**Continuing today Part 2 of 2 from this writing in our quarterly theme of Elisabeth Elliot’s Heroes of the Faith.
I think of the vast number of older women today. The Statistical Abstract of the United States for this year says that in 1980, 19.5% of the population was between ages 45-65, but by 2000 it will be 22.9%. Assuming that half of those people are women, what a pool of energy and power for God they might be. We live longer now than we did forty years ago (the same volume says that the over-sixty-fives will increase from 11.3% to 13%). There is more mobility, more money around, more leisure, more health and strength-resources which, if put at God’s disposal, might bless younger women. But there are also many more ways to spend those resources, so we find it very easy to occupy ourselves selfishly. Where are the women, single or married, willing to hear God’s call to spiritual motherhood, taking spiritual daughters under their wings to school them as Mom Cunningham did me? She had no training the world would recognize. She had no thought of such. She simply loved God and was willing to be broken bread and poured-out wine for His sake. Retirement never crossed her mind. If some of my readers are willing to hear this call but hardly know how to begin, may I suggest to you:
1. Pray about it. Ask God to show you whom, what, how.
2. Consider writing notes to or telephoning some younger woman who needs encouragement in the areas Paul mentioned (in Titus 2:4,5).
3. Ask a young mother if you may do her ironing, take the children out, babysit so she can go out, make a cake or a casserole for her.
4. Do what Mom C. did for me—invite somebody to tea, find out what she’d like you to pray for (I asked her to pray that God would bring Jim Elliot and me together!)—and pray with her.
5. Start a little prayer group of two or three whom you can cheer and help. You’ll be cheered and helped too!
6. Organize a volunteer house-cleaning pool to go out every other week or once a month to somebody who needs you.
7. Have a lending library of books of real spiritual food.
8. Be the first of a group in your church to be known as the WOTTs (Women of Titus Two), and see what happens (something will).
“Say not you cannot gladden, elevate, and set free; that you have nothing of the grace of influence; that all you have to give is at the most only common bread and water. Give yourself to your Lord for the service of men with what you have. Cannot He change water into wine? Cannot He make stammering words to be instinct [imbued, filled, charged] with saving power? Cannot He change trembling efforts to help into deeds of strength? Cannot He still, as of old, enable you in all your personal poverty ‘to make many rich’? God has need of thee for the service of thy fellow men. He has a work for thee to do. To find out what it is, and then to do it, is at once thy supremist duty and thy highest wisdom. ‘Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.'”(Canon George Body, b. 1840)
**Excerpt originally from the September/October 1989 Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter.