Phenomenal Women of God: How to Live With Strength and Dignity

This post recalls two phenomenal women of God
and the impact they made on my life.
Such women inspire all females to live with strength and dignity.

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

My grandma’s birthday would have been on the 10th of this month.

I thought about it being her birthday, and then I thought about her as a person.

It wasn’t just,  “Oh, it’s Gramma’s birthday day,” and going on my way as I do on the years I barely think about it at all.

The reason I don’t think about it every year is because she’s been gone over 30 years. And the last 10 years before that we lived 2000 miles apart.

Feeling the loss of a Phenomenal Woman

So this year, wham, I’m hit with pangs of loss that I have never really felt before.  And I recall her great strength as a person and her deep faith in God. She never was one to talk about faith or God. She lived it, in the hard times. In health and sickness. In poor and poorer times. There were no rich times. But we all knew she believed. In God, and in her own strength she had as a result.

I thought so much about her this year that I designed a birthday card in her honor. Celebrating her strength, with the quote by Maya Angelou in the poem, “Phenomenal Woman.”

Those words say so much.

It seemed strange to me, this mindfulness and sense of loss after all these years.

And then,

I got a phone call. It was a message saying a lady in our church family had passed away just hours earlier.

This was the Phenomenal Woman I was missing.

I just hadn’t known it.  God gave me a sense of something missing, and I didn’t know what it was about until this phone call.

I hadn’t known she was so close to death; things seemed to hasten for her towards the end. Seeming so sudden, after almost 98 years, it was time to go Home.

And I just want to say, God doesn’t make women stronger than this lady, or my grandma.

We all, all us church ladies, and likely all her neighbors, looked to her as a sage, a mentor, a 31 Woman.

She was a pastor’s wife in her early years, when her family was young, and times were not modern. Her husband labored for the Lord, clacking on trains on revival circuit, for months out of the years. (He later had lung issues as the result of those smoke filled train cars, and coughed painfully for years.)

And she kept the home fires going and the cows milked and the crops cropped.

Phenomenal Woman.

And so, then I knew.

I knew why God put thoughts in my heart about strong women and blessed angels and rewards for a life lived phenomenally.

The pangs of loss were for both of these phenomenal women who impacted my life.

Whom I have been so very fortunate to have known.

Because

I wonder

Are there phenomenal women of God today?

Are we going forward with strength and dignity?

God, help us remember the Phenomenal Women in our lives,
and covenant to carry on the torch with strength and dignity.