is God-fearing. Neither is every woman. And even the God-fearing ones still have the temptations to deal with. We are all like shifting shadows…what we want today is always different from what we want tomorrow. Since we constantly change, disappointments in ourselves and in each other is sometimes inevitable.

Therefore, my advice is this: For every woman whose man is making the dough, even if it affords you to live comfortably, and even if you both have a joint account (as my husband and I do), make sure you continue to develop yourself intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and most importantly financially. Women are sophisticated creatures. We are built to handle more than one task at a time so you can still successfully manage your home and still do something with your life just in case the cards you are dealt with in life requires you  to financially support your family. I know a friend whose husband can afford to take care of the family financially. My friend is a stay home mom and she watches over her neighbors kids for a fee. It’s not a lot of money, but it is something. I know of another stay home mom and she is in school part time studying for her MBA. She drops her kids in school in the morning and hurries to her own class in a university that is about thirty minutes drive from her house. She finishes her class at almost the same time when her kids are done for the day in school. When her kids are doing their homework or napping, she is busy doing her own school work too. Another friend of mine who is a Pediatrician sews clothes when her two-month-old baby is napping. She and her husband, who happens to be a Doctor too, pastor a growing church. They have a live-in Nanny, yet my friend will say that she has to make herself productive since she has temporarily given up her medical career to be with her new baby and support her husband in the ministry.

Women who take time to invest in themselves like these ones are prepared for life’s unpredictability. And I think every woman who considers herself wise will do the same.

P.S: For Wale Taylor(Final part) is now on Femme Lounge. Happy reading

This girl wants a child of her own

This girl wants a child of her own.

She looks at all the cute babies dressed in blues and pinks, with rosy cheeks and decorative pacifiers, and she longs…oh how she longs, for her own child. She wonders when God will hear her. He seems so far away, so out of reach that she often wishes that she could have the wings of an angel. Then, she would fly to his throne room and demand that he hear her plead her case for a child. She would ask him if he knows of her many tears drenching the pillow, night after night, while her husband snores away his cares. She would shake God…yes, she would shake him by the arm and almost trip him for his seeming negligence of her. Doesn’t he see? Does he not care? Does he not see her embarrasment, how she is forced to stand and smile while her friends strut about their kids on sunday mornings in pretty frocks? What kind of a God is this, not to hear her when many teens are getting knocked up and throwing the children under the knife of the abortionist?

This girl wants a child…her voice is hoarse now from constant crying, both in her heart and from her eyes. But the heavenly Father looks on and reaches out his arms to her, enveloping her in his love. But she doesn’t see…she’s too lost to her pain to see that he is comforting her. Then when she sleeps, laying next to her sleeping husband, she hears His voice…”I’m coming. This delay is for my Glory. Wait. I am coming.”

This girl wants a child of her own. She’ll get hers – in a more beautiful time.

A walk with my Father

 The love of a mother is often always there, but the love of a father…when one secures that kind of love, it makes a huge difference in the life of the child-receiver. Unfortunately, several women (and men) grow up without knowing the love of a Father. Their fathers may have been present in their lives, but perhaps he was critical, abusive, unreasonably demanding, or passive. Others did not have a Daddy present, so the issue of being loved by them wasn’t relevant. Perhaps, he abandoned the child’s mother and in so doing, abandoned the child. Maybe he died physically. Many research studies show that without the consistent love of a father, children grow up into adults carrying all sorts of emotional complexities. They go into relationships with a flawed picture of how the relationship ought to be, bringing frustration oftentimes to their partners. I truly believe that children loved by their fathers tend to have a more well- balanced psyche, and are at a low to moderate risk for being emotionally insecure. I say ‘low to moderate risk’ because being loved by your Dad doesn’t take away all the risk for emotional insecurity. That is because even good fathers are still flawed and have their own share of ignorance, mistakes and regrets; hence, their ability to love us for whom we really are is imperfect. Yet, when you see a good father loving his child, regardless of his failings, it simply astounds you.

I caught a glimpse into this type of love when I spoke to a dear Uncle last night.

He had last seen his 20-year-old daughter almost four years ago. She was 17 at the time and had come to the United States to study to become a Medical Doctor. To him, she was a child when she came left home. She had never lived away from her parents …not even for one second of her life.

Last night I spoke to him about how he felt seeing his daughter after almost four years. He told me,” We strolled down the streets tonight, hand in hand. She talked, I listened. I talked, she listened. She spoke, not the way a child talks with her father, but the way a woman talks…with her father. It was cold last night when we walked, but I felt very warm inside – seeing that my child has now become a woman.”

My heart melted – it almost seemed like it were made of butter – as I heard him talk to me over the phone. As he spoke, a picture of a perfect father holding me in his hands flashed quickly across my mind. I was walking with the perfect father on the beach. He was laughing. His hair made billowy waves as the winds of the sea played with it. I felt secure and at rest as we walked on the sandy shore. With him, I did not have to pretend to be anything I wasn’t. I could be myself and not have to worry about his acceptance of me.

As the vision of my heavenly Father swept over me, I suddenly realized that there is a reason why our earthly fathers are imperfect…regardless of if they loved us or never did. It’s so that we will be forced to look up to the Heavenly father – the perfect father. Even now, he invites us to take a walk with him…hand in hand. He’ll talk, we’ll listen. We’ll talk, and he’ll listen. With him, we can be rest assured that we’ll grow in every good thing. We won’t always be a child, tossed to and fro by the skirmishes that constantly plagues the world, but we’ll become the grown woman or man who can have a nice steady conversation with him, unafraid that we’ll be accepted or not.

Come with me. Let’s take a walk with my Father…and yours!

Reflections from parenting

In 2006, I became a parent for the first time, and guess what? My life changed forever. I was nearing thirty and the emotions of hard-core fear  mixed with so much joy was not as felt on my wedding day as it was on the day I held my offspring in my arms for the very first time.

Merriam-Webster defines the  parent as a person who brings up and cares for another and Parenting as the task of rasing up a child.

Scary stuff. Right?

The definition in itself implies that you are in charge of raising another human being other than you. I could hardly care for me, or make myself do the right things at the right time, and here I was, responsible for the care of someone else. This had to be the funniest joke of the decade. But I got  over my fears with the support of  some very good people who loved God and knew the importance of raising kids to be godly in a world that is often times Anti-good; and good parents, who like me, had also been terrified when they first became parents.

Now, while the idea of a ‘Parenting Degree’ seems laughable, there really isn’t anything funny about having to parent children who sometimes can be more tricky than you ever were as a child.  Times are changing and more challenging than they ever were when we were growing up. Thus raising children in our present day world is increasingly daunting and scary.  Well-meaning parents and guardians  find themselves running helter-skelter as they strive to be in charge. Unfortunately, mistakes are made in the process. Some children ultimately become badly scarred emotionally, while many of us lose sight of ourselves as we attempt to fulfill the quest, leading frequently to physical and emotional exhaustion and furstration.

This is why Reflections from Parenting was born. It is a forum for sharing my parenting experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly – with the goal of encouraging you and hopefully, I too get encouraged by you.  This site is a place where parents and guardians can laugh at the mistakes and bravely keep on going; a place for the sharing of  true life stories with other parents carrying the tasking, yet beautiful assignment of raising our kids to be the best they could ever be.

Unconditional Loving

Whenever I hold my littlest one in my arms, I am always bombarded with the meaning of unconditional love in its truest form.

Her tiny body packed with so much vulnerability has a way of hitting my innermost core like I have been rocked by a time bomb. The little hand that grasps mine with absolute trust fills me with such breathlessness that I know that I’d go to hell and back than let any harm come to her. And even the hectic schedule of night feedings, constant diaper changes and round-the-clock crying is never enough to dampen my love. The thought that she is mine to keep, fills me with warmth on the coldest nights. The realization that she is here with me makes me forget my fears and insecurities, even if it is for a little while.

Reflecting on the love I have for my daughter (and all my children) gives me a glimpse into my heavenly Father’s love for me. I begin to understand what God says about him loving us with an everlasting love. Every morning when my kids wake up from sleep, I imagine God giggling with uncontained joy inspired by love as he ushers us into a new day filled with so many amazing opportunities. I imagine his warm breath gurgling down from the heavens like a pot overfilled with boiling hot water. I imagine him breathless as we take time to make him first in our day, trusting in his unfailing love.

Sure, I am sometimes suspicious of his love for me, more so because I know I am not deserving of such attention. Yet he reminds me again and again, through the experiences of love that I have for my imperfect children, that he loves me. That he has always loved me. And that he’ll never stop. He has loved us with an everlasting love either we believe it or not. He loves us so much that he takes his time to create every single one of us. We are all custom made with his own wonderful specifications…even Identical twins are still created different from each other. He sends us to a world where evil never rests. But even then, he has prepared experiences for each one of us so that we can call on him, and when we do, he never fails to answer. In the midst of our troubles, he is rocked with intense love when we grab his hand in trust, believing that he will take care of our situations no matter what. Our stubborn hearts filled with continuing desire to do evil is not enough to dampen his love for us. The sounds we make, be it from grief or from joy makes him remember that we are His, and that he’ll go to hell and back to save us from all harm. And that is exactly what he did many many years back, coming to earth as man to die in our place.

What love. What amazing love