God designs motherhood not just for our happiness but for our holiness—and he will be with us through every hard day.

The gospel helps us celebrate our children’s unique personalities and giftings and grow in sanctification together, even when we seem worlds apart.

When we feel buried by failure—whether struggles with sin or inability to live up to our own or others’ expectations—we can run to Jesus in prayer, casting our burdens before him.

While motherhood often brings unexpected challenges, God can accomplish unexpected good and glory in our lives through them.

God uses even our uncertain steps to sanctify us and teach us to walk by faith.

Motherhood isn’t just about training up our children. It’s about God training us as his children to look to Christ and to look like Christ.

Keep applying the gospel again and again—moment-by-moment, prayer-by-prayer, conflict-by-conflict—it focuses our hearts more fully on Christ and conforms us to his image.

We often spend our days believing we can mother in our own strength. But it’s okay to acknowledge our weakness—that’s when we see our need for Christ.

When guilt paralyzes us, the gospel frees us to move forward into repentance and joy.

Motherhood works towards something. We just need to ask: is it toward our ends or God’s?

Christ didn’t suffer on the cross so we could just survive motherhood. Rather, he defeated death so we could live as righteous ones. As we choose to serve our families with joy and out of love for God, we are transformed by grace into Christ-likeness—yes, through car pick up lines, nighttime wake ups, and toothpaste spills.

We all know that motherhood is so much more than social media showcases. It’s more than the bursts of laughter captured in a well-lit scene, houses that are never messy, walls that are never sticky, and hot steaming coffee that magically appears in bed next to a sleeping babe.

Some of the most genuine frames of motherhood are those you cannot capture. I’m talking about the early morning wake-up to hold up your daughter’s hair as she battles a stomach bug. Or the Holy Spirit-given fruit of patience budding in you as you break up sibling rivalry for the fifth time this week.

Social media is not wrong in and of itself, but for many, it may be the water needed to grow seeds of comparison, discontent, and envy. Today alone you probably learned where Sarah just traveled, and what an awesome mom Jane is for feeding her child steel cut oats and kale daily. With every scroll and every click we are depositing some knowledge into our brains, and what fills our minds will direct our thought life and actions.

Sometimes we just need that simple reminder that true joy doesn’t exist apart from Jesus.

The bottom line is this: forego the fairytale picture of mom-ing so many project through the screen, because this will not sustain you in the trenches of motherhood. If we want to mom well, we need to know Christ well, because it is He who has the power to transform us, our homes, and one another.