H
onestly, you don’t have to know what you’ll do when it happens, when the kids grow up, buy you a Mother’s Day card, while they tell their friends, their therapist, and their kids, that you got so much wrong.
You just have to know that you’ll humbly own it.
Because they aren’t wrong.
It’s tender and true:
You could have held them longer after they grew too big for your arms: held space for their pain, held their eyes, held them up in relentless prayers.
You could have said yes to more campfires, jumped more on the trampoline and been known more for your loud, you could have asked more honest questions and lingered longer, simply honouring them with listening space. You could have said yes. And No. Both at the right time.
Where you tried and fell short, they now trip and fall and have bruises to prove it.
Much dysfunction is a function of denying brokenness. The madness of much dysfunction ends now, ends with our owning it.
Yes, things were broken. And: All the brokenness can be the tender breaking open of a seed to grow better.
No matter their age or your regrets: You can tenderly own that you took some wrong turns and it’s never too late to simply turn toward the Light.
Life always turns on the turn.
And it’s worth writing down by the kitchen sink: Mothering is never about how your kids turn out. It’s always and only about how you keep turning toward your kids and their Maker.
It’s okay: Motherhood is never about training your children to be good so they won’t ever fall — it’s about letting them see you fall in love every day with a good God.
And even after you’ve fallen hard — they see you keep falling hard for God.
Simply: The work of every parent is to give the best they know how now — and the work of every child is to forgive their parents the best they can now. Our work will look different, but we both have growing work to do.
There is always grace coming to meet all of us.
I became a mother on the eve of Mother’s Day. I was a wide-eyed girl of 21.
He was 4 weeks early. I wasn’t ready, he was tiny, a curled soul in my hand, and I had no idea how to unfurl him into a man.
That boy who made me a mother now turns 27. I’ve now been a mother for a quarter of a century. I had no idea I’d end up becoming the mother of one and a half dozen kids — which is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying I’m the mother of 7 kids — while saying that a whole lot of days that felt more like mothering 18 kids.
I have lived through days —countless of them — that were unashamedly our actual dreams come true — and I have lived through honestly our very worst nightmares.
Rejections. Diagnosis. Needles and daily injections. Constant meds. ICUs. Self-harming. Open heart surgeries. More than once. Mental health fractures. Mine and theirs. Car accidents. More than once. Drop outs. More diagnosis. Wilderness Wanderers. Sleepless nights. Prayer pacing and soundless tears at 3 am. More than once.
Seven miraculous kids has meant non-stop riding seven roller coasters with all of the wondrous, exhilarating heights — and heart-dropping plunges.
Our nightmares end when we accept that where we are can be where dreams still come true.
And a thousand times I return to what I learned about mothering that first long, sleepless night of being a brand new mother.
It wasn’t wails of the brand new baby that kept me awake, but my terror that was kinda palpable: How do you mother and raise an actual living human being?
I’d opened up the most Holy Book that I had brought to the hospital with me and I had traced a trail of words that had been worn down as tried and found true for centuries:
“He carries them close to his heart
and gently leads those that have young.” Isa. 40:11
In the shadows of a dark room of a neonatal ward, I’d laid there wide awake with this Mother Epiphany:
You need to carry out your mothering the best you can, but the Shepherd carries your babies close to His heart, and He is the one responsible for carrying your babies home.
God is ultimately the shepherd of our children, we just have to keep faithfully carrying on.
God gently leads those who have young, because He is leading us on a journey — that journeys with our kids who are on a journey of their own.
No parent gets to decide a child’s outcome — we only get to decide to always come alongside our child. We only get to offer our child with-ness and witness on their way — we don’t get to determine their way.
We can only relentlessly pray that they will choose the only One who is the only Way.
It’d taken me years to realize Parenting 101:
No shock, no shame, no matter what they do.
Only share with them the sheltering arms of the Shepherd.
Parent or child, we are no different, we are all wandering sheep who are easily lured, who all need the rescue of the Shepherd from the lostness of lesser loves, into the embrace of the greatest Love, Love Himself.
When a mother stops seeing herself as the shepherd who needs to be good enough get her child safely Home, but instead sees her and her child both in need of a Good Shepherd, this is how she always stays safe in the home of God.
When I’d turn toward the expanse of dark hospital room windows, there was my reflection, a mother desperately fearing she was not enough, backlit by the glow of hospital hallway , and there was clear Heart of the Father:
The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. Ps. 23:1
Mother, in the arms of your Father:
You are not lacking.
You lack nothing.
You. do. not. lack.
I brimmed….. dropped my eyes, shook my head…..
On the eve of Mother’s Day, my hours old newborn son slept soundly, and I cried quietly in the arms of my Father and it would take me a long quarter of a century and 7 kids later to know it fully:
God’s a perfect Father with His own prodigal kids — and He only has perfect grace for my prodigal parenting of these imperfect, glorious kids.
It would take me more than a quarter of a century of mothering to find the relief of it:
If we don’t turn inward — it all turns out in the end.
Just turn outward — toward your children, and toward your Shepherd — and in the end, it will all turn out. All will be alright, all will be all redeemed, all will be all restored.
You will get things wrong, you the prodigal parent with kids who will both make wrong turns, only to turn and find the arms of the Shepherd who left everything to come and find you and gently lead you all the way through.
So no matter what any Mother’s Day Card says this year, there is a Shepherd who gives every tender Mama what she longs for: More than Enough Grace.
You get more than enough grace to bury your fears that your faith isn’t enough, and that your faults are too many.You get more than enough grace to wash your dirty wounds and wounds the devil’s lies.
Grace that says you doesn’t have to try to measure up to anyone else because Jesus came down — and He measures you as good enough, as worthy enough, as loved more than enough.
Grace that embraces you before you prove anything — and after you’ve done everything wrong.
Grace that holds you when everything else falls apart — and whispers that everything is really falling together.
Whatever has happened in the past can’t change it, and nothing in the future can intimidate the reality of it:
you are always sufficient — because God always gives you His all sufficient grace.
You don’t have to be afraid —because you have a Father, and you don’t have to know how to do it all, you just have to choose to be all here with Your Father who is here, right here, with you.
His grace meets you in every moment — and you will miss it if you are worrying about future moments.
When you focus on living only in the grace of this moment — is exactly when you get the grace of a momentous life. Live in the moment — and you get a momentous life.
That is all…
Honestly, you don’t have to know how to be awesome and do everything.
And when all the mothers did more than open up their Mother’s Day cards, but actually opened their hearts to that kind of grace, and unfolded all of His more than enough Grace, and let themselves be completely enfolded in it….
All kinds of wounds healed in a thousand tender places.
* * *. *
What Every Mother Wants Most: More than Enough Grace
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