Arising to Call You Blessed

It seems like every conversation I have with other moms these days eventually turns

 toward one serious, sobering question:  

am I getting this mother thing right? 

Mother and Child, by Pino Daeni - (image source)

Maybe it's the end of the school year exerting its exponential pressure.

Maybe it's facing the people we used to call children, 

knowing that our time of 24 hour influence on them is coming to a close.

Maybe it's that time of freefalling parental limbo between adolescence and mature adulthood,

the time between training a child in the way they should go and the not departing from it.

Maybe it's just having a moment to come up for air and take a look around,

only to see that we're doing it completely different than all the other moms.

We all know what happens in those moments when the last straw breaks.

When we discover the pile of dirty clothes in the closet reaching to the sky like the Tower of Babel.

When we find they've completed the test but failed to answer the essay questions yet again.

When the carefully worded and meticulously detailed instructions we gave weren't followed - at all.

When they forget to call when they get there and don't answer our texts and we worry, 

and then we get mad.

Sometimes it seems parenting is more about grinding the rough edges off our own selves
than teaching and exhorting.

Those last straw moments fill our hearts with doubt,
but they take up far more space in our motherhearts than they should.
Of course God uses our strengths in the lives of our children ... 

but He uses our weaknesses, too.   

Our strengths shore our children up where they need it,

and our weaknesses call them into their own strengths.

God gave your children the mother they need, and it's you.

Of course it isn't news to you that the task of motherhood is a colossal task.  

Impossible, maybe even.  

But God's grace fills in where we fall short.
You can relax in that.

And you know what? 

This colossal task called motherhood that you're doing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?  

You're doing an awesome, amazing thing, and you're doing a fantastic job of it.

Most importantly,
you're exactly the mother your child needs you to be.  

How do I know that?  

Because God picked you especially for them,

and they are blessed.

Happy Mother's Day!