Pray without ceasing

Being a parent is a humbling experience. Nothing else in my experience brings me to my knees so often. (Yes, it's been one of those days.) I am rarely the type of parent I want to be and very often feel like a fraud, especially when others tell me how wonderful they think I am or how special I must be to raise 9 children. I know for a fact that I am neither wonderful nor special. I am instead short tempered, impatient, ungrateful, uncaring, and very imperfect. I react instead of behave purposefully and I am shown daily the depths of my own sinfulness. Really, it's not a pretty sight. But I keep going, keep getting up in the morning, keep trying to be a better parent because I am continuing to learn that I do not do this hard thing on my own. Oh, every so often (ahem, all the time) I forget myself and try to parent without divine help, but very quickly I'm reminded that it doesn't work. I need God's help. Actually, I need more than God's help, I need to let go of trying to parent on my own and let God parent through me. That is where the 'pray without ceasing' line comes in. When I was younger, I used to find this a difficult command. How could anyone ever do that? But as I parent, it's all I can do. Being a mother only works really well when I pray my way through the day. Believe me, there is always something to pray about. And it's not just 'Help, what do I do now?!?" types of prayers (though they are very frequent). It's also prayers of thankfulness and rejoicing. It's confessing my too numerous faults and receiving God's grace and peace. I am so thankful that God is the better parent, both because of how He parents me and because of how He parents my children...if I let Him. It can be hard (and scary) here in the trenches and I sometimes wonder how God can ask me to do this. But my imperfections serve to show God's greatness. If He can use me, even me, He can do anything.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making bias tape... otherwise known as the Sew, Mama, Sew! Giveaway

Image
( Sorry, the contest is now closed .... though you're welcome to leave a comment if you like.) [This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but is here solely to give Blogger a different photo to post in the thumbnail.] It's Sew, Mama, Sew Giveaway time again.  I love bias tape.  It is so useful and so easy to use... finishing edges ... finishing seams ...  And while the pre-packaged stuff has it's place and I use it often, I really like to have patterned bias tape as well.  Enter one of my favorite little tools: the bias tape maker.  This one make 3/4 inch bias tape and I will be giving one away at the end of this post.  But first, I thought some of you might like to see what it does if you've never used one before. I don't have a rotary cutter, nice cutting mats, or even a proper cutting table (I cut-out things on my floor), so if I can do this, so can you.  Here is my admittedly quirky method. Step 1:  Lay out the fabric an...
Read more

Sew, Mama, Sew! Giveaway

Image
Sew, Mama, Sew! is hosting another giveaway day , the day where many bloggers giveaway things they have made or supplies to make things or both.  It is great fun to visit a lot of blogs and try to win cool stuff.  So fun that I thought I would participate this year. I had great hopes of making a set of coordinating mother/daughter aprons.  But reality reared its ugly head and I came to terms with the fact that my time is not limitless.Instead of aprons,  I must continue to spend quality time with yards and yards of red plaid flannel.  What am I making?  Well, as I tell my children, it is the season not to ask questions... I will be able to let you know sometime after the 25th. Instead of making something, I went to my favorite thrift store and found some supplies in the form of sheets and pillowcases (some of my favorite raw material).  I'm giving away three pillowcases and one twin flat sheet. I decided to go with bright, springy colors...
Read more

The mystery of the missing soap

You all know that I am an avid reader of mysteries, but sometimes we have our own real life mysteries here as well. Take the case of the missing soap. One of our bathrooms upstairs is the children's bathrooms, whose sink is lower than other sinks upstairs. Now, since it is the children's bathroom, it is not always pristine and things cannot always be found when they are needed. Are we the only house where things just randomly vanish, never to be seen again? This happens fairly frequently. Often the items are too big to have been taken by Borrowers , but every human in the house disavows any knowledge of the missing item. As far as they are concerned, they never even knew said item existed, so how could they have taken it? Often Mr. Nobody gets the blame and we move one, the item sometimes resurfacing at a later date and sometimes not. Early last week, when the little girls went upstairs to get ready for bed and found an entire bar of soap missing, it was classed as one of ...
Read more