Mar 19, 2018 | Bible, Children, Christianity, Discipleship, Discipline, Faith, Family, God, Grace, Parenting, Tips, Toddlers
There are more than 3 things. Obviously. Like, that a certain time of the day – the time that was previously referred to as happy hour – would now be referred to as unhappy hour. And that someone else’s bathroom, sleeping and eating habits would be dominating my conversations for the foreseeable future (and that I would see absolutely nothing wrong with that!). While I was pregnant with my firstborn, I read all the books. I knew about sleep training and pureed organic veggies. But there where soul challenges that I was about to encounter on my journey into parenthood that no one ever told me about.
(This blog is an abbreviated version of a talk called The 10 things I wish someone had told me about being a Mom – for more info on booking a talk or workshop please click here)
I have only been a mom for 11 years. According to Malcolm Gladwell that makes me an expert. But he’s wrong. I am categorically not one! But let’s face it, as moms, we really just need all the help we can get, and if you are reading this that means you agree with me on one thing – This parenting thing is flat out hard! It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve done and I grew up with 3 brothers and I am South African and I’ve competed in an International Beauty pageant! I will take on 12 competitive blonds with perfect teeth over an 11-year-old boy on a mission any day of the week!
So here are a few thing that I wish someone had given me a heads up about:
THAT IT WOULD SHAKE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MY IDENTITY AS A PERSON:
When I became a stay at home mom, I dreaded the “So, what do you do?” Question in social settings. I felt unjustified telling people I was a stay-at-home mom. It used to be so easy to talk about the career I was so proud of, and the awkwardness I felt at this new role in my life made me realize how much of my worth and identity I found in what I did for a living.
Woman are meaning makers and meaning-seekers, and when we become moms no one highlights to us the risk that we may now exchange one wrong source of meaning and identity for another. That we may very well go from being defined by our work an achievements to being defined by our home and our kids (and their achievements). That we may go from performance reviews and bonuses to the bar for our lives being Proverbs 31 (oh my goodness can you even imagine!) and the definition of our worth as our kids and their achievements! Can you imagine living under the pressure of having the justify your mom’s entire existence with every school report, or good night’s sleep! Is it any wonder even our kids our stressed!
But God never intended for us to bank our identity on the role of a dice, on the changing landscape of our roles or our seasons. Because then every word spoken in criticism of that becomes the definition of who we are, then our (absolutely inevitable) mistakes and failures (and that of our kids) are not learning opportunities or life happening, but a declaration of who we are, failures, as moms, as people. No, God’s anchor for our identity is the unchanging conviction that He holds about us, and His unalterable word over us.
Because the gospel says that we are who we are not because of what we do or achieve but because of what Christ did and achieved.
When we are in Christ, that is the final word over us.
Then our mistakes or failings will never be the defining story of our lives because grace means that we have never really blown it.
Then all that ever needed to be achieved is finished and that is a work us moms can rest in, not strive for.
Then whatever our accomplishments, achievements, and successes become a reflection of His grace and glory in our lives.
Living this truth as the anchor of who we are testifies much more greatly to our kids than striving for achievement!
THAT WE ALL LIVE BY A DEFINITION OF SUCCESS, WHETHER WE KNOW IT OR NOT
When my eldest was in Gr R they once filled in one of those cute forms for Mothers day, they go something like this:
My moms name is ___________
Her favourite Color is _______________
Together we like to _______________
But it was my son’s answer to one question that really stopped me in my tracks, literally. Where it said My mom says (Fill in the blank) a lot, he wrote HURRY UP. Jip, it was right there in black and white, “My moms says hurry up allot”.
As a mom, I defined how good the day was by how much I had gotten done. For me, productivity has always been the ultimate measure of success. Don’t be lazy, don’t slow down, do do do, go go go! If at the end of the day, the To Do list had lots of little red tick marks on it, then it was a good day. Conversely, if a kid got sick or the car broke down or I locked myself out of the house (jip, it’s happened!) then, the day, and by definition, I – was a failure.
Whether we know it or not, our definition of success, what we deem to be the ultimate measure of “good and enough” in our lives, is what drives our decision making, what we say yer or not to, what our schedule looks like (and our kids schedules) how we spend our money and our time. Comfort, status, being liked, all of these things could be our definition of success, the thing that cracks the whip in our lives so to speak, without us even knowing it.
The challenging thing about becoming a parent is that you are no longer preaching the sermon, you are living it, and they are watching.
So I had to ask myself, what am I reflecting to my boys about what I believe true success is, and I was forced to come up with a new definition of success.
So let me ask you this. If someone were to look at your life, your schedule and your bank account, what do you think they would say your definition of success was? Because it’s this definition that is messaging to our kids what we deem to be most important.
THAT THE DAYS ARE LONG BUT THE YEARS ARE SHORT
I didn’t say this, but since I heard it I tell everyone. Because I wish someone had told me!
Because we kind of all journey through life the way kids journey to the coast, always asking “Are we there yet”. In Highschool we just want to finnish and be a grownup, at Varsity we just want a real job and be independent, when we start out work we just want to reach the top and earn money and success, when we are dating we just want to get married, when we get married we just want to have kids, and then when we have kids and the shole adulting and parenting thing is suddenly very real and very scary and if we are honest, something that we would sometimes very much like to run away from! we’re like, oh my word this is so not fun! And we look longingly at older couples with older kids sitting placidly at restaurants enjoying a quiet meal (while our toddler picks gum up off the floor under the table and we are wondering if there is a changing station in the restrooms!) and we ask ourselves, when is this going to be over?
But now that my boys are 9 and 11, I can’t help but wonder, did I make the most of that time, those tough, early years? DID I see it as a shaping, refining, satisfying blessing God intends it to be or was I just white-knuckling it to get it over with!
Embrace the discipline of the moment instead of the distraction of your iPhone. God has given our children to us so we can teach them, but I have learned more and more, that He has also given them to us to teach us!
Embrace the mundane of the menial so you can find it’s meaning. Because wisdom is a treasure
Be present with your kids so you can make Christ present with them, because in every circumstance we are His witnesses, testifying to our kids what it means to follow Him in every circumstance.
Running on empty – that is how I sometimes feel as a mom. I get to the end of the day and feel like I have nothing left, like in every area, with every offering, I am lacking. Ok, so be honest, sometimes I also feel like that at the beginning of the day. Like my only hope is to just try harder, like trying harder is my slogan, my motto, my anchor. Like I am starting off from a place of lack. But that’s a lie. According to the God’s word, I have a promise not of lack, but of abundance! A promise that says I will be equipped for the Godly work of mothering with more than what I need, “that He is able to make every grace overflow, abound to us, so that in every way – always having everything we need – we can excel in excel in every good work” (2 Cor 9 v 8)
And is that not what we are busy with as moms? The good word, the work of raising the next generation of Christ followers (please
Lord!), the work of raising someones’ future husband or wife! It is the abundance for thís that Paul employs the Greek word Perisseuo for, to describe just how much grace we will receive – grace in excess, beyond average, to surpass/ overflow/ have leftover! And with every sunrise, it’s new, there’s more! Yes, please!
Make extravagant grace your slogan Momma, your motto, your anchor! I am praying for you!
Feb 27, 2018 | Bible, Christianity, Discipleship, Discipline, Faith, God, Grace, Prayer, Tips
(or lost or frazzled or disorganized or distracted or overwhelmed..basically, if you’re a modern-day woman)
I get it!
I am fairly confident that if you are reading this, you have a strong cerebral conviction that you MUST pray. Prayer is good. But sometimes you find yourself in a season where your prayers are trite, one-way conversations that sound allot like shopping lists and allot the same and that happen in the car or in the few minutes before you go to sleep. Or you find yourself disillusioned by a season of pleading desperation that didn’t actually “work”, and didn’t make you feel any more connected to God. Can I get a witness? I know what it’s like to suffer from distraction, frustration, lack of urgency, discipline and motivation in my prayer life. I have had to claw my way back into better habits and rhythms only to fall back into losing prayer in the blur of countless stressful days strung together. So here are some tips, from one struggling, distracted woman to another:
Determine your why: We have a ping pong table at home. It’s become a great opportunity for quality time between my husband and our boys. But my husband, God bless him, once made the fatal error of offering one of our boys a reward if he beat his dad at a heated game of ping pong. This, sadly, set a precedent whereby our son would only play when there was going to be a reward at the end. What my good husband was after, was quality time with his son. What my son was after, was a reward. It came to a point when I had to ask him a tough question: “do you spend time with Dad because of who he is to you or because of what he can give to you?”
Sometimes this is what our relationship with God is like. And this can be most evident in our prayer life.
There is no point in my starting off by saying “You must pray” if you’ve lost your “reason why”. And if you have lost your reason why, ultimately all I can tell you, is that our prayer life (or lack thereof) will reflect what we truly believe about God (eish, I know, truth bomb right!), whether we seek Him out because we have realised that in Him we live and breathe and have our being (Acts 17 v 28). Or whether we only hang out with Him if we can get something/ need something out of it. So first start off not by asking yourself, why don’t I pray, but asking yourself, what do I believe about who God really is?
Direct your thoughts and words: I have confessed before that my brain is always going in a thousand directions at once. I am like a laptop with too many tabs open. That is why “getting in the zone” to pray is hard for me. I also sometimes battle with praising and even thanksgiving beyond the tired, thoughtless phrases that I’ve so overused, and I’ve battled to find the words to pray for the people I love in a more directed, focused way.
In here I write down scriptures, promises to pray for them, affirmations and praises to help me fix my mind on God.
So go on honey, head out to Typo, I am giving you permission to indulge your stationery fetish. Call it an investment in your prayer life. Buy something that can lie open in your hand (that is why I use ring-bound notebooks), that you can easily and quickly add to. I have found that without a firm foundation in scripture, my prayers are just like shopping lists. On the other hand, God’s Word is like a prayer vocabulary and when we use it to shape our prayer language (so to speak), prayer becomes a deep, rich, two-way experience, instead of a one-way list of requests. And having something written down to pray through, for me, is a concrete move against my own internal noise which I battle to quiet down.
One of the purposes of prayer is that it aligns us with God’s thoughts and desires, and when we pray scripture we have the opportunity to internalize His very character and for our daily life to be framed by it.
Actually writing down your prayers is also a way of staying focused during your prayer times. Even if you just have 5 minutes, use them to journal your prayers, giving substance and depth to even the shortest bite of time you are spending with God and inviting Him into your world.
“Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-Glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal. Define your dream. Claim your promise. Spell your miracle.” Mark Batterson – The circle maker.
Dedicate time: I know that many of you are in a life stage where even a simple quiet time is a challenge, much less dedicated time to pray (
are you a young mom? Check this out) I am not saying there is anything wrong with praying in the car, or praying when you make the beds – we are supposed to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5 v 16)! But when I am talking to my husband while driving to an event we might be
talking, but we are not necessarily
connecting, right? It wouldn’t be considered “
building intimacy”, right? To build connection you need to be fully
present. To build intimacy you need to take
time – ask any husband who has tried to rush it an failed! And so in my marriage, I may not be able to dedicate time and resources to a full-on date night, but we can sit down and have a cup of coffee, be present for and with one another and listen/ talk for as long as a cup of coffee takes. And if you are in a busy and distracting season and it’s all you have, believe me, that is all it takes: 15 minutes in which connection is rekindled, in which time is given to sharing and listening, and we find ourselves walking away anchored in, steadied, heard, connected. So set it out in your mind for your coffee break at work, or the quick lunch you grab before fetching the kids. Put your phone away as you sip that coffee, and instead of being filled with the highlight real of someone else’s fake life (yes, I know you’re are scrolling Facebook when you’re waiting for the kettle to boil!) , open up your prayer book or journal if you have one, and allow yourself a few moments to be present with God and to be filled with the real sustenance of the gift of rest.
Dump Perfect: in fact, apply this across the board to every area of your life! We often approach the disciplines of our spiritual life (devotions, prayer, fasting etc) the same way we approach diets, fatalistically. We go at full tilt, knuckling down for a time, until we fall off the wagon (thanks Cinnabon!) and then, instead of saying, “aww man, I shouldn’t have eaten that whole thing, but ok, I am picking up where I left off”, we say;”Aww man, this day (weekend/ week) is a write-off, I am giving in and I will start again on Monday!” In our spiritual life, we have this set idea that our interactions with God should look a certain way, take a certain shape and amount of time, make us feel x,y or z, and if we can’t have/ do that, we might as well not even attempt anything. And in that we lose our unction, we lose sight of the importance of the spiritual realm and its impact and then we wonder why we feel like our prayers hit the ceiling. I love the saying: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Because surely a simple, sincere prayer uttered in a moment of awe, understanding, desperation, is better than a perfectly crafted doxology left unspoken?
“If in prayer I come before a throne of grace, the faults of my prayer will be overlooked.” Charles Spurgeon
Dare to be honest: I hope you also have a group of friends in your life where you know you can be your authentic, uncensored self. Friends who love you in such a way that they don’t make you feel like your too much, or not enough, for whom you don’t need to dumb down or dress up any part of yourself in order to feel at home. I am blessed to have a few like that. And if I compare how I feel when I am around them with how I feel when I am around people in front of whom I can’t be myself, I know who I would rather hang out with, and I appreciate the authenticity of those relationships all the more. It’s no different with God. We are bound to seek Him out all the more if we experience the truth about His loving character and nature to us if we enter in with a conviction of His grace. We are bound to avoid Him if we have allowed the burden of sin and shame to pile up like dirty dishes in our soul, bound to skirt formally around Him if our picture of Him has become affected by half-truths and earthly wisdom and religiosity.
You have permission to be unhappy before God, desperate, ungrateful even, superficially joyful, just plain you.
Just take a stab at praying through the Psalms if you don’t believe me.
In Genesis Hagar refers to God as El Roi, as she experiences God as One who truly sees her in a world where she feels utterly unseen. You are seen darling, and loved, chosen, sought out not just despite of who you are, but because of it. That is the God we draw near to when we draw near in prayer.
Can I encourage you in whatever season you find yourself, to make small shifts in your schedule and perspective to have your daily life transformed by prayer?
“To pray is to change. All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked onto the periphery of their lives, it was their life. It was the most serious work of their most productive years. Nothing draws us closer to the heart of God. “ Richard Foster
Jan 25, 2018 | Christianity, Church, Discipleship, Faith, God, Uncategorized
Does this ever happen to you? You sit down for your quiet time (yes, you’ve managed to hit the snooze button only once, got up before everyone else, you have your crispy new journal and your gel pens, and a warm cuppa – so you basically just hit a perfect mommy trifecta) and your mind does one of 2 things:
It either goes blank. Completely blank. Like the look your 9 year old give you when you ask him why he can’t just remember to put the toilet seat up.
OR
Your mind goes in 50 different directions at once. Now, I am an expert juggler. For example, I am constantly juggling my out of control love for my children with how much they sometimes annoy me (oh please, I know I’m not the only mom who thinks that but never says it!). But juggling 20 thoughts at once does not a productive quiet time make. And if I just sit down and close my eyes and start “trying” to “focus”, my thoughts just run amuck. No matter how hard I try, I am making a grocery list, a to do list, a list of deadlines or dinner dates or a don’t forget list from the minute I sit down.
The other challenge is that in our content driven, content crazy, content overload world, it’s not only hard to switch off to the many distractions but it’s also hard to actually select and stay on a focussed path of spiritual progress. The constant beeping of your phone and the million options of blogs, books, bible-studies, devotions, podcasts can leave you overwhelmed and spiritually rudderless.
Sometimes the fact is that we are so overwhelmed by content and choice, that our quiet time struggle has more to do with a lack of focus than a lack of time.
I have struggled with all of the above as a confessed information junky with a minuscule attention span, and so I wanted to share with you today the super simple structure I stick to to stay focussed during those precious meeting times with God.
Find the right spot: build an altar, the place where you praise, worship, remember, give thanks, receive. Clear a space for your body and your mind. I know you are always last on the list Mom, but be unapologestic about this!
Get in the zone: I light a scented candle, take 5 deep breaths while pressing hard on my fingertips or squeezing a stress ball (don’t judge ok this works for me), and then start off with a prayer of adoration. I often find that my spirit is sluggish to start with, regardless of the time of day that I meet with God, so I write out scriptures and psalms of adoration in a prayer book to lead me into God’s presence and centre me in His will. I have it ready as I sit down to start and I read those prayers, out loud if I can.
Adoration reminds my soul who I am about to sit down with and breathes expectation into my spirit.
Eliminate (mental and physical) noise: My phone used to be the first thing I reached for when I woke up in the morning. Before sitting down to read my bible I would already know how many emails I had to respond to later that day. Not good for focus or motivation. I found that keeping it off until after my quiet time helps me to bring my thoughts in line with the priorities of God’s Kingdom, instead of the priorities of my own. I also have one of those handy little mini note paper stacks. The moment a thought/ to do/ person that I have to call’s name pops into my head I quickly write it down and set it aside so it doesn’t completely derail me.
Have a plan: If you are into devotionals, have that at the ready. If you’ve started off the year with different areas of your faith that you want to study and grow in (think grace, forgiveness, faith, contentment), take out your concordance as a starting point. Maybe you’ve chosen a book of the bible to do. That’s what I prefer. But the best thing is to know what works for you but whatever you do, make sure that God’s word is at the centre of it. Go for quality and not quantity.
Set yourself up to crave the word. Whatever you are reading during your personal devotions must be taking you deeper into being able to hear God’s voice in His word for yourself.
Have a back up plan: because: life. And because: snoozebutton. If I oversleep or had very little sleep the previous night, if I’m feeling particularly mentally overwhelmed or even if I know I only have 20 minutes instead of the hour and twenty I was hoping to spend, I reach for a Psalm. Every year, I pick 2 Psalms as my “go to Psalms”for that year. Yes, only 2. Some days truth be told a couple of bites of a Psalm is all I can handle. There! That’s my real sometimes Mommas! And I am ok with that. And you know what, I think God is too. Having a plan AND a back up plan means I never sit down and hit a blank during my quiet times.
Make it plain: As in, make your plan something you can see. This is probably the thing that has helped me stay on track the most. Think of it as the agenda for the meeting you are about to have with God. I use one of those weekly planner pads with the tear off sheets so I can update it when I need to (subscribe to the blog this week to recieve a handy personal devotional schedule printable for your desk!)). This goes onto a whiteboard in front of me. On here I record what I am focussing on or reading at the moment, as well as who I am praying for each day.
Mondays I pray for my husband and sons and our housekeeper
Tuesdays the people I mentor/ disciple and my close friends and their families
Wednesday is my extended family
Thursday I have the privelage to pray for family and friends who don’t yet walk with Jesus. I also pray for all the missionaries I know on Thursdays
Fridays are for my kids’ school, my church and my country. On Fridays I pray longer, hiehie!
Saturdays are for my personal prayers, plans and goals, my writing and work.
Having this list up means that when I have promised to pray about someone or something, I can easily add it to the right place on the list. I can stay on track during my prayer time as I know every day of the week who I am praying for and it helps me pray with purpose. I also record here what I’m reading, what my memory verse is that week (which I also put on Q cards and stick all over the house) and I also keep a “spill over” list if I already know what devotional or word study or book of the bible I want to do when I am done with the current one.
Record and engage: Maybe you journal. Maybe you don’t. But when I study the bible, I make notes. It helps with focus because it’s an activity that I am physically engaged in, as in I am not just sitting there, I am doing something. And in the front of my journal are the 4 things I look for each time I sit down to read the Bible, and this is what I write down. This is something my mom taught me to do when I was still very young. So, I look for
- Confirmations, commands, corrections and/ or promises from God
- Keywords (you know, those ones that just “jump out”
- Who is God (what elements of His character are evident in this scripture, what can I praise Him for?)
- Who am I (what does this passage highlight about me, things I must repent of or see about myself?)
This is also a handy rubric that our church distributes to assist people during their queit times (
get the explanation here). Whatever “method” you choose, make sure it engages you mentally, spiritually and physically and helps you to develop a pattern of discipline during this precious time of devotion. As I engage with the content, I pray, I confess, I plead, and what I studied then forms the jump off point for a time of prayer, confession and supplication.
If the God of the universe tells you something, you should write it down – Henry Blackaby
Go forth and share: Telling someone what you have gained from your time with God is a great way of internalising that knowledge. What do you talk about with your girlfriends Momma? With my closest buddies we can go from talking about the latest and best liquid blusher (my latest obsession!) to what God is speaking to us about right now in the space of a 10 minute conversation. I pray that you are as immensely privelaged as I am to have such an inner circle of women!
Your intentional engagemet with God and His word will reap a harvest, not just for yourself but also for the people God has placed in your path.
February is looming and I am sure you , like me, had lots of ideas about staying on track spiritually this year. I hope that these inputs will help you, and please share in the comments other tips and tricks that you find valuable in keeping your focus during your time with God! If you are in that babies and toddlers lifestage and a set time of personal devotion seems about as out of reach for your as 12 hours of uninterupted sleep, I have hope and encouragement for you to,
read here! And remember:
God delights in you and is more interested in you showing up to spend time with Him than in what you accomplish in your quiet time. Eventhough in the world our measurement is achievement (think before and after photos, activity trackers, reading the bible in one year, and to do lists) what God honors and has always honoured is discipline. Your relationship with Jesus is the light that will shine out of your life, pointing others home, pointing you home.
The amount of time we spend with Jesus, meditating on His Word and His majesty, seeking His face, establishes our fruitfulness in the Kingdom – Charles Stanley
Nov 8, 2017 | Bible, Children, Christianity, Discipleship, Faith, Family, God, Grace, Parenting
“What about my quiet times?”
Three times in the last 2 weeks. That’s how many times I was asked this question by moms of young children. That’s how I knew it was a thing. That’s also how I knew I must be old!
How do you keep growing with God when you are in the throws of the not-sleeping, always-feeding-burping-changing-or running-after, why-must-they-get-up-at-5AM-on-Saturdays madness of those early years with kids?
It’s not as complicated as you think:
Raise your expectations of God and lower your expectations of yourself!
Because what would your life, your walk with Jesus look like if you expected to see God every day all day any time of day, and you got rid of the expectations of what your walk with Him is supposed to look like (which very often mostly depends on things you do)? What if you placed all your expectations on the promise of His nearness in this season of your life, instead of placing it on your own ability to carve out 60 precious quiet, uninterrupted minutes. The dichotomy is that nothing will test the fiber of your faith like being a mom, and yet in that season you are relegated to noisy cry-rooms listening to half of a sermon and you can barely carve out time to wash your hair much less wash your spirit in a solid daily quiet time. You can barely go to the bathroom alone, much less have alone time with Jesus. And there you are in a season where you need Jesus more than ever!
The good news is that I have some points that may encourage you. In other good news, I will keep it short. For obvious reasons! There is a way that we can journey with God and grow in our faith in the challenging season of early parenthood if we can just let go of the idea of that we have in our head that it’s all supposed to look a certain way. So..
Let God do what God does: Too often in life, we have a very high expectation of ourselves and actually a very low expectation of God. You can hear it in the way we pray. The way we are always asking Him to help us do things and how seldom we just ask Him to do them. He is still on the throne, even if you feel you might have lost the plot.
Do your best but don’t trust your best. Instead see parenting for what it really is – the biggest trust exercise you will ever complete and your biggest ever leap of faith! Trust God.
Let the Word do what the Word does: It’s sharper than a two-edged sword (Heb 4 v 12) and it never returns void (Is 55 v 11). When your days are long and your attention span is short, take one verse, or maybe 2 (on the days that kid slept through the night). Write it on a cue card (I use these all the time) and give yourself time to memorize it. Read it in the morning when you wake up and just before you go to sleep, meditate on it as you make dinner, sink into it as you stand at the sink, keep a card in your car and next to the feeding chair or the changing station, pray it over yourself and over your kids. Let it do something in you, instead of you trying to do something with it! Oh and listen, I love me a good ‘ole girlfriend devotional any day of the week, and of course there is a season for that, but I really believe that in the long run 2nd hand conviction won’t carry us. Each of us is responsible to get into the Word for ourselves. And the year that you have that first or second or third baby is NOT the year that you also read through the bible. Just let that go ok! Take a bite-size, chew on it for a couple of days. See what happens.
Let worship do what worship does: Do you worship in your home, or do you leave that for Sundays? Worshipping God is a powerful thing. Whether you are blasting Hillsong at full force or simply out-loud-my-neighbors-think-I’m-crazy speaking gratitude and praise to God (ascribing to Him the Glory due to His name alla David style in Psalm 29v2) as you pack the lunchboxes; there is power and authority in the act. The act of worship draws our eyes upwards and our hearts closer to God as we see Him more clearly and ourselves more clearly. Be intentional about bringing worship into your home and creating a spiritual atmosphere that can influence your spirit and help you draw near to God when the slog of parenting leaves you parched for intimacy with Him. It will do you good. It will do your children good.
We end up walking around with this huge expectation that we as moms are somehow letting our faith “slip” and we really should just “try harder or get up earlier” with some pinterest perfect spirituality when in fact there is no better time than when you first become a mom for you to realise that
weak is the new strong and that the whole parenting deal doesn’t rise and fall on your ability to parent but on your ability to trust God MORE.
AW Tozer says that it is in the nature of God to speak, He is never silent, and the one who doesn’t expect to hear God speak will discount what He says. Soooooo, higher expectation of God, lower expectation of self. Do you know what you need for the chaos and the fears and the battles of parenting (no, of LIFE!)? You need songs and prayers! And the Bible is full of both! And all the sisters said: AMEN!
Sep 4, 2017 | Beauty, Bible, Discipleship, Discipline, Faith, Fashion, God, Grace, Wardrobe
Jip, one month to go and then I would’ve gone 10 months without indulging my serious fashion fetish. I feel the way my wardrobe looks – worn out! Soulsearching and exerting extreme willpower will do that to a girl!
But ok, this is what I realised: Once your salvation is secure, the best Satan can do is distract you, preoccupy you and keep you from maturing. The biggest battles in our lives, our biggest challenges and the things that place us on the precipice of progress or defeat in the faith is not the things we see, it is the things in the unseen.
If Satan can keep us from noticing what is happening in our hearts, his belt is notched with our inneffective insignificance.
The unexamined life is a tragedy, we all know this. Examining our lives is essential if we want to grow and progress, especially in the faith. But very often these ideals are just that – ideals, things we say as believers like we know them but we’ve never done them, certainly not at any deep level. That was me! I was poorer for it…
“Now therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts, “Consider your ways! “You have sown much, but harvest little; you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied; you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk; you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough; and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.” Thus says the LORD of hosts, “Consider your ways!” Haggai 1 v 5-7
In “considering my ways” in the last 10 months I have been so convicted about the fact that God’s heart towards me is undivided, but that my heart towards Him is fragmented into a million different pieces. I am an expert rationaliser, always quick to say this interest or that passion or this hobby or preoccupation or choice or this way of doing or thinking doesn’t take away from how I journey with God. I discovered otherwise. CS Lewis said that every time we make a choice, we are turning the central part of ourselves into something a little different than what it was before, and so in our life as a whole, through our innumerable choices, we are moving towards harmony with God or the opposite. When I took the time to “consider” it certainly shone a light on places in my life where I am not in step with Him.
So can I encourage you today?
To get uncomfortable: Listen Lovely, this is a corner piece of the puzzle right here. Because your comfort is the single biggest thing opposing your spiritual progress. Because it’s only in a state of discomfort that we can grow. So, launch yourself hard out of your comfort zone, challenge yourself hard on the areas in your life you thought had nothing to do with God… believe me, revelations await as your reward and progress as your prize.
To hear His voice louder: Sometimes we care more about what they say or the scale says than what He says. When was the last time you spent time anchoring yourself in His opinion of you? Digging for that gold in His word is a reset button for the mind and the heart, making us more able to set our hearts on the things above. You know, as opposed to setting it on what Olivia Pope is wearing in The Fixer or how many (or few?) likes that post got?
To think about That Day more than this day: So that today’s pursuits and passions and even pleasures will always have the end in sight. Because when I get to heaven I am pretty certain I am not going to say: ” I wish I had bought more clothes!” or “I wish I was more on trend!” or “I wish my cupboard looked like Khloe Kardashian’s!”
To ask the difficult question: Which in this case for me was “What is God’s greatest competition in my life?” Honey, I promise you answering this question is a worthwhile quest. What competes for your time, your money, your headspace, your attention. Is it your comfort? Is it your kids? Is it what other people think? Is it the Instagram body or the Pinterest life?
So hey, why not start your own movement, and move yourself forward in the faith! Because that is what happens when you let God into an area of your life that you thought had nothing to do with Him.
Part of maturing is letting God have Lordship over every area of our lives, even areas we thought was “separate” from Him. So whether it be #wearwhatsthere or #lovewhatsthere or #livewhatsthere or #overcomewhatsthere or #dowhatsthere…Why not do something that will take you to that place?
“Take away the dross from the silver and there comes out the pure metal for a vessel for the silversmith to shape” Prov 25 v4
