Something strange can happen when a girl grows up in a church where a woman pastor attends... she grows up thinking that it's perfectly natural for someone like her to grow up, wanting to be a pastor.

As a kid at First United Methodist Church in Newton, Kan., I would often see an elderly couple sitting in the back of our sanctuary... there, in the deep, dark recesses, behind the accordion doors, where the hearing aid devices hung next to the offering envelopes and wooden Communion cup holders on the back of the pews.

It was a long way from where my mother would usually sit, second row back from the dais, north side of the sanctuary, just barely in the aisle. Here I would beg half a stick of Juicy Fruit or Doublemint or Spearmint gum, and chew until all the sweetness ran out. Then I would promptly fall asleep on Mom's lap, listening to Dr. Armour Evans preach.

There was a lot I was unaware of, back then... a lot I took for granted. I didn't think much of the fact that Mom chewed gum in church to try to cover up the smell of cigarette smoke on her breath. It didn't bother me that my Dad wasn't with us, because he worked such odd hours as a railroader that we seldom went anywhere together save the grocery store, unless he took vacation time. I also had no idea that others thought it strange that a woman would be a minister.

Sitting in that dark recess, just in front of the nursery and kindergarten room walls, was an elderly couple. So elderly that they appeared frail, thin, bent over. They looked ancient to me. The man's face looked rather sunken in, as I recall. But I knew who they were. And I knew there was something special about the woman.

She had a title, you see. She wasn't just Laura Bradbury. She was The Rev. Laura Bradbury. She was the only woman I knew who bore that name. Her husband had also been a minister--he was first--but in my mind, there was great significance because this woman was Someone.

I must have heard her preach a time or two, when Dr. Evans was gone or ill. I don't recall being especially impressed--what kid ever is, with a grownup's preaching? But I do remember having it firmly established in my mind that Women Could Preach. And Women Could Be Preachers.

So much so, that when some of us high schoolers went to Riverside Church in New York City years later, the thing I was taken with (aside from the marble walls in the bathroom) was that Women Could Be Ushers. Women collected our offering and took it up to the front to be blessed! Now that was something I had never seen in church before.

But women preachers? Of course.

It wasn't until I went into ministry that I discovered that The Rev. Laura was one of the first women ordained in Kansas, probably a decade before I was born. I had been sitting among a legacy in the making, and hadn't even realized it.

The cult of womanhood

As women, and girls who will one day be women, we all have a legacy to share, and a legacy we can leave behind. Let me tell you about the legacy that was given to me. I grew up in a beauty shop. That is to say, my mother had a beauty shop in our home, down in the basement. And our basement was filled with women, four days of the week.

This was during the time when most women went every week to the beauty shop to get their hair washed and curled. They’d sit under a hairdryer for 45 minutes before the curlers would come out. Then a hair artisan like my mom would backcomb and tease it and softly brush and swoop it up into a perfect hairdo.

Every so often, the ladies would come for a color rinse or a permanent. Their voices would rise above the drone of the hair dryers, and then above that, one could hear laughter here, a cackle there. I knew them all, and their voices, and without seeing them, knew which woman was beneath my bedroom, down in the shop, getting their hair done.

On certain days of the week, the distinct scent of permanent wave solution would waft upstairs. It seemed that the back door of the garage was always opening and closing, as one woman would leave and another would come. Mom would climb the stairs periodically throughout the day to put up her feet, get dinner started, and make sure that everything was all as it should be.

Her beauty shop represented a cult of womanhood. Mom was a beautician, and the women were there to become beautified. She also was part therapist, a woman’s bartender of sorts, listening as they confided all their family issues and challenges.

It was a wonderful place for a girl to grow up. Mom’s customers were women who owned businesses, women whose husbands owned businesses, women whose husbands worked with my dad on the railroad, women who had been schoolteachers, women who’d never married, women who sometimes brought their grandkids with them to play. It was hard not to believe this same activity was happening at other peoples’ homes in our neighborhood.

I was grateful to be surrounded by all these women, for my paternal grandmother had died a decade before I was born. My mom’s mother lived more than two hours away, and trips to her home in western Kansas didn’t happen often. Neither did phone calls.

Somehow, it seems, if you are lacking a special person in your life, God will sometimes give you substitutes—people you may not be related to, but can love, just as well. Sometimes, in my case, you get dozens more than what you truly missed out on.

They were in our house every week, some for twenty or more years. They knew everything about us, and watched us grow up. They put special gifts under a little Christmas tree in the beauty shop for mom and I. They ordered Christmas cards and pocketbook calendars from me, so I could earn enough money to buy slippers and a Zippo lighter for my mom and dad and stick them under the family Christmas tree.

They were my teachers about life, and patiently listened while I told them what was going on in school that day. They sat and colored pictures with me. They held me in their lap while we looked at Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens magazines. They knew when I had my tonsils out, when I got in trouble and had to stay after school, when I had my first date, and when I left home for college.

I tell you all this because I want you to know that every woman has the ability to love and mentor a young girl in their life, if only they will look around you. If only they will sit down and take the time to listen. And ask questions. And care a little.

And if you are a girl or young woman, I want you to look around you and see the amazing group of women around you, who have all sorts of wisdom and love to offer… if only you will sit down and take the time to listen. And ask questions. And care a little.

We all have a legacy to share, and a legacy we can leave behind. The days of the beauty shop may have ended when my mother retired and made her last trip up the stairs, in 1990, but the women I grew to love there will never leave my heart. The love I received from them all—Lois, Helen, Ethel, Lorene, Lucile, Catherine, Dorothy, Elizabeth, and so many others—remains with me even today. I can still hear their voices of encouragement. And I cannot wait to get to heaven and see them all, once again.

They are the women of the beauty shop, the mothers and grandmothers that God gave me as a source of strength and support. I pray that you may find your own cult of womanhood, a special place where women come together to love and nurture each other in a spirit of love.