NURTURE the SEASON
In the birthing process, not only is there a NEW BABY, but the person giving birth becomes someone they have never been before…A MOTHER… A PARENT… a whole new world opens up in one short moment.
The Changes are Huge…
· Woman to a mother
· Man to a father
· Your Title/ name / life posture changes completely
· Responsibilities immediately change
· Daily routines change
YOU have no choice but to embrace the change that is going to happen in you if the dream is going to be successful…
Simply, the process is one of maturity.
· As in the natural, it is impossible to give birth or parent until you have physically reached a level of maturity to create;
It’s all an issue of Maturity.
· Maturity demands change.
· Maturity is a completely different posture.
We are all on the road to maturity in Christ.
· Just like a new mother loses her former identity to take on another, we lose our former understanding of our self to walk into a new world of opportunity and influence.
Isaiah 53:19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
The NEW thing is you are being transformed from being a PRODUCER to being a REPRODUCER.
As you Enter the New Season:
1. Embrace your New Role….
· Fall in love with being a Parent
“Becoming a parent looks—at least in the brain—a lot like falling in love.
Which helps explain how many new parents describe feeling when they meet their newborns. At the brain level, the networks that become especially sensitized are those that involve vigilance and social salience—the amygdala—as well as dopamine networks that incentivize prioritizing the infant. “In our research, we find that periods of social bonding involve change in the same ‘affiliative’ circuits,” Feldman said. “We showed that during the first months of ‘falling in love’ some similar changes occur between romantic partners.” Incidentally, that same circuitry is what makes babies smell so good to their mothers, researchers found in a 2013 study. The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love, 2003”
· This is not business a usual
· This home is not the same anymore
2. Don’t be a “Know it all….”
· Nothing out does experience.
It’s one thing to read the manual of the car it’s another thing to drive it.
· Build relationships with people that are doing what you are called to do and glean everything from them.
“Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do! And whatever else you do, develop good judgment.”
“4 These older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, 5 to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God.”
· In transitions like these you are not meant to be an expert.
3. It’s going to get dirty sometimes…
· It gets overwhelming sometimes….BUT it’s OK.
· Learn to TALK..
· Seek out Family.
4. There is a Anointing (Grace) for you in the “NEW”
· The anointing is the enabling power of the Holy Spirit
· There is an anointing from God that is waiting for you to take a hold of.
· There is a rest and a grace awaiting you.
· The grace is for the purpose of the season.
5. You never feel like “you’ve got this.”
· The feelings of inadequacy are always with you.
· You are always aware of your humanity and your failings, which makes you more dependant upon His grace and leading
6. Understand the Different Seasons
· In every stage of a child’s growth the parent has to take a different role in their child’s life. It is an ever releasing role
oCommander
oCoach
oFriend
· In our new role, season, position, title…there will be times that you will need to be all three at different times.
7. Walk in Authority
· With the anointing comes Authority
· With the Authority comes Responsibility
· With the Responsibility becomes Maturity
· Not only will you walk in Maturity but you have now Reproduced others into MATURITY.
“The greatest brain changes occur with a mother’s first child, though it’s not clear whether a mother’s brain ever goes back to what it was like before childbirth, several neurologists told me. And yet brain changes aren’t limited to new moms.
Men show similar brain changes when they’re deeply involved in caregiving. Oxytocin does not seem to drive nurturing behavior in men the way it does in women, Feldman and other researchers found in a study last year. Instead, a man’s parental brain is supported by a socio-cognitive network that develops in the brain of both sexes later in life, whereas women appear to have evolved to have a “brain-hormone-behavior constellation” that’s automatically primed for mothering. Another way to look at it: the blueprint for mothering behavior exists in the brain even before a woman has children.
Perhaps, then, motherhood really is like secret space in a woman’s brain, waiting to be discovered. “Although only mothers experience pregnancy, birth, and lactation, and these provide powerful primers for the expression of maternal care via amygdala sensitization,” researchers wrote, “evolution created other pathways for adaptation to the parental role in human fathers, and these alternative pathways come with practice, attunement, and day-by-day caregiving.”
In other words, the act of simply caring for one’s baby forges new neural pathways—undiscovered rooms in the parental brain.”