Tonight as I sit to write, the kids unpack the Monopoly board and pour themselves Kool-Aid.
It’s late here, later than when they started last week’s UNO marathon and hotter, too. And if I’m honest with you, I’m ready to clock out and hit the sack.
Parenting has turned this weird corner on me and I’m not sure how I feel about this next leg of the race. My youngest is 5 and my oldest will be 14 in two days and I’m consumed with this feeling that someone is missing from our family. I’m thinking baby thoughts while counting how many summers we have left with our oldest.
Weird, huh?
You’d think with as many kids as we have coming and going I’d be content to just hold them and let them go. But I’m not. I’m just not.
And I think the coming and going of the neighborhood kids have only served to make the longing a little sweeter.
Can you feel the tension in the air I’m breathing? It’s here and it’s thick and it’s the sweetest tension I’ve ever felt and never wanted to talk about.
Mothering is like that for me.
It’s the thing I wear for always and yet never feel like I look good in it. I feel like a little girl playing house with a whole shoe full of children she can’t possibly launch into the world well.
This is why I steer clear of writing about how I mother.
Who am I to write about how I mother when I can’t sleep at night for fear that I am failing miserably?
Yet, of all the things I write, after marriage, this is the one thing I’m most often asked about.
How do you mother your children well while living where you live, doing what you do? And how in the world do you get everything done?
The answer, of course, is Jesus.
Jesus is the answer for everything.
He wakes me up and He sustains me. The Holy Spirit convicts me every minute of every day and on good days, I respond swiftly to his conviction. But on not so good days, my flesh rises up and chooses itself over every other thing and every other person. In the evenings, Jesus’s name is the one I repeat over and over again when I cannot sleep for all the failures and fears that plague my every thought. And Jesus is the one who reminds me that He loves me anyway and that my imperfections as a mama only push my children further into His arms.
But this post is the {After Jesus…} answer sort of post.
Because that’s what you’re really asking, right?
For two weeks, I’ve tried to come up with a bullet-pointed list of my How-To’s of Motherhood, but at the end of the day, friends, there is no such list.
I simply wake each day trying to meditate on a few truths about ME, the person of Lori, the child of Jesus, the wife to Thad, the mother to my tribe.
I believe that half the battle of motherhood is fought in the heart of the mother.
If the enemy can capture our hearts and fill it full of untruths about our identity in Jesus, he’s won the battle.
As Christians, we cannot mother well if we don’t know that we know that we know that Jesus has chosen us and equipped us for this work called mothering. And we can’t know that if we waiver on the simple truth that Jesus loves us with wild abandon and He loves our children with the same love.
So instead of giving you a How-To list, I’m going to give you a Things Christian Moms Need To Remember list. How’s that?
8 Things All Christian Moms Need to Remember
1.) Before the beginning of the world, the children in your home, and the ones yet to arrive, have been given to you by God for kingdom purposes you are not yet aware of.
