Cry Me a River to the Tune of Kumbaya

The first women's meeting I ever went to should have been entitled, "Kumbaya, my Lord."

I was nineteen and, of course, I knew everything.

It was my time to become one of the "women".

I was really excited about attending. I dressed up and did my hair and got ready to mix it up with the ladies. I made my first dessert...ever! (Yes, I was one of those nineteen year olds who knew everything...except how to cook).

And when I got there all the ladies turned out to be women in there 30's,40's and older.

I reasoned with myself that it was ok to be the youngest because, after all, I did know everything and maybe I could help these women out.

I spied one lady in her early thirties. She was running the sound board...off in the far corner. I scrambled next to her.

"Can I hang out with you back here?"

She gave me a pitying look. "You got dragged here, didn't you?"

I bit my lip. "Not exactly. I was just told that I was expected to be here. My deciding to come feels like I had some say in it."

She smiled and shrugged. "Well, at least the food will be good."

"It's dessert only, I thought."

Which, as I thought, was a waste of time for women in the their thirties and up to have a dessert only party since it will only invoke a conversation full of salacious oohing and ahhing over recipes and then the inevitable 'moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips' conversation.

Even though I knew this, I still made a cherry cream cheese/ heavy cream/ whipped cream/ enough cream to make your hips disappear completely kind of cake.

Which, as I came to understand, is what you do as a woman. You make incredible food, fill your face and then say you shouldn't have.

One could almost start saying "Fiddledeedee" as well, but I think that stopped sometime during the early 1900's.

Anyway, we came, we saw the food, we inhaled it and moved on.

Then came the sharing time.

Or as I liked to call it, 'the pull out your fingernails and pluck your eyelashes for fun' time.

As the first woman shared her story, I was thinking, "That's great, lady. I'm glad that happened to you....25 years ago. But what is God doing today?"

And then another lady started. "Well, it all started in 1978..."

That was twenty years ago!

I quickly did the math as I counted up the thirty women in the room.

30 women times 15 minutes of prattling on about things you all know about each other...I quickly realized that I was going to be here until my mid-thirties.

I didn't understand why a women's meeting was just everyone sitting around, sharing what God had done but no transparency as to what God was doing.

Why weren't we praying?

Why weren't we making a plan to help someone who needed it?

Why were sitting around just telling our troubles and filling our faces?

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "This is the part where Diva learns that sometimes women just need to talk it out no matter how cyclical it sounds. This is when God shows up and bursts that prideful bubble that doesn't have an ear to hear or a heart to understand. This is where I need to grab some Kleenex because we're about to be dosed with a big load of Truth."

Well, in the words of my nineteen year old self, "Uh, you'd be wrong."

None of that happened.

In fact, after that one event, I have reluctantly gone to three other women events.

So I find that God's sense of humour is tickling me that my first speaking event is going to be at...

you guessed it...

a women's conference.

Somehow, there seems to be a ring of humble pie in here.

A cherry cream cheese/ heavy cream/ whipped cream/ enough cream to make your pride disappear completely kind of pie.

I'll let you know how it tastes.