I’m not so good at sewing buttons and I’m sporadic in bread-baking, but one thing I do pretty well is mess up.
I’m not sure there are any words more frequently bounced around the heart of a mom than some version of “I’m a failure.” (I heard that amen.)
In fact, I am prone to wake up in the middle of the night only to start rehearsing all the ways I’m letting my kids down, all the inadequacies and deficiencies, what I’m not giving them, and on and on. Until one night around 3am, as I was praying all my fretting back to the Lord, He’d had enough.
“Are you trusting in your good parenting, or are you trusting in Me?” He asked point blank.
Um, whoopsies (to borrow daughter’s terminology.)
That night stopped me short because He had just placed His finger on an idol in my life: my self reliance and overemphasis and worry over being a good mom.
The Bible teaches it’s not my own good parenting choices or how together I am as a mom that God wants me to feel confident about. Paul said it this way, “I place no confidence in the flesh…” (Phil 3:3) I’ve learned that failure can, in fact, be very useful because it exposes the object of my faith.
God has allowed me to be utterly broken as a mom in order for me to get this lesson right. In it all, He has shown me He wants me to transfer my trust from myself (my good choices, my hard work, my skills and abilities, my wisdom, etc) to Him and His character. Because God’s good plans for my life and my children’s lives never depended upon me in the first place.
Yes, I am to work hard and make good choices, but those will naturally come as an outflow of faith. Faith always spurs obedient action (see James for that concept.) If I focus on faith first, He lends me His adequacy to parent my children. ….
It was during that night of fretting that the Lord began (and continues) to reshape this area of my life and I’ve come away with one simple way to not fail as a mom.
{Are you ready?}
Get back up again.
Proverbs 24:16 says, “The righteous woman falls seven times and gets back up again.”
You see, failure is inevitable. I am imperfect and will never “arrive.” God’s word tells me the mark of truly being righteous is not perfection. It is not the absence of failure. This scripture tells us the righteous mom will fail just like everyone else.
The mark of the righteous mom is that she gets back up after she falls.
This is the beauty of failure: it realigns our faith. It reminds us to transfer our trust from ourselves to the One who has promised and who is Faithful and who cannot fail. Ever. So If I find myself wallowing in my failures, I know I’ve misplaced my faith. The solution is to make Christ and His sufficiency the object of my trust and confidence.
This is the essence of the gospel. Living this way is a gift to my children. I am modeling to them “The just shall live by faith.”
My sweet friend, do you feel like a failure? Are you consumed by all you do wrong? I’ve good news for you! The best of moms, yes, even “the righteous mom fails seven times…” You are in good company.
Now join her and get back up.
**A personal note? Our faith is only as good as its object and this summer our family is studying the character of God, deepening our understanding of His trustworthiness. I’d love for our study to somehow bless you and your family if the Lord chooses? If you’d like to read along, click here…
