Simplifying the Mother Load

This motherhood job is hard (good, glorious, and hard) and it helps me to call to mind the simplest, most essential aspects of this privileged responsibility.   Even if the periphery of our lives is sometimes dusty, sticky, piled-high, and undone, Lord help me to hit the heart of the matter in my job as mom.

If only I could set this tiny sermon to be like chimes on a clock that would ring every 15 minutes or so in my home...  somehow I need this truth awakening, refocusing my soul at least that often:  

My kids are my job.  Love them.  Serve them.  Lay down your life for them, Jill.  Don’t rush them along- through breakfast or through their little years- so that you can get to other things, “better” things that aren’t at all as important as these little now, but eternal lives.  Don’t fall for the lie, don’t be deceived!, that I’ll be more satisfied if I can finish my list, write more, give so many gifts, or host so many others....  

Let your kids be your main thing (til Daddy comes home in the evening).  They won’t always be, but they are right now.  Let them be.  Enjoy them as such.  Lay aside all the other junk.  Train your heart to take joy in your job to serve your children.  Strive hard to stir up their joy, enter into their joy, let their joy be yours, and serve them, serve them, with joy.  

For, in fact, all my service to them, is service to God.  I am not serving our kids so that they can repay me one day or so that I can please God (he’s already perfectly pleased with his Son who I am hidden in by faith!)  But I am serving them as an act of worship to God.

All this- the messes, tickles, quarrels, learning, growing, living- is grace from God.  

Praise, praise be...




Related Reading:  this post has stuck with me, challenging me, for years...
A Mother's Work:  A Model for True Work, from Ann Voskamp