Mama Says

By Mollie Germain

Have you ever said, “If I knew then, what I know now, I wouldn’t have done that?” This book elaborates on that very thought. It’s about lessons learned through life, discovering God’s plan for your life and living a life that brings God the glory, He so richly deserves. It’s all about the choices we make, good and bad, and the consequences we reap for having made them. From birth to the grave, singleness to marriage, unsaved to saved, it answers the questions you always wanted to ask, but never had a forum in which to do so. This book will bring you to laughter at times, and tears, at others; but all of the time, will enlighten you, provoke you and help you to become a better you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664234062

Mollie Germain

Mollie Germain, who stands in the five-fold ministry office of teacher, is an anointed writer, teacher, counselor and woman of God. She is the author of eight books that have inspired, provoked and educated her readers for the past twenty years. She founded Mollie Germain Ministries, Inc. to bring the truth of God’s Word to those who are hurting, to heal their wounds and satisfy their need for a better understanding of the Word of God. Through her books, workshops, conferences and seminars; in addition to, speaking engagements throughout the United States, Cape Town, S. Africa and Uganda, she is fulfilling the mandate that God has given her. Her ministry of excellence is founded on the belief that a woman’s primary ministry is her home and when she has taken care of her home and family, with excellence, then and only then, can God use her gifts to bless others.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 Mollie Germain.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

844-714-3454

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture taken from the Amplified Bible, copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture taken from The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. The Living Bible, TLB, and the The Living Bible logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3405-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3404-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3406-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021909632

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/11/2021

Contents

Introduction

Part 1 Why Are We Born?

Born

In Between

Womanhood

A Good Thing

Marriage

Motherhood

Part 2 The Issues of Life

Relationships

Rejection

Fear

The Unexpected

Part 3 Your Christian Walk

Following the Plan of God

Your Thought Life

Getting Your House in Order

How Successful Are You?

Make Time to Pray

Death

I dedicate this book to two beautiful young ladies, Lanice Ariel Patterson and Brea’ Alexandria Germain, my beloved granddaughters. I see this book as my legacy to both of you. About six months ago, I realized that I was spending a great deal of time with our two grandsons and little or no time with our granddaughters. I wanted so much to sow into your lives, but because Brea’ lives in Georgia, and Lanice was so busy with her own life, time just seemed to pass by without even talking to you sometimes for weeks. I then decided that I would send you a text message every morning and that message would always begin with, Mama says. It would contain thoughts about how to do life, messages I thought you needed to know about God, and my thoughts towards you. When I approached you with the idea, you both immediately said, yes you wanted to hear what Mama says. Much of what I have shared in those text messages is written inside these pages; but now I have the opportunity to elaborate on each one and give you more of what Mama says. God bless you both, you’ve made me proud.

Introduction

Hi, I’m Mama. I was not given that name at birth, but by our oldest granddaughter. One of the highlights of my life was becoming a grandmother. As I held that tiny infant in my arms, I wondered what she would call me. Our own children called my mother, Nana and my husband’s mother, Gram. Those names just didn’t seem to fit me and neither did Grandma or Big Ma. Since I didn’t know how to identify myself to her, as I talked and played with her, I never referred to myself as anything. And then one day, as I lifted her to my knee, she smiled that beautiful smile and said, Mama. I loved it. It was like putting on a garment that fits every curve of your body just right. It said everything I wanted that little person to know about me. She called her mother, mommy but I was Mama.

I wondered the same thing as I held our second granddaughter, and following her cousin, she too called me, Mama. And just the other day, as I was working in my home office and listening to our two grandsons playing and watching TV across the hall, I heard our six-year-old echo this phrase, But Mama says… That was not the first time I had heard that phrase referring to myself. Over the past 28 years, I’ve heard it said by myself, rehearsed by each of our grandchildren and even our children at times. But that particular day, he spoke it with such authority, as if it was the voice of reason and wisdom and therefore, the final word on the subject. What they were arguing about, I do not know. But at that very moment, it sounded to me like But Mama says was akin to the The final authority, a term reserved only for the Word of God. Instantly, I was convicted in my spirit for even thinking such a thing. The thought was filled with idolatry, almost blasphemous. I immediately repented, and put the phrase back in its proper context with godly wisdom, love and respect.

The next morning as I went for my morning walk and talked with God, that phrase rose up in my spirit again. God had been telling me what my next book would be about and He said, I want you to entitle it, Mama says… This book had been on my mind for some time, awaiting direction from the Holy Spirit. I would have entitled it, Wisdom in the Affairs of Life or Living the Christian Life, but God said, Mama says… and so it is.

Have you ever had a time in your life that you wanted to do over? A moment, a day, maybe even a season that didn’t come out just right and you thought, if I knew then, what I know now, I’d do thusly? I think we’ve all had that thought or said those words from time to time. We’ve thought, if our life were only a word, a phrase, even a math problem written on a piece of paper with pencil, we would simply erase the mistake and start all over again. But we can’t go back, we can’t do it over again. The mistakes we made, the opportunities we missed, the words that we said in a moment of haste, they are part of the woven fabric of our lives. Those experiences, good and bad, formed our character and made us who we are.

Isn’t it wonderful, that because of what Jesus did, we don’t have to go to our graves with those sins? Once we repented, God wiped our slate clean. He doesn’t even remember that we did that thing or said those words. Like that piece of paper with all of those mistakes, Jesus erased it for us. No, we don’t have to pay for those sins, but we will and do reap the consequences.

Life is a patched work quilt woven with numerous tests and trials, with a few unforgettable, miraculous moments thrown in for color, sewed together with threads of love and sometimes hate. We cover ourselves with it to keep out the cold, the isolation, the fear, until it is time to be discarded for our eternal destiny in heaven or hell. The choice is ours, just like the patches in our quilt. We can pass those tests and trials or we can fail. We can relive unforgettable, miraculous moments or we can choose to ignore them. I think the most beautiful thing about this life we get to live, is that we are free to be whom God created us to be.

PART

ONE

WHY

ARE

WE

BORN?

Mama says,

"Regardless of the circumstances surrounding

your birth, you were not a mistake."

Born

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding your birth, you were not an accident, a mistake, or a surprise. God planned your coming. He had you in mind before you were ever conceived. We all had different circumstances surrounding our delivery, but God had the same thing in mind with all of us. He created us to bring Him glory on this earth.

This is how God brought me into the world, as told to me by my mother. On December 24, 1939, my mother was on her way to the supermarket to buy her Christmas turkey. She walked those eight blocks slowly, heavy with the weight of twins in her belly; although she did not know that there were two at the time. My father, who walked with her, waved to his neighbor who said, Where are you going? she is carrying very low. I think that baby is ready to come out. To this my father yelled, No, we have six more weeks. He then looked at my mom and asked her, Are you, all right? She said she was okay, just tired. Her previous pregnancies didn’t feel like this. It seemed this baby never slept, but was constantly kicking and moving, making everything she did so much harder.

She bought that bird and went home. Later that day she prepared the turkey and put it in the oven for tomorrow’s Christmas dinner. Two hours later, her water broke. Nana, who lived in the apartment downstairs, was summoned to take care of the girls and off to the hospital they went. As my father sat in the waiting room, they didn’t let fathers into the labor or delivery room back then, he pondered how he would now support three children. After what seemed like a long time, the nurse emerged to tell him he had a son. Great, just what he wanted after having two girls. While the exuberance was still on his lips, she announced that the second baby would be out in a minute. Wait a minute, what did she say? Two babies?

Five minutes later, the double doors opened for two small glass cribs, pushed by two nurses, followed by the doctor. He told my dad to sit down, and proceeded to say, "Your wife just gave birth to a boy and a girl, both are very small and will be put in incubators until they reach the weight needed to take them home. We were like that turkey she never got to cook. We weren’t done yet. We had to be put back in the oven called an incubator.

My mom told me that my dad walked out of the hospital and didn’t return for two days. Back then, mothers stayed in the hospital for at least a week. She knew her husband. He had been worried the whole pregnancy, how he was going to support three children, and now there were four. Her youngest daughter was only a year old, the other not quite five, and now she had twins.

When my father finally returned to the hospital, they named us. Of course, my father wanted his son to carry his name, so Paul Van Dickens Jr. was my brother’s name. What to call this girl they pondered. Nana, my father’s mother, had been such a help with the children, even though she and my mom didn’t really get along, but dad wanted the girl to be named after her. And so, Mollie Elaine Dickens was my name.

Between the two of us, we weighed a little over five pounds. I, the heavier of the two weighed two pounds, ten ounces. A weight like that is no big deal now, but back then, it was a big deal. I stayed in the hospital for four weeks, my brother for six. But thanks be to God, I was healthy. My brother had some challenges, which is why he didn’t come to our house when released from the hospital. He went to stay with my father’s relatives in Waterbury, Conn. because my mother had her hands full with my sisters and me.

Such were the events surrounding my birth. Yours may have been different, but none the less, significant in the eyes of God. Regardless of how you were born and to whom you were born, God created you for Himself. Does that surprise you? Oh, you thought that you were created for your parents? Isn’t it all about your mother and father wanting a baby and so conceived you? Weren’t you planned as a testimony of their love? Sounds like a fairy tale story, doesn’t it?

But, no, God in His infinite wisdom designed you, filled you with talents and gifts, picked just the right parents, and brought about just the right circumstances that you would be conceived. God knew even before you were conceived what you would look like, what potential you possessed, and what would be the circumstances surrounding your birth. You might say, He set you up. You may not like the setup. You may have had a difficult childhood. It is even possible that your parents didn’t want you and gave you away; but God not only wanted you, but created you, designed you, planned you for His purpose.

No, you were no accident. You were no mistake. God doesn’t make mistakes. When I think of the awesomeness of God, I sometimes think, wow, God loved me even before I was even born. He didn’t wait until I was born and schooled and then plan my life. He had it all thought out before I was ever conceived. There was no mystery as far as He was concerned. The mystery lies in me and in you. We were supposed to get saved, get to know our heavenly Father and from Him, discover the plan for our life, accept that plan and fulfill it.

Born Again

We were supposed to get to know our heavenly Father. As a skinny, black girl growing up in Orange, N.J., I cannot remember not knowing that there was a God. Nana, my paternal grandmother, after whom I was named and who we referred to as, religious Nana, made sure we went to Sunday school every Sunday. She didn’t take us herself, nor did she attend, but she pestered my mother every Saturday, to be sure that she had our clothes ready to go to Sunday school. What we didn’t learn in Sunday school, we learned at her dining room table whenever we came to visit. We knew there was a God, we knew most of the biblical stories, but neither she, nor our Sunday school teachers ever told us, what God was supposed to mean to us. I think I put Him right up there with Santa Claus and the Easter bunny.

By the time that I was about twelve years old, I was told that it was time for me to join church and get baptized. I didn’t have a true understanding of why I was doing either, but I was an obedient child, and so, I came down the aisle the following Sunday when the preacher said that he was opening the doors of the church. You know, I actually looked behind me at the doors to see if someone was opening them. That phrase didn’t explain to me why my nana was pushing me out of the pew to walk down that aisle. I wasn’t alone, my twin brother and my sister, who was a year older than us, were pushed out also.

We were taken to a little room in the back of the sanctuary, someplace I never knew existed before that day. I was thinking, I’ve been here every Sunday for years, thought I knew every room in that building, but had never been back here. Two deacons asked us questions to see if we knew who God was and we answered yes to everything, looking at each other to confirm that we were right in doing so. Then we were told that next Sunday, after the morning service, we would be baptized. Nobody told us why we were getting baptized. They just told us what to wear and what time to be there.

After church, as we joined our nana on the front lawn of the church, she was talking to some other ladies and poking out her chest with, look at my grandbabies, getting baptized. See I told you that God is good. Not understanding why, she was so excited, we just proceeded to walk to the sidewalk and begin our long walk home.

The following Saturday, as our mother packed our bag of a change of underwear and bathing caps (they said they would give us robes to put on), she kept warning us not to act up and to make her proud when we get baptized. I knew we were going to get in a pool, but I had no idea of the significance of what I was about to do, nor of what actually happens in that pool. Sunday, immediately following the benediction, we were ushered from the front pew, where everyone who was getting baptized sat, and marched back to that little room. It was there that we had to take off everything but our underwear and put on these long white robes, our swim caps, and they put a white towel around our shoulders. We lined up in a hallway that led from that little room to a staircase that led to the baptism pool, which was right behind the altar. Since, I was the shortest of the group, there must have been about ten of us, I was the first to go.

The deaconess took my towel and told me to climb the stairs. At the top of the stairs was a deacon, who held out his hand to me. I reached for his hand and he told me not to be nervous. I wasn’t nervous, I like water; so. I just stepped into the pool and walked towards the pastor, who was waiting in the middle of the pool. The water wasn’t too cold. When I reached him, he put his hand on my hands and folded them across my chest. He then told me to close my eyes, held my back and what!! That man actually ducked me under the water. I was not prepared for that. I heard him saying something while he did it, but I was too busy trying to get away from him to hear what he actually said. He then, lifted me on my feet and told me I could go. What was that? Why didn’t somebody tell me what he was going to do? I walked out of that pool angry. This was what baptism was all about? They ushered me right back to the room, so I didn’t get a chance to warn my siblings. Boy, were they in for a surprise and neither one of them liked to get into water?

When everyone had finished being dipped, we assembled back in the sanctuary where they gave us certificates and congratulated us on being saved, which I didn’t understand, saved from what? Later that afternoon, I walked down the street from my house to talk with my friend, Midge and tell her what I had just been through. As we talked on her front porch, her aunt overheard our conversation. She came out, bible in hand, and sat with us. She began to explain what I had just experienced and asked me if I really believed in Jesus Christ. I thought about it and yes, I did believe that he existed and that He was the Son of God. She opened her bible and began to read the passage that I now know as Romans 10:9, 10.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

She said, based on that scripture, I was saved, which meant that if I died, I would go to heaven. It was that simple. Why hadn’t my grandmother or my Sunday school teachers, or even my mother, explained it to me? They all seemed to think that this was something I was supposed to already know. So, now I had a knowledge, although limited, of God, but I still had no idea that He had a plan for my life, nor did I really know how to communicate with Him.

Getting to Know Him

I am sure your experience of salvation was quite different than mine, but the important thing is that we receive salvation and then come to know God, as early in life as possible, because none of us knows how long we will be here. You know, when I look back over my life and I see the years I wasted in not building an intimate relationship with the Godhead, I get a renewed appreciation for time. God has given me enough time to get it right. Time is the only commodity that we don’t know how much we have. Tomorrow is not promised to us. Regardless of how old you are, none of us knows how long we will live. We all hope that we live to see tomorrow, but nowhere in the bible does God guarantee us that.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. James 4:14

That is such a sobering thought. We are born, given a specific amount of time to live out our life, and then, like a vapor, we die. So, at the age of twelve, I was saved. I knew that if I died, I was going to heaven. And for the next five years or so, I didn’t really think much about God.

I went to Sunday school and church at the Union Baptist Church where I was baptized. I sang in the youth choir, but that was as far as my getting to know God went. Some friends that were part of a social club that my sisters and I helped form, went to another Baptist church in the next town. They seemed more involved in their church, so we got permission from our parents to change churches. I got more involved in church activities, mostly because my friends were involved, and I liked this preacher better because at least I could understand what he was talking about. This pastor took the stories in the bible and translated them into our everyday language. He said it in such a way that I could identify with what he was saying. He made me curious about what the bible was saying, so much so that I began to read it for myself. I felt that God was someone who really cared about me. That was big for me because, although I came from a home with both parents present and five siblings, I never really felt that anyone cared about me. I wanted to go to church now, not so much for my friends, but because I truly was interested in God. I even started teaching Sunday school.

Getting to know God, at that point in my life, was merely believing that He is and that He cares about me. I thought about Him, talked to Him, (and I will tell you more about prayer in a subsequent chapter) and somehow felt quite content with where I was in my Christian walk. This is where many Christians are. They are saved, they attend church, they talk to God and they think that that is all there is to it; to having a relationship with Him, to living the Christian life. God has so much more for us and it is a shame that we don’t understand that until we are older, until we have been through some stuff. Until we have made our mistakes and suffered the consequences, do we really come to the conclusion that there is more to God then we have been experiencing.

Mama says,

On the day you were born, the angels in heaven rejoiced. When you leave this earth and are received back into heaven, the angels in heaven will again rejoice. They rejoice for these two events because of what God has done. What happens in between is your responsibility. Are the angels in heaven rejoicing?

In between those epic events, is life. God is real concerned about how we do life. It is called, our Christian walk. It is so important to God, that He wrote a book about it. It’s called the BIBLE. Wrapped up in those sixty-six books, is all you will ever need to know to live your Christian life, victoriously. The problem lies in the fact that we don’t want to read that Book. We may read a few choice scriptures that mean something to us, for one reason or another, or we read it along with the preacher on Sunday morning; but, by and large, for the average Christian, it is a book that has an assigned place in our home, but few have it in their heart.

From childhood to adulthood, I was always an avid reader. I just loved books, but I didn’t acquire a thirst for The Book, until I was married and confronted with responsibilities that I knew I was inadequate to fulfill without guidance. I knew enough about God to realize that the bible was the only place that I was going to find such guidance, and so, I began to earnestly read the bible. I still wasn’t at the stage that I knew how to study the Bible, but I was reading and sometimes I was understanding.

For those of you who did not understand what I just said, about reading the bible and not studying, let me explain. When we read the bible, we select a particular passage of scripture and we read it, with the intent of applying what it says to our life. When we read, we should never take a scripture out of its context, but