Dolores, Like the River

When I was twenty-five years old, I moved from Denver to a town in western Colorado called Montrose. I supposed that, like many my age, I was “finding myself” by running from home. In reality, the motivation for my move was a belief that I could find the internal peace I craved by manipulating my life’s external elements.

While in Montrose, I found a relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. I began a personal faith journey that challenged and eventually dismissed my belief that if there was a God, the chances were slim He would ever find a place in my world or I in His. On my spiritual voyage, I came to understand that I was loved for just who I am. I learned that God wanted a relationship with me. Coming from a family destroyed by alcoholism and abuse, this was not a message imprinted on my sense of self.

The Bible tells us that God loves and accepts us unconditionally. I soon found He does not just talk a good game. He supplies people, here on earth, who live and give His kind of love. He brought a woman named Dolores into my life. Over the next thirty-five years, she extended that unconditional love along with unwavering patience and understanding as I struggled to find my spiritual feet. She endlessly supplied wise instruction for growth in the Lord and provided an example of unflappable integrity. We met when she was sixty-five and I was twenty-six. It was through Dolores that God taught me about self-acceptance, forgiveness, dealing with loss, exposing the lies I believed about myself and others, living in joy, finding my gifts, and using them for His glory.

We were two completely different women. Our age difference of forty years was only one area of dissimilarity. Dolores had had a privileged upbringing and education. I was a kid with little education beyond high school, and I’d been raised by parents who barely scraped by financially and spent most of their extra time and energy on drinking and fighting. She was soft-spoken, even-tempered, and refined in manners. I was a rough and tough, beer-swilling, cigarette-smoking, hard-playing, hotheaded young woman who was more at home in a biker bar than a sitting room. She was a staunch conservative with 1940s values. I represented the liberal girls from the 1970s, with values dependent upon my whims and perceived needs at any given time. Dolores was a woman of faith matured through a lifetime. I had more than a small challenge in trusting a stranger on a cross for something I really didn’t believe in: eternal salvation.

From a human lens, this relationship would be considered unlikely to form let alone last for well over a quarter of a century. It had to be ordained by heaven. This was a master plan by the master planner to teach me about love—the one element that above all will sustain us through time, age, and life’s various predicaments.

It is my prayer that as you follow this story, you will (if you don’t now) appreciate the Master and His great plans, as well as the teachers and mentors He sends to bring those glorious plans to fruition in your life. And when your turn comes to assume the role of teacher/mentor, I pray you will be willing to flow as a quenching, healing, and nurturing river in the life of another.