Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Sacrifice {Day 4}

Thank you for joining us! You can find Day 1 here.

When I was young, my mother read stories.  She read stories at naptime and stories at bedtime and stories any time she didn’t know what else to do.  She filled hours and hours of rainy days with books.  Together, we looked in the windows of a little house in the middle of big woods, chased a very fat rabbit through an English garden, and hoped to anything that a spider could find a way to save a pig.

Sometimes she read missionary biographies, and our living room became the densest of jungles.  We held our breath through cannibal country and the dangerous back-allies of the Orient.  We watched the Moravian missionaries seal their belongings into caskets and send them off to Africa, where they would surely die.

It was fabulously romantic and terribly heroic to a seven-year-old with an overactive imagination and a particular aptitude for martyrdom.  I could take up a cross like that and carry it to glory.

But it is God who orders the sacrifice, and it is God who cuts the cross.  To my surprise, I was not made for being a martyr, but a mother.

The sacrifices of motherhood are not glorious like I desired.  They rarely draw the attention of the crowd.  Motherhood carries the simple, ordinary cross of ordinary days.  It is the cross of daily self-denial in the mundane circumstances when no one is watching.

It is not particularly notable, and hardly ever acknowledged.  It is lonely and monotonous and altogether mindless, sometimes.

And that’s the rub.  It is all so ordinary.  The dailyness of this cross cuts against my flesh.  I have other gifts to offer, other talents to showcase, but here I am, doing nothing more than making lunches and wiping noses day after day after day.  That’s hardly the stuff that changes the world, I think.

I begin to feel a bit like Cain, who found the sacrifices of God to be unbearable, not because he could not give them, but because he could not give what he wanted.  He was a man with a garden, but the sacrifice was meat.  That kind of sacrifice didn’t make him look good at all.  It didn’t showcase his natural talents or abilities.  It was the standard one-size-fits all model, and he wanted a custom fit.

Dissatisfaction settles in where pride has left an open door.  It settled in to Cain, and human blood was spilled onto trembling earth.  Some days, it settles in to me, and I begin to feel the hardship of my position under a cross that isn’t glorious at all.  Pride tells me I am losing my life—my self—for nothing.

That is a lie that keeps me crippled under the weight of a burden that is supposed to be easy.  It is a lie that steals the joy of motherhood and the joy of giving to God the very thing He has asked of me.

In those moments, when I am feeling so small, so devoid of anything good to give to God, I must embrace the words of truth.  There is no greater love than this, than to lay down my life for another.   To give my life for my children is the most profound and powerful way I can serve Him.   It is the simplest and most irrefutable way I can proclaim Him.  Motherhood is the gospel in action.

When I embrace the dailyness of motherhood, I am embracing the daily giving of one life for another.  It is a picture of the gospel that all the world longs to see.  It is a sacrifice that touches the hearts of my children and secures a godly remnant for a future generation.  And that is just the thing that can change the world.

If my seven-year-old self could see me now, she might be disappointed, at first.  But the beauty of the cross is this: when I give God the sacrifices He desires in the way He requires, I find joy.  It is awfully daily, awfully ordinary, and far more glorious than anything I could have imagined.

 

Please join us tomorrow for Day 5: Forgiveness

For further thought

1)      Read Psalm 51:17.  What are the sacrifices God requires of you?

2)      Micah 6:8 is a well-known passage.  Think about it in light of motherhood.  How can you please God in your daily calling?

3)     Do you sometimes feel like Cain?  What are the sacrifices you would like to bring to God?  Consider this in against the writing of the apostle Paul, who had reason to boast about his sacrifices for God.  What brought Paul the greatest joy in serving God (see Philippians 3:7-11).  How does Paul’s perspective change the way you view the mundane aspects of parenting?

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Priority {Day 3}

Just joining us? You will find Day 1 of the series here.

Last year, a man with a couple of kids moved in with the woman in the green house up the street.  The kids, who introduced themselves as Chance and Hailey, had been living with their dad and a couple of older half-brothers until their dad met Sandy.  They told us their dad was going to marry her, and they started calling her mom.  They had never had a mom before so they tossed the word around their lips like something sacred.

But we could hear the yelling down the street.  We saw Chance and Hailey standing on the sidewalk while words that should never be spoken were shouted into the air.  They sneaked into our yard and hung around the apple tree and asked us what we were having for lunch.  Sometimes, when I asked if they had already eaten at their house, Chance would shrug and say, “We’re not allowed to go home ‘cause Mom—our mom—is cleanin’.”

One day, Hailey came running up to me, tears streaming down her face.  She had a bright red spot on her knee.  “I need a Band-aid!” she wailed.  It wasn’t a terrible scrape, for all her carrying on, but it was bleeding, and the blood was getting all over her clothes.

“I can get you a Band-aid,” I said, “but I think it’s better if you go home so you can get cleaned up.”

“I already went home!” Hailey bawled.  “My mom told me I couldn’t come in because I’d get blood on the carpet!”

I stared in disbelief at the green house up the street.  I had already known the children were not a priority, but to hear it like that hurt.  I hurt for the children, but also hurt for Sandy.  I guess I understood, a little.  I wished I didn’t, but my heart is deep and full of shadows and I know something of selfishness.

Like her, I have traded my joy for my children for the tyranny of the moment.  I have been angry when muddy feet tramped all over my freshly-mopped floor.  I have been too busy making dinner to be bothered with one more scraped knee.  I have gotten my children dressed for church while yelling at them because we’re late.

I know the cost of mixed-up priorities, and it weighs on my heart.  I want more for my children than that.  I want more for me than that.

But it is so easy, when my toes are in the dirt and my hands busy about the stuff of earth, to forget that this is not my kingdom.  It is easy to forget that almost everything I do here doesn’t really matter at all, at least, not the way I think it does.  When I am dead and gone my kids will not care if the living room was tidy or not, nor will they remember most of the things that I did.  What they will remember is if they were loved.

Love must always be my priority.  It is the thing that outlasts all my doings.  It is not the capstone on my list of achievements; it is the cornerstone.  If I do not have love, nothing I do matters, and I am no better than the woman in the green house up the street who worries more about her carpet than the heart of her child.

Love must permeate everything I do in my home, and my priority must be this: to wake up every day with the intention to live out my faith through love in front of my children.

This does not mean that the to-do list doesn’t get done.  It means that love drives the to-do list.  Love determines what is the best thing to be done.  Love keeps my eyes on eternity and asks the hard questions about what my children really need.

It is the simplest and hardest thing.  Love can’t fit into a box and be checked off.  It can’t be measured the way stacks of folded laundry can.  This priority requires me to seek wisdom, to understand the unique needs of my children, and to give up a false perfectionism.

Some moments, the best way to love my children might be doing the laundry.  Other times, it might mean listening, correcting destructive behaviors, giving them time to recharge, or grabbing them in a great big hug.

Always, it means pressing in to the Author of Love because I cannot give what I do not have.  I must hold fast to the truth that God’s plan for me is better than any plan or purpose I have for myself.  The children He has entrusted to me are a gift, not a duty, and I will have no greater honor in this life than if my children can say they knew the love of God because of how I loved them.  That is more important than an immaculate kitchen or being on time for soccer practice because that is the stuff of eternity.

And nothing impacts eternity more than love.

Love is the stuff of eternity

For further thought

1) 1 Corinthians 13 is a famous chapter on love.  What does it have to say about works done without love?

2) If you are like me, reading through the attributes of love can be like reading through a list of failures.  I obviously, continuously, and outrageously mess up love.   Which aspect of love is hardest for you?

3) Read 1 John 4:7-11.  What is the source of all love?  What are your actions toward your children saying about what you believe about God?

4) My prayer for you today comes from Philippians 1:9-11: “I pray that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

Join us on Monday for Day 4: Sacrifice.

 

 

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Foolishness {Day 1}

When I am old, I will be the kind of woman who smiles at young mothers and tells them to enjoy their babies.  I will tell them to hug their children tight, laugh more, and worry less.  I will not forget that parenting is hard, and I will not be so foolish as to tell a mother with a screaming two-year-old that she will miss these days.

But when I am old, I will remember that I did not always enjoy my children, and I will wish I had.  I will remember that some days, I thought it was enough that my children were loved.  It was enough that they were cared for.  It was enough that we made it through the day and I had not yet been committed to an asylum.

I will remember that in my heart, I was jealous of my husband who could walk in the door from work and wrestle children without any thought to whether they’d be too wound up to go to sleep.  I was envious of the grandmas and great-aunts and darling old neighbors who could simply be with my children without any thought to what had to be done.

I will remember that I acted as if enjoying my children was a nice “extra.”  But it wasn’t always as important as the laundry.

When I am old, I will have learned that enjoying my children is not an extra.  It is essential.  It is transformative.  It is powerful, and it cannot wait until they are older and it is easier.

Still, I have been a young mother, and I know that words like this from an old woman are not always welcome.  A young mother will think it is hard enough to keep up with all the demands of motherhood without having to like it, too.  It is hard enough to get through some days without completely losing it; the idea of enjoying the children in the midst of the mess is unfathomable.

But when I am old, I will have learned that this is exactly the point.  Anyone can enjoy her children when it is easy.  Anyone can smile when the family photos are being snapped.  I certainly did that much.  But to enjoy a child who is cold and distant, who can never seem to obey, or who just makes the messes messier…that is foolishness.

It is a foolishness that captures the hearts of our children and breathes the aroma of Christ into our homes.  It is a foolishness that gives real hands and feet to love and chases insecurities away.  It is a foolishness that raises motherhood from an out-of-fashion role to a means by which the world can see the very image of God.

There is something other-worldly beautiful about a mother who delights in her children.  It smacks of the self-sacrifice and unconditional love we hear so much about but rarely see.  In that simple, flesh-defying act of enjoying her children, a mother demonstrates the very heart of God for His own.

It is hard.  It is foolish.  It is glorious.

When I am an old woman, I will remember that I didn’t always enjoy my children the way I should have.  But by the grace of God, I learned.

This is the introduction to our new series, 30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More.  Please join us tomorrow as we jump into the practical side of enjoying your children more.  Coming up, Day 2: Perspective.