Michele Morin : Spiritual Mentor and Leader in Christ

Michele Morin serves as a Christian spiritual mentor for me and many other  bloggers. She encourages and leads through her faithful writings on her blog Living Our Days.

She is so faithful to linkup with Literacy Musing Mondays as well, and you can count on her to visit other blogs each week and be a real exhorter to her fellow bloggers.

I am proud to share her profile. Thanks Morin for your hard work on this. This series would not be possible without the writing of all the bloggers I feature.

 

Michele Morin’s Biography Information

I’m a middle-aged housewife who lives on a country hill in Maine with an unreasonably patient husband, two high-school-aged sons, and an incorrigible St. Bernard.

 I really didn’t intend to come back to Maine when, at 17, I left with a one way ticket to California, so I touched down in Missouri as well as Georgia during my college years.  Then after graduation, I accepted a position with Child Evangelism Fellowship in Portland, Maine.  To my surprise, I loved living in the city, and those years in Portland changed my whole perspective on life here in Maine.  I also worked in human resources for several years in the banking and healthcare industries.  

My single days were full and satisfying.  I continued taking classes in everything from business and computer technology to Medieval Literature (go figure).  I was active in a wonderful church, and loved pursuing the challenges in my job.  

Marriage came as a total surprise to me, and so even after twenty-six years, I still maintain that my husband is God’s sweetest gift to me.  He is a math teacher, and together we have raised – and are still raising — four children ranging in age from 14 up to 22 – all boys!  We have a family lawn care business, and so far our boys have all spun off their own mowing businesses to help them with expenses in their teen years (and beyond) and to learn a great work ethic.

I continue to homeschool the two youngest boys; and every summer, I manage a big garden.  I am privileged beyond words to teach the ladies (and quite often the children, too) at our little village church where people serve “the Lawd” and have loved our family well over the years.

Michele Morin‘s Gospel Story: How She Came to Know Christ as Her Savior.

Flannery O’Connor describes the South of her childhood as being “Christ-haunted,” and I completely identify with that.  Alcoholism and mental illness pretty much defined the home I grew up in, but there was an undercurrent of something spiritual – outside influences, my own curiosity and my hunger for something stable and true — that kept me on track, even though I did not come to faith until I was in Junior High.  I truly had no idea what I was getting myself into, and if it were not for two important influences, I’m not sure that I would have persevered in the faith:

• Godly women mentored me in the Word of God, and because I saw that God answered their prayers, I began to believe that He would hear me as well.   They modeled for me a life of self-giving surrender to God.
• I attended Child Evangelism Fellowship’s youth training program for several summers (Christian Youth in Action).  I learned how to study the Bible and to prepare a lesson for children, and in the process, I discovered that I could open my mouth and share truth in a way that made sense to others.  Shy and self-conscious, I finally dared to believe that God could use my offering, small and faltering though it was.   

Her Favorite Verse and How It Became Important to Her

Romans 8 has been my favorite passage of Scripture since I memorized it several years ago.  There is so much encouragement in those 39 verses, starting with “There is, therefore, now no condemnation,” and all the way to the end with the list of huge forces that are in no way able to separate us from the love of Christ.  There is also deep theology that helps me to think about suffering and prayer and the will of God, my place in God’s family as an heir, and God’s eternal plan to conform each believer to His glorious image – Incredible!  I need liberal doses of Truth applied directly to my brain in order to combat the lies I tell myself every day.  Romans 8 is straight-up and unadulterated Truth.

Her Blogging Story

I started blogging when our pastor invited me to write for our church’s website.  I would submit my post to him as a draft, and he would take it from there.  It made sense, because I teach the Ladies’ Sunday school class and lead the study each month at our Ladies’ Missionary Fellowship meetings, so this was just one more way of communicating Truth to the wonderful women who attend my church.  During that time, Leslie Leyland Fields was looking for bloggers to promote her latest book, and I just barely qualified as a blogger, but she sent me a book, and I wrote a review for our church’s site.  

A number of people said, “Hey, that was good.  You should do more of that.”   And, you know, it’s odd that I can’t really remember exactly how it all happened, but before I knew it I was signed up with several publishers to receive books for review, and I started a very simple version of Living Our Days (still the name of my blog), but I didn’t know how to insert pictures or use tags or ANYTHING.  At some point, Mary, I discovered you and others who host blog link-ups and learned a lot from just reading lots and lots of posts by godly and experienced bloggers.

Her Blogging Mission

Annie Dillard wrote, “The way we live our days will be, after all, the way we live our life.”  I read those words when my children were very small, in the days when I was in the midst of changing diapers, cleaning up lots of messes, reading stacks of story books to my boys, and looking for ways to fill their days with wonder.  I’m convinced that God cares deeply about the way I use my minutes, about the thoughts that I allow to occupy my idle moments – EVERYTHING.   With that in mind, I want to “take captive every thought” for obedience to Christ.  Since God has communicated to us through a Book, my understanding of His ways will be in direct proportion to my Biblical literacy – or, as I prefer to think of it:  Biblical fluency.  By sharing the books that I am reading and the lessons from God’s Word that I am learning, I hope to become more fluent myself and to encourage others in their journey of faith.  

Rosaria Butterfield writes about our tendency to interrogate Scripture and its truth, saying that, in reality, we should be letting Scripture interrogate our lives.  All of this can happen even in the midst of a laundry-basket-life, because God infuses even the mundane with meaning.  My blogging is an attempt to bring all these strands together for my own thinking – and for the women who read and live along with me.  

I’m convinced that God cares deeply about the way I use my minutes Click To Tweet

Her Top Three Posts Based on Readership Statistics

You would smile if you knew what a challenge it was for me to figure out how to find the answer to this question . . . and it was fun to know!  

My most-read post was An Unexpected Love in which I wrote Abigail’s and David’s love story from the Bible for Valentine’s Day this past February.  It makes me happy to think that it had the most readers, because I still remember how much I enjoyed researching and writing it.  

Number two was Why Read the Lists?  a fairly recent post that came about because I was reading through I and II Chronicles with my husband and was overwhelmed with the beautiful truth that each of those unpronounceable names represents a person that God knew and loved.  

The post in third place was my first ever monthly re-cap post May Musings 2016 .  These are fun to write, and give me an opportunity to share my favorite book reviews from the previous month along with family milestones and lessons from Scripture that I’m learning.

 

Her Three Favorite Posts

My favorite post of all time is from Christmas 2015 in which I gave a voice to one of the weeping women of Ramah from the days when Herod sent soldiers to kill all the male babies who might threaten his rule. As the mother of sons, that story has always grabbed my heart, and I was thankful to have the opportunity to put words around what one grieving mother might have been feeling.  It was also a joy to share the post, Weeping Woman of Ramah, with readers at SheLoves Magazine. 

 My readers are on-line friends – most of whom I will never meet on this earth.  However, when I write a Bible study series, so far it has always been in concert with a class I am teaching for the ladies in my church, so my second and third favorite posts are the two series I did on Nehemiah  and on Hebrews .  I loved knowing that my Sunday morning women were reading along, and I think it helped our group conversation when we met.

 What Inspires Michele Morin to Write for Christ?

I have a feeling that even if I were not a Christian, I would be writing and teaching about something.  I love words, and it is so satisfying to polish a sentence, to find just the right adjective or noun to communicate the thought that’s in my brain.  Thanks be to God that He has given me the privilege of living in concert with Him, and, therefore, of sharing His truth.  I just turned 54, and the longer I live, the more I realize that I have no wisdom of my own to share, and the only thing of lasting value that I have to offer to others is my faltering grasp of the eternal wisdom in the Word of God.

Her Favorite Song

My favorite hymn for years and years has been Be Thou My Vision.  I do love the old hymns because they are a feast of truth set to music.  I love to blast Handel’s Messiah in the fall months when I’m canning applesauce and enjoying the last of the sunflowers.  Right now I’m listening to a lot of Elisabeth von Trapp’s gorgeous singing.  

She has also created music for several of Robert Frost’s poems which are just glorious listening for washing dishes or making spaghetti sauce.

Authors Who Inspire Her or Motivate Her to Write

I consider several authors to be my “book mentors,” and have learned how to write by reading them – and how to live on this planet as a believer by studying their lives.   In no particular order:  Elisabeth Elliot, Philip Yancey, Luci Shaw, Madeliene L’Engle, John Piper, C.S. Lewis.  I love a well-crafted story with three-dimensional characters, and have feasted upon the fiction writing of Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, and Marilynne Robinson for years, and am likely to re-read a much-loved book because it feels like a visit with an old friend.

 

A Personal Blogging Story

Last winter, I received an email notification that someone here in Maine (I could tell because “maine” was part of their email address) had subscribed to my blog.  It was not an address that I recognized, so I wondered about it, but really had no way of finding out who it was.  Then, in May, I reviewed a book that featured a strong Grandmother character, so I introduced the book with a brief memory of my Nana.  https://michelemorin.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/a-gracious-plenty/   

To my surprise, I learned that the Maine subscriber to my blog had been a cousin who was pretty much a stranger to me since family dysfunction and alienation had prevented us from really becoming acquainted.  She also had come to faith, and her retirement years have been filled with a fair amount of pain and suffering.  Somehow she had found my blog, and she commented on that post for the very first time because of her strong memories of our shared Grandmother.  She has been a continual source of encouragement to me since then, and I’m thrilled to be able to speak truth into her life – and to have this positive and joyful link to extended family.

 

Her Blogging Tips

J.I. Packer offers this advice (which I cannot improve upon):   “Go deep in personal worship; write to hit hearts; write from a sense of calling.”  Thanks be to God, He is able to use my mixed motives, my foolishness, and my fragileness, because I forget these three points all the time and get intimidated by technology, discouraged by low numbers, or bogged down when the details of living life make it hard to read, write, and study.  I’m also a firm believer in reading as much and as widely as time will allow.  In fact, I’m cutting back on the number of book reviews I do on my blog so that I can read (and re-read) some older books that I haven’t had time for.

[bctt tweet=”J.L. Packer inspires @MicheleDMorin to: “Go deep in personal worship; write to hit hearts; write from a sense of calling.”” username=”Maryandering”

Last Minute Thoughts On Inspiration and Uplifting

Continually , I am encouraged by the truth that God has given things to me that I would never have had the sense to ask Him for.  Chief among these gifts is my family, and I will always remember the Sunday morning after our fourth son was born.  We were all in the mini-van, and we were on our way to church, and my unreasonably patient husband looked over at me, smiling, and said, “Everybody’s here.”  He always had that Certainty (and I capitalize it in the tradition of A.A. Milne, because it’s a thing all of its own) that God was going to give us four children, and that we would raise them to follow Him.  Obviously, the paint is still wet on this project, but this is the trajectory that my life has taken for the past 22 years.

For most of that time, there was barely time to keep a journal and to write milestones in baby books, so it feels very luxurious to be sharing words with a wider audience than the 6-year-olds reading rhymed clues for scavenger hunts at my kids’ birthday parties.  Even so, I look back and realize that I had all four boys in my home together for only ten years.  My oldest son married at age 18, and I love his wife and son, so my heart is full, but I still ache that ten years was really not long enough – and if I had known how quickly it would pass, I would probably have laughed more and thrown myself into the daily chaos with a little more abandon.   I would have stopped my ceaseless striving with the do-list and looked into their faces when they spoke to me.  I’m thankful for grace — to recognize my failings and to persevere in faith in this following life.

Social Media Links

You can follow Michele Morin on her blog, Facebook , and Twitter.

Your turn: What inspires you most about Michele Morin, her testimony, and her blog.  Please share in the comments.

 

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Be sure to check out my introduction post to see more features of inspirational Christian women bloggers.

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