Jeanine’s Offering

I have been blessed this past month to meet Jeanine Guidry who is the founder and Executive Director of a non-profit band here in Richmond appropriately named Offering. Their tag line is “Making Music Make a Difference.”  Offering achieves this vision by giving their musical talents away in support of local non-profits.

I spent time with Jeanine this week and watched her with great interest as she offered herself to Embrace, Homeward, and the East End community.  I have never met such a giving person in my life.  I kept trying to figure out what her angle was.  What was she going to get out of any of this?  I could not answer this question until I read a devotional from Marketplace Leaders written by OS Hillman titled “The Spirit of Competition” which came out today in the TGIF email. Hillman writes

A Broken People: Sitting with the Pain

I have gone through a fair amount of painful experiences in my life.  I had three miscarriages in my twenties, lost my father to suicide at age thirty, my daughter suffered a major medical condition two years ago, and I have had those I minister to lie to me, slander my name, steal from me and betray me.  Obviously the most difficult experience was the loss of my father, but the thing that has been hardest for me to overcome has been the betrayal.

Betrayal has a sneaky way of making you distrust yourself.  After the most significant incident of betrayal that I have ever suffered, it took me almost two years to regain my ability to trust my own judgments about people.  To this day, I am scarred because of that betrayal.  There are some people I will never trust again.  I recognize that those who wounded me were mentally ill and/or ignorant of how their actions hurt me, but that does not mean the wounds they inflicted are not real.