Weakness Drives You to Prayer

Dannah Gresh: As a mom, Sarah Walton has learned to look for God’s grace when she’s tempted to play the comparison game.

Sarah Walton: We compare the inside of our lives to the outside of other moms’, and we think, Well, I am not measuring up! To me, a lot of times grace has looked like accepting my limitations and realizing God isn’t surprised by my limitations, and He’s not disappointed by them.

Dannah: Welcome to the Revive Our Hearts podcast for April 1, 2025. I’m Dannah Gresh, and our host is the author of Choosing Gratitude, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When you’re feeling overwhelmed or like you just don’t meet the standards placed on you by society or by your group of friends or even your own standards for yourself, what do you do? How does the gospel speak to you in that moment? 

That’s what our guests today are going to be talking about—specifically in the context of motherhood. My friend Sarah Walton and her mother, Linda Green, have written a book together entitled He Gives More Grace.

That’s a phrase taken from James 4:6: “He gives more grace.” And aren’t you glad? I like to think of God’s grace as being kind of like an ambulance that He sends when we’re in trouble. We cry out to Him for help, and in that moment He gives us tailor-made grace. 

Well, if you’re a mom, you know how often you need that “ambulance”! Sarah Walton and Linda Green know it, too. Dannah sat down with them over a video call to talk about this whole idea of depending on the grace of God in the everyday moments of a mom’s life. Let’s listen together. 

Dannah: I’m looking at a mother and a daughter, and I’m thinking, “You look like you might have those best friend moments. (laughter) You look like you’re probably a mom and daughter who pray together. 

I can imagine, looking in on the life you share, that it would be easy for some of us to look at you and say, “Supermoms! Right there! They’ve got it!” What would you say to that? 

Sarah: No way! Actually we kind of laugh, because I have told my parents very often I’ve been a great sanctifying tool in their lives. So, they really should be grateful for me in that regard! It has by no means been an easy road. 

I would say actually it’s a sweet picture of redemption rather than a picture-perfect mother/daughter relationship, because there really is no such thing. But God has been very gracious in our long road!

Dannah: Yes. What would you say, Linda?

Linda Green: I would just add, God has used Sarah in beautiful ways in my life, and He’s also used Sarah to bring me to my knees in utter desperation for His grace! He has been such a faithful Father to do that, but I had to learn a lot of my own lessons along the way.

Dannah: Yes, God does tend to get two things done at once . . . or many, many things. Linda, take us back to when Sarah was little, you know, those two-, three-, four-year-old years. How was the Lord using her to sanctify you then?

Linda: First of all, she was our first daughter, so I was just thrilled to have a girl after two boys. But she was a very strong-willed little girl right from the get-go. If I said “no,” then she saw it as a challenge.

She was the one who climbed up and got into my purse and had lipstick all over her face. She was the one who climbed up on the table and ate the whole back of a birthday cake that we were planning to serve for a birthday party that night! 

Dannah: Sarah! (laughter)

Sarah: I promise I don’t do that anymore!

Dannah: Yes, so I’m sure that’s funny now, but at the moment . . . Whose birthday was it?

Linda: It was her brother’s, not hers! (laughter) So, yes, there were those challenges. As she got into school she had a lot of sickness, she had a lot of stomach aches, she had a lot of nightmares at night. Those were some of the challenges we dealt with.

Along with, she started doing things behind our backs. Like, she was not allowed to cross the street to her friend’s house, and one day I just happened to look out the window and I saw her running across the street with her bike. 

So there were those kinds of things just right from the beginning. God was giving me opportunities to pray!

Dannah: Sarah, do you have anything to say to defend yourself? (laughter)

Sarah: Oh, well, I could go on for a long time! I think, also, our personalities were very different, even from the beginning. I was very much more a typical third-born, youngest, last child, only girl. So I think I pushed those boundaries a little bit more.

But I was also kind of a free-spirited child, where my mom was a bit more rule-following. I liked to push those boundaries a little bit. Rules were more “suggestions” than “obligations.” So that was just a learning process. But I think often your weaknesses can become your strengths, too.

God has used that flexibility and that ability to “go with the flow” in my life. But that was not as pretty looking at the beginning. And the other thing was, I was a complete tomboy! I think she was expecting a daughter that loved dolls and dresses, and I wanted nothing to do with it!

I wanted to hang with the boys and roll in the dirt and play sports. I think we all as moms can experience that, that there are going to be some of our kids that we just don’t connect with as easily, because they aren’t cut from the same cloth that we are. I think that added another element for us.

Dannah: Well, you’ve definitely got the attention of a lot of us as moms! You’ve got the attention of the mom who's got the preschooler, the two- to three-year-old, the willful, rebellious child, the teenager that’s doing crazy things, and the mom who has got a child that’s really different, and she’s just trying to understand him or her! 

What ingredient got you through, Linda? What ingredient from God’s Rule Book of Life was the one you needed to be the mother He meant for you to be in Sarah’s life?

Linda: I would say, I was learning to understand what the gospel looked like in my life every day. I knew the gospel had saved me, I knew Christ had saved me by His power, by His grace alone. But I was feeling very confident in my parenting when I started.

God just used each of the challenges to help me to see my own weakness, my own need, and to drive me further and further into prayer. I tried everything I could that I knew, in my own wisdom, in my own strength.

So when those things stopped working or when I felt like my words were not cutting it and I had no wisdom, God used that in my life to drive me to Him and to understand that the gospel is a journey of grace—all the way along, not just for our salvation but for every single day. Our weaknesses help us to see our need for that grace and run to it more quickly! 

Dannah: Okay, I want you to unpack that word “grace.” Because I think we throw it around a lot. It can be a Christianese word, but it’s not, because it’s in the Bible. It’s a word God wants to use to fuel us for life. When motherhood gets hard, we need His grace. So, how would you define that word?

Linda: Biblically, grace is God’s favor bestowed on undeserving sinners. None of us deserve His grace. I think of His grace as His power that is perfected in us. So that grace, that power, that strength, that wisdom comes through His Word through His Holy Spirit, as we depend on Him and rely on Him.

We understand that for saving grace, but I need to understand that I need Him for everything—every decision I make. I think of the manna in the wilderness that God provided for the Israelites.They couldn’t collect that manna for more than one day. They had to go out and collect it for that day and trust that He would provide it.

We can get up in the morning and think, I’m confident about this day, I know what I’m doing, and charge into it in our own strength, rather than starting off saying, “Lord, You and You alone know what this day holds. I have no wisdom of my own, no strength of my own.” Then moment by moment learning to go to Him (obviously that doesn’t just happen overnight) and seek His wisdom and His help for everything—even when we feel like we’ve got the answers! 

Dannah: Right! Which as moms, we can tend to do. Sarah, you’re sitting there, not just as the daughter of Linda, but as the mother of how many children? Three? 

Sarah: Four. 

Dannah: Four. How does grace work for you as a mom? What would you say?

Sarah: You know, I really love thinking in a lot of practical ways, really. On the ground as moms, what does grace look like? It can have a lot of different levels. You have this spiritual level of grace, of finding our confidence, our wisdom, our identity in Christ—not in our motherhood, not in how well our children are doing, not in anything circumstantial.

But then you have the really nitty-gritty aspects of grace . . . where I maybe am facing a child who is screaming and I have absolutely no idea what to do with this child! I feel so out of my realm, I don’t know how to relate to her in this moment.

One example would be, I have one who loves to erupt from “zero to sixty” in two seconds! Her emotions become so large it’s easy for my emotions to want to match that!

Dannah: Oh, yeah!

Sarah: In that moment, I feel this tension either to become extremely emotional and angry like her (which never serves anybody well!) or somewhat panicked! I guess I just don’t know how to handle it!

Linda: Or angry.

Sarah: Or angry, whatever it is. I remember this one time she had gotten in a little fight with one of her siblings, and she had been the main cause of it. She ran away screaming, which completely baffled me, because I thought, Child, you are the cause of this problem, and you’re running away screaming like you are the victim here!

She ran up and down the stairs, and I felt so overwhelmed with her reactions and not knowing how to even reach her heart in that moment, because she was so emotional. So I went upstairs and I sat next to her, and I just simply prayed, “Lord, I have no idea how to understand this kid right now! I have no idea what words will help. I don’t want to match her emotion and make this worse, but I’m feeling my own angst. Help me to know what in the world to do!”

As I sat there, all the sudden in the moment, the Lord gave me a thought, My daughter is responding to shame right now. She’s not emotional just because she’s angry; she’s embarrassed that she hurt her sibling! She doesn’t know what to do with those feelings.

So just like in the garden, we want to run. We want to run and hide. We want to be angry because the other person, in some ways, is at blame, because “they made us sin.” It ended up, I asked her, “Haley, are you feeling embarrassed and sad that you hurt your sibling?”

Her sobs slowed a little bit and she kind of nodded. And little by little, I just saw God lead me in conversation. I almost didn’t know the step ahead before I took it. It just was one step at a time. It was such a sweet picture to me of God guiding us in our realization. 

It’s like my mom was saying. We feel our weakness and our lack of knowing what to do, which we are faced with every day in so many ways! So that’s one way. Other ways are when we feel like we’re failing our kids. I feel that sense of never doing enough all the time! And I think every mom does. There’s always more we could be doing. 

Dannah: [tongue in cheek] No! One glance at social media will tell you that you definitely aren’t measuring up, because your house doesn’t look like this one, and your recipes don’t turn out like that one, and your family pictures aren’t looking this way. I think it’s worse than ever that we feel that.

Sarah: Yes, exactly, it is. It’s in our face everywhere we look, and I think to your point, we see these little squares on Instagram, or whatever we’re on. Typically, what moms are showing are the strengths they have. What we don’t see are all the areas that are their weaknesses.

And so, we assume every mom has every strength. Every mom is in the gym, she’s cooking amazing meals, she’s loving her family, she’s the fun mom, she’s doing crafts, they have the money to spend!

Dannah: She’s the sugar-free mom . . .

Sarah: Perfect, exactly. In all the little facets that can look . . . We compare the inside of our lives to the outside of other moms’, and we think, Well, I am NOT measuring up! My poor children! They got stuck with me as a mom!

To me, a lot of times “grace” has looked like accepting my limitations and realizing God isn’t surprised by my limitations, and He’s not disappointed by them. He knew the kids He was going to give me. He knew I would battle chronic illness. So I battle guilt that I can’t do everything I want to do with my kids. I feel bad when their faces are hanging because they wish I could go do something with them. 

One other practical example I remember is: I saw my kids bickering a lot one week. I just felt like, “I am failing as a mom! If I look at my children right now, I have dropped the ball in so many ways! They’re bickering. They’re ungrateful. They’re not doing chores.” The list could go on. I remember standing looking in our fridge and seeing all these dishes that had like mold growing on them. I thought, Okay, yep, now that’s the last straw! I am completely a failure as a mom!

And one of my boys saw a tear start coming down. And granted, one of these boys contributes a lot to the challenges I face! I didn’t really want to have to answer what was wrong, because it was kind of like, “Well, you’re part of the problem!” 

But he did, he pushed, and he said, “Mom, what’s wrong?” 

And I said, “Sweetie, I’m just really overwhelmed. A lot’s going on; I’m just struggling.” 

And he immediately calls to his young brother and says, “C’mere!”

“Mom, we’re going to take care of you. You take care of everybody, and we’re going to go take care of you.” And they ran upstairs and grabbed my daughter’s toy foot spa and gave me a backrub. 

It was this sweet picture of God using the children that I felt I was falling short toward, to point to the truth. I felt like I was failing them but they actually became an avenue of God’s grace to me. It was such a sweet picture. And, to be very clear, that is not a common occurrence in my home! That was why it was so sweet!

Linda: I struggled in a different way. I don’t think that you can give grace that you haven’t first understood. Unlike Sarah, I was a rule follower. I was the first-born, obedient child. I became a teacher. I loved my teaching. I got lots of accolades.

I thought, Okay, now we’re just going to do this with our own children. I loved that, and I had a lot of creative ideas. God had to take me down a whole different path to teach me how much I needed His grace. And so in that way He used not only Sarah, but all of my children, to bring me to the end of myself and teach me who He is and who I was and my need for Him. 

I guess the Scripture He has used the most in my life is 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” He taught me to delight in Him above all else: above my children, above anything that I was putting my confidence in.

I was becoming a student of His Word, and He just kept bringing His Word to my mind and helping me to see how much I needed to depend on the truth of that Word every day. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves every day!

I had baked big chocolate chip cookies one day for my children. I had put them on the counter to cool and ran to do some laundry. My boys had friends over. They were running around outside, and when I came back in the kitchen fifteen minutes later, almost all those cookies were gone! There were like two cookies left on the counter.

Immediately I drew the conclusion that they had eaten those cookies. So I ran outside and I started really reaming them out for going in and eating the cookies without asking my permission! They all looked at me blankly like, “What!? We didn’t eat anything!” So you can see how that scenario played out. A few hours later our six-month-old Labrador puppy started throwing up chocolate!

Dannah: Oh, no! 

Linda: This was just one of the ways God was showing me I need to receive grace . . . and I need to give grace!

Dannah: You ladies have told that story so well today. We’ve got to receive it first. We’ve got to go to the cross. We’ve got to pause in the crazy moments and ask the Lord for wisdom. I think we’ve all had Labrador-ate-the-brownies moments in our lives. (laughter) It’s where we just need to pause and say, “Lord, what is really happening here? Can You fill me with more of You right now?” Sarah, how do you get filled up enough with the Lord and with the truth that in those moments, when you’re looking at the moldy food in the refrigerator . . . (Sarah, I am going to treasure that you said that because it cheers my heart greatly to know that Sarah Walton also finds occasional science projects growing in her refrigerator!) 

Sarah: Oh, yes! 

Dannah: How do you prepare yourself and fill yourself up with the grace of Jesus so that at those moments, the grace kicks in?

Sarah: Well, it is obviously so important that we need to be in God’s Word, but I will be the first to say, that’s more challenging in a lot of seasons in ways than what [we expect or want it to be].

Before we have kids it’s easier to sit down and be in the Bible as long as we like. I’m a journal-er, and so that’s helpful for me to process things. But as soon as I had the little kids and you’re up all night, and life is crazy, even if you plan to try to get up early, they always tend to rise equally the same time you do!

So, you have so many seasons where you have to get creative in what that looks like. The thing that has really been such a gift to me is Psalm 103:14, “For he knows our frame; [and] he remembers that we are dust.” It has been such a sweet reminder to me, just the simplicity of that, in a couple ways . . .

First, in Him knowing there are going to be seasons that it’s really hard for us to sit at His feet the way we want to, to be able to absorb that truth, absorb that wisdom, kind of bring ourselves in line with what’s true, instead of what’s going on in our heads.

I’m a chronic overthinker, so I am typically in my head way more than I should be, and that often doesn’t lead me anywhere good. Being in Scripture is where that tends to bring those thoughts down to surface level—to match whether those are true or completely leading me in a bad direction.

So it has had to look very different in different seasons. Sometimes it has looked like, literally, that day only being able to listen to worship songs. Other times it’s a verse that I write down on a card and I just try to rehearse that verse to myself whenever I can. It’s there just so that God has an opportunity to remind me of it in the chaos.

Or then, in the times when my husband graciously gives me an hour out, and I go and find somewhere quiet (because I can’t find it in the house). It might look different for everybody, depending on our situations. Trying to find those moments but also understanding that God sees our hearts, and He knows our desires, and He will give us the grace for the capacity we have.

And then, it’s also when you do find that moldy food in the fridge, realizing God is not disappointed in me that I have moldy food in the refrigerator. He’s not as disappointed in me as I am. And if the God of the universe isn’t, why am I being so hard on myself that I expect to be perfect all the time; that I expect to be able to juggle every ball perfectly and never drop one? It’s not reality. 

And on top of that, He knows I deal with chronic pain and illness that limits me even further. And so when those thoughts come to my mind, when I see that picture of the mom that’s doing a really fun craft with her kids, or they’re out at the water park, and I feel terrible that day, and my kids are like, “Mom, can you take us somewhere?”

And I have to say, “Guys, I just can’t today. Look, I’m really not feeling well. Can we just play a game here?” 

I see the disappointment on their faces . . . again. He knows my frame; He knows that I am but dust. I am a human being that has limitations by my humanity, and God knew that. And so, God can actually use my humanity, not just in my life, but in my kids’ lives. He’s actually been able to use my limitations in many ways to teach my children things that, in my head I’m thinking, This is hurtful to them. It’s making them miss out on something good.

But instead, there are a lot of ways He has used it in teaching them compassion, teaching them that they will not always get what they want, and that’s okay. It is teaching them the world doesn’t revolve around them.

And so, I think I just have to often remember that not only am I limited, but my children are limited, and we are all working this out together as we grow. And, goodness gracious, we need a lot of grace in that process!

Dannah: We do need a lot of grace! We’re talking with Sarah Walton and Linda Green, the mother-daughter authors of He Gives More Grace, from our friends at The Good Book Company. I feel like we’ve just gotten started. Would you come back tomorrow? 

I’d like to talk a little bit more about two things specifically: what is God teaching us in all of this craziness of motherhood, and how do we pray so that His grace does fill the gaps? Would you come back tomorrow so we can continue this conversation? 

Sarah: We would love to! 

Linda: Sure! 

Nancy: Sarah Walton and her mom, Linda Green, have been offering moms what I’m sure is a breath of fresh air, realizing they’re not alone in the struggles they face, and at the same time, pointing moms to God’s grace and the gospel! They’ve been talking with Dannah Gresh, the co-host of Revive Our Hearts. 

Sarah and Linda’s book is called He Gives More Grace. It contains 30 Reflections for the Ups and Downs of Motherhood Through the Years. And there are plenty of those, aren’t there? So whatever season of motherhood you may be in right now, this would be a great resource for you to go through on your own, anytime of the year.

It would also be a wonderful gift to give for Mother’s Day coming up next month! There’s more information about the book He Gives More Grace linked within the transcript of this program on our website, ReviveOurHearts.com. You can also access the transcript through the Revive Our Hearts app. 

Well, as Dannah mentioned, tomorrow Linda and Sarah will be back with more encouragement for moms as they learn to lean on God’s grace in the midst of their limitations and frustrations. I hope you’ll be back with us here on Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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