“One of the first lessons a pilot learns is to trust his instruments over his feelings. A pilot’s feelings may mislead, but his plane’s instruments provide him the true information to keep him safe and focused.

Life sometimes feels like a flying in a storm, doesn’t it? We bump up against difficult circumstances, find our faith shaken by loss, lack, or trials; & struggle to reconcile the feelings we experience with the wisdom we know from scripture.

We reach out to social media & blogs like air masks to maintain some semblance of control when what we need is the lifegiving air of our hope in Christ.

But what does that mean? To ‘find our hope in Christ?’

When people talk about hope, it’s usually in uncertain terms. We hope that thing happens. We hope that situation changes. We hope, but we wait to know the outcome.

And since we can’t be sure of what will happen next, our hearts are tempted to look at our circumstances & assess God’s faithfulness to us by the state of our current realities.

‘Is there enough money in the budget?’ ‘Are my kids healthy?’ ‘Does my marriage feel strained?’ ‘Does God love me?’

But the result of circumstantial hope is despair. If we can’t be sure of an outcome, we feel an urge to self-promote & self-preserve in order to care for ourselves in the face of uncertainty.

The truth is, life is full of suffering, painful consequences of sin, & a general brokenness that affects every relationship, conversation, & trip to the grocery store with five kids under five.

But as Christians, we know hope in an unchanging & eternal Christ is a certain thing.

When we look at the cross, we see that God gave up his most precious Son to save his enemies who delighted in their rebellion. In Christ, we have a fixed point of God’s faithfulness to us.

If God has given us all that we need through Christ, will he let us falter when we grow weary in training defiant children or haven’t slept in seven months? When the weight of our feelings are crushing & we can’t see if we’re flying right-side up or upside down?

No, mama, he will not. Because Who we hope in was & is victorious.”

I don’t need to tell you that motherhood is hard work. It’s physically grueling, emotionally exhausting, and intellectually numbing. But one hardship we often overlook as moms is the challenge it makes to our sense of purpose.

Through the consuming trials of motherhood, we lose many of the earthly ways we used to understand the purpose of our lives before—we may no longer work out of the home, our friendships may change, our relationships with our husbands may differ as we make room for the family, and so on.

Because the challenges of motherhood strip away our old identity markers, we are tempted to replace them by finding our purpose in godly motherhood.

Although godly motherhood is valuable, it is not our purpose. It is not our first calling, but the result of it.

Our purpose is first and foremost to love God more.

Therefore, we don’t wrap our purpose up in our children—or in any other relationship. Roles and relationships don’t define who we are and why we are here. Only one relationship defines us: our relationship with God.

Dear Mommies, we are so much more than the summation of our children. His purpose for your motherhood is that you would know him better, love him more, depend completely on his strength, and understand his faithfulness in a new way.

This is the second in a series of posts to demystify some of the most common gospel-isms we use in Christianity. What does it really mean to “remember the gospel” in your day-to-day life as a mom? Find out here.

About eight years ago, our family hit a tough spot financially. I was weeks from delivering our third child when my husband came to me with the numbers; there was simply no more stretching an already stretched budget. We ended up on food stamps and Medicaid.

At first, my faith didn’t waver.

But then things went from bad to worse. As the weeks turned into months and the months to years, I found our financial woes hitting me in a place I’d never expected: motherhood.

To be a ‘good’ mother, culture tells us, you must feed your child organic, locally sourced food. To be a ‘good’ mother, it whispers, you must book a professional photo shoot for each new stage (as well buy new matching outfits.) To be a ‘good’ mother, we hear, you must have the perfectly accessorized nursery. And then as they grow older, to be a ‘good’ mother you must be able to pay for dance, music, and art lessons.

What I remember most about our lean years was the sense of helplessness and guilt I felt While my story may be a bit of an outlier, the desire to care for our children is a universal one.

‘Which of you,’ Jesus asks in Matthew, ‘if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?’ The heart of every loving parent is to provide good things for our children. So when we’re financially unable to give them ‘bread’, it can strike us to our very core.

As a Father himself, God knows and understands the weight of your mother heart. He knows how desperately you long to give your children good gifts and how much you despair when you can’t.

In the midst of our financial struggles, in the midst of my feelings of helplessness, God was feeding us and carrying my children in his arms. But more than caring for my children, God was also caring for me.

As I led them, he was gently leading me. And part of what he was gently leading me to was the understanding that he never intended for me to care for my children alone.

While I don’t know what the future holds, I do know this: The Lord is my Shepherd and so I shall not want. And because the Lord is my Shepherd, my children won’t want either. He will feed his flock. He will carry the lambs in his arms.

He will gently lead those that are with young.

"Although we’ve had the same food expectations for all of our kids, their tastes and preferences vary wildly. Not long ago, we jokingly nicknamed our twins, “farm-to-table” and our oldest son, “Mickey” (in reference to his love of the McDonald’s cheeseburger). It was all fun and games … for awhile.
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After a couple of weeks it started affecting their behavior and excitement about different foods. Like when our firstborn pushed away his broccoli—not because he simply didn’t like it—but because he was “Mickey.”
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This goes to show that what we call ourselves has power.
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We don’t think of ourselves neutrally, but instead, we see ourselves through the lens of, 'Mary, the angry mom,' or 'Julie, the messy person,' or 'Kayla, the A-type overachiever.' The more we repeat these and believe these labels, the more we live up to them.
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The power of personal identity is one of main reasons why God spends so much of the Bible telling us who we were created to be, who we are apart from him, and who we are in Christ. These foundational truths are the dot from which all the lines of our life flow.
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In Genesis, he tells us that we are image bearers, created as males and females, equal in worth but still distinct. As image bearers, we deserve dignity, respect, love, and life. 
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But in Genesis, we also see that Adam and Eve sin. As sinners, we deserve guilt, condemnation, separation from God, and ultimately death. It feels normal for most of us (especially once we’ve heard and believed the gospel) to be horrified and ashamed about this sinful aspect of our identity. 
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If God left us like this—image bearers enslaved to sin—the narrative of our lives would be irredeemable.
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But he intervenes by sending his son, Jesus, to purchase us at an unimaginably high price so that we could part with our old identity and be raised with him, identified with Christ. Our new identity—in Christ—means that we are redeemed image bearers.
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From the basis of our new identity in Christ, we love well, we look out for the interests of others, we forgive, we submit, and we pursue peace.
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God tells us who we are in Christ, not because we have arrived today, but because we will arrive when we meet Christ. The more we believe that—remembering our identity in Christ today—the more we can cast off lies and walk in the way we’ll walk for eternity. 
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So, the next time you hear someone mention your identity in Christ, let it be a reminder that you are a new creation in Christ, which is definitely a label worth remembering."
 

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.

The truth is: we may sometimes feel helpless in motherhood, but because of Christ, we will never be hopeless.

'Theology' can be an intimidating word. For many of us, it calls to mind professors, pastors, or academics tirelessly pouring over ancient books. But it actually means 'the study of God.' So, momma, you're a theologian, and believe it or not, you're raising tiny theologians in your home. 

Every day the world around us affects our kids' theology – the shows they watch, the books they read, and the neighbors they play with are all teaching them something about God, his relationship to his people, and his world. 

So, the question isn't, 'Are our children theologians?' But instead, 'Have we taken the time to teach them to be good ones?'

Thankfully, God has equipped every one of us to be a student of his word! Each of us – you and me and even our tiny theologians – are able to come to the word of God, to study it with joy and understanding, and to share those rich truths with one other.

Momma, we have the honor and joy of joining with God in the process of raising tiny theologians. Let's teach!

We claim to believe it, but what really stirs in our hearts when we don’t get the job we applied for? How about when our kids disobey, or don’t do things the way we hope? What runs through our minds when dinner burns, or—even more practically—when our little one wakes early and interrupts our morning “quiet time?”...

What if we accepted the beauty that God, in his sovereignty, wants to cultivate something different than we expected in the hours of that missed nap? We might have a fussy toddler on one hip and a screaming baby on the other, but circumstances like these press us into the joy of sanctification that the Lord graciously ordained in order that we might look more like his Son.

He isn’t asking us to go anywhere that he himself hasn’t been. Isn’t this what Jesus did for us over 2,000 years ago as he prayed, ““Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).

By his example, Jesus enables us to surrender everything about our lives for the sake of those around us.
 

Like anyone, moms are susceptible to the conforming pressures of the world. The world tries to squeeze us into its mold like the play dough in our playrooms. 

Conformity comes from the word for “masquerade” – “to wear a mask” or “play a part.”...When our doxology and theology is conformed to the world, it gives the outward appearance of substance without an inward reality...

As we yield our minds to be renewed in the truth, our doxology and theology are transformed. The word reorients and realigns everything we think and do.

Transformation is radical, and sometimes messy, but in the end, glorious! The goal of transformation is to look like Jesus. The word of God (theology) reveals the glory of God (doxology) and the Spirit of God transforms us to be like the Son of God (2 Corinthians 3:17-18).

We are continually becoming what we will be – and what we are becoming is what we behold.

"I'll do it tomorrow..."

Four words, that seem like basic procrastination, are actually a hiding place for so much sin.
 

Today I'm reminded of how far I am from being a good mother, a good friend, a good wife / sister / daughter / church member / volunteer – a good anything! I feel split in two, like I live in the in-between. I want to do better, oh how I long to do better. But the needs keep coming at me and I fail over and over again. I just can't seem to get it together.

At times, it can feel pretty bleak. Why can I not live out what I know, I know? If I have Christ, why do I sometimes feel lost? If I know his promises are true, why do I act like they don't exist?