"52 Things" Exerpt

I've been reading a book called "52 Things Kids Need from a Mom" by Angela Thomas. It's fantastic, and I want to share parts of it with you every now and then. Today I want to draw from a chapter called "Kids Need Their Mom to Pray in Secret with the Door Open." Excuse me while I shamelessly type this chapter, pretty much word for word. :) 

"In my first years as a mom, I desperately wanted to keep a passionate spiritual life with God. I wanted to read the Bible. Sit quietly and pray. Maybe even write a few things in my journal. It's just that my little people would not cooperate.

I remember shaking my head and just fussing on the inside about my crazy, chaotic predicament. I am trying to be with God so that I can be a better mom. Anybody here with me? As you can imagine, being alone rarely happened, and I'd feel guilty about my crumbling spiritual life. The only ones I knew to blame were them, the ones I loved so dearly, who needed me every minute. 

I would love to tell you that the answer for my struggle came to me in a moment of brilliance, but I was too tired to be brilliant. There was just an afternoon. I think I put on a video for my kids to watch and went up to my bedroom. For some reason kept the door open and sat down on the floor to read my Bible for a minute, and then I stretched out, facedown, on my carpet to pray. I guess I had been praying for one whole minute, and then they came. 

I could hear them coming down the hall, but that day, instead of stopping what I was doing, I just kept lying there, praying. Of course, they walked right in, and I'm sure you can guess what they did. They crawled on top of me. And they played with my hair. And they wiggled their little faces up to mine.

"Hey, mamma," one whispered. 
"Hey, honey," a gentle, not frustrated voice spoke from within me. 
"Watcha doin'?" they asked in unison.
"Praying."
"Oh, it looked like you were sleeping," an honest observer said.
It's been known to happen, I admitted to myself. 

Do you know what they did next? Those little toddling children lay down beside me and mostly on top of me and prayed too. Oh, they prayed squirrelly prayers that lasted for only a couple of seconds, but they prayed. My babies were praying because they had seen their mama praying. 

I knew God was saying to me, "I want your kids to see you being with me." 

After a few minutes, they were done, but I just kept lying there while they ran in and out. Back to the video. Back to check on praying mom. God settled something inside of me that afternoon. The days of being a college coed with lots of time to be alone and to pray were over. That chapter was closed. Honestly, I didn't want to go back. I just longed for the sweetness of how I used to spend time with God.

But lying on my bedroom floor that day... I remember being so very humbled. And grateful. My uptight, "everything must be right" personality could have kept me away from God for years. Trying to get it all together. Trying to be just right before I could spend time with Him. But that day, God so tenderly walked me step-by-step through one of the most powerful lessons about grace I have ever known.

Come to Me messy.
Come to Me when you're tired.
Let the children lie on top of you.
Let them interrupt you.
You do not have to be perfect, just come to Me and let them see.

My kids are older now, but the lesson remains. They need to catch me praying. They should walk past my room and know I'm reading my Bible. They need to find the notes I've written lying on the counter in the kitchen. They need to overhear me praying on the phone with a friend. 

I bet your kids do, too. 

It seems the lessons we so want to teach our kids are transferred - and not because we sit them down in the living room, pass out ten pages about being spiritual, and then give them a lecture about how our family is going to follow God. The thing that shapes them more deeply is that you and I pursue God in the everyday of living - that our spiritual lives become the backdrop for their childhood. Bibles left open are normal. A kneeling, praying mom is an ordinary sight. Bible studies done at bath time, routine. 

Jesus said in Matthew 6 that we are supposed to keep a secret life. To give in secret, pray in secret, and fast in secret. But I think that when we become moms, for a season those sets of eyes sent from heaven to watch you need to see what you do with God in your "unseen" moments. 

May it be so for you and me, and and may the children who witness our prayers learn to pray more powerfully because they catch us being with God."

Bearing One Another's Burdens

I'm just going to be honest. I love Galatians 6:2 a lot less now that I've studied it. Does that sound irreverent? Let me clarify, it used to give me the warm fuzzies, and now it makes my brain hurt. I had pictured helping the needy, weeping for victims of injustice, and helping the down-and-out to whom life has been unfair. I absolutely know that God calls us to do those things, but I started chasing what this particular verse means, and I was challenged in some new ways.

Feel free to crack open your Bible and unpack this passage with me! :) 

Galatians 6:2 says, "Bear one another's burdens, and in doing so, fulfill the law of Christ." Conveniently located just twelve verses earlier, in Galatians 5:14, it says - "For the whole law of can be summed up in one command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"  So, it seems pretty safe to say that the whole essence of what Jesus calls us to do is love and look out for one another just as we do ourselves, and that can be done by carrying burdens for each other. Awesome. Sign me up for once a week! 

However, I'm a big believer in context, so let's look at the verse just before, Galatians 6:1. "Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself." I checked around to see what some great teachers have to say, and it seemed to confirm what I kind of hoped wouldn't be confirmed. In Galatians 6:2, it seems that "burdens" can almost be interchanged with the concept of "faults", which kind of stinks because "Bear one another's faults" feels far less motivating. Faults are messy, ugly and hurtful. Forgiving can be hard enough, but to actually get in the mess...

Maybe I could rewrite this text like this. "If you see your brother or sister in Jesus stuck in sin, don't just shake your head and feel sad, don't just pray for them, and don't go tell everyone how "burdened" you feel for them. If you are living a life consistent with how God says to live, you have the moral authority to come alongside them with a humble and gentle spirit and tell them that what they're doing is sin. They're choosing to live in chains that Jesus died to free us from. If you are struggling with the same thing they are, you may need to take a pass. Taking that burden and temptation would just be unwise."  

Back to my appreciation of context, let's look at verse five. "For each one will bear his own load." Wait, what? Didn't God just say to bear each other's burdens? No wonder people say the Bible contradicts itself! *insert lots more studying* 

Verse five is important. Like, really important. This passage doesn't give a manual for what it exactly looks like to be a burden-bearer. We get some guidelines and something a whole lot better - the Holy Spirit. He's called our Helper, and He really will help us with the practical parts of burden-bearing here. We are ultimately going to answer to God for our own stuff, and they are going to answer to Him for their own stuff. We're not their Holy Spirit. We can't force them to change. We can't be their always-and-forever crutch. We can't make them live right or love Jesus. This is helpful for me because I used to be a textbook enabler. I swear I had a sign on my back that said something like, 
"Make chronic bad choices? Plop your burdens down on me. I will go out of my way to buffer for you so you don't feel the consequences quite so badly. You'll be freed up to go mess up your life some more! I'm so nice!" 
Here's the cold, hard fact. Sin hurts. Isaiah 5:18 says, "What sorrow for those who drag their sins behind them with ropes made of lies, who drag wickedness behind them like a cart." Now THAT'S a burden. When someone is stubbornly choosing lies over truth and consistently refusing to stop dragging that sin behind them, that's their burden. I think we need to be really sensitive to the Holy Spirit about when to bear a burden and when to love someone enough to let sin hurt like it's supposed to. Pain is motivating, it gets our attention and makes us want to change whatever we need to make it better. 

I'm not really on a soapbox here. I've been on every side of this thing. I've had my burdens borne, been teachable and changed. I've stubbornly held on to sin and felt the pain. I've been an enabler, and I think there have been times I have done burden bearing the right way, too. Let's be grace-filled, Spirit-led burden bearers "that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith!"

Just a disclaimer, this has been my personal study. I'm flawed and certainly not a scholar, so the only parts that are absolute truth are the verses! I hope you'll dig in yourself. I would love to hear what God's teaching you! 

I was reading in Romans today, and I found myself stuck all of twelve verses into the book. The verse reads, 

"That you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith." 

I love that! That's what church is about. To take that a step further, I think that we as women (who stereotypically can have dramatic relationships) are supposed to feel this way about each other! 

I would love to meet weekly with all of you women who lead in different ways at CCC Yorkville. I would love to have deep, encouraging, uplifting conversation with you as often as we have something new God is teaching us. Realistically that's not going to happen, but what if we kept touch weekly through this blog? I have a dream that we all can dialogue (at our convenience!) throughout the week. We can be refreshed and reminded by God's simple truths, we can be stretched and challenged by some deeper theology, we can be encouraged by guest posts and interviews from people with amazing stories, and we can decide whether or not to join in on some fun (really!) practice of spiritual disciplines. I have a dream that something as simple as a blog can bring us closer to one another and closer to Jesus. 

I'd love to know what you think!