God’s Grace for Weary Moms

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"You'll Like Mom Math"

"Hope for Imperfect Moms"

------------------

Dannah Gresh: Calling all moms (and those with moms to love)! It’s our time to party! Mother's Day is here, and we think this is a day worth celebrating.

I’m your host, Dannah Gresh. You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. 

Let me start out with a little memory I have of Mother's Day. This was about fifteen years ago. My daughter Lexi, I guess she was a little low on the budget that year, so she made me the world's most beautiful chocolate cake. Now, here's the thing about this chocolate cake: she decorated it using perfectly aligned little tiny chocolate chips forming concentric circles all the way to the middle where there's a big strawberry on top. The time alone in which she took to put those chocolate chips in perfect order blessed my heart as a mom.

So, whether you budget is big or small, love on your mom. She's going to remember it.

Here's what I want to say: moms are servants. They make countless daily sacrifices. And sometimes, they feel a little bit exhausted. If you’re a mom, I know you’re saying "yes and amen" right now! We want to celebrate you today by inviting you to slow down, breathe deep, and soak up some much needed grace from God’s Word. 

First, we’ll hear from a mom I love a lot. Her name is Erin Davis, and she’s no stranger to the Revive Our Hearts family. Today, Erin is an editor at Moody Publishers, and she’s mom to four boys. But back when she only had two of those four little ones, she blogged here at Revive Our Hearts and wrote a book called Beyond Bath Time: Embracing Motherhood as a Sacred Role. She’s passionate about helping you see the mundane rhythms of mom life as ministry. Let’s listen as she talks with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth about that.

Erin Davis: The vision that God gives us of the body in the Word is of a unified body and of all the parts working together and all of them being important. Listen, if you’re a mom, nobody is going to put you up on their missionary bulletin board. Nobody is going to write you a check every month. Nobody is going to ask you for a Power Point presentation or a monthly newsletter.

So if you’re a mom, you can start to feel like you’re the least important member of the body and that nobody notices you and that you’re not contributing to the greater functioning of what God is using your church to do.

I think that's because motherhood is made up of a lot of little things. We drive them around in our minivans. We wash their tiny clothes. We take them on little trips to school, little trips to soccer practice, little trips to church. For moms with young children, we think in the smallest increments of time—two-minute time outs and thirty-second showers and five more minutes of sleep. So all that littleness can reduce motherhood to make it feel like something small. And I think we often think of small things as insignificant things.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And yet you look in the Scripture, and you see that God chooses and uses so often things that are tiny.

Erin: There are so many examples of that in Scripture. One of them I found when writing this book that came to life to me in a new way that. I just loved. It was the story of the little boy with the loaves and the fishes.

The story is that a boy comes to hear Jesus teach, and he has the barley loaves and the fish. We know the disciples find him and Jesus multiplies them, but, can I make an assumption? A mom packed that lunch. I think it’s very likely that a conversation went down where the little boy was getting ready to leave, and the mom said, “Oh, wait. Let me pack you a lunch. You won’t be able to hear or learn on an empty stomach.”

So if we trace that little lunch all the way through, that seemed like a little thing—mom packs a lunch; boy carries the lunch; disciples recognize the lunch; Jesus multiplies the lunch, and thousands of people are fed. But it doesn’t stop there. I mean, that story’s been told and retold and retold as an example of what a powerful God that we serve, as an example of the fact that Jesus was divine. He was able to take this small thing and multiply and multiply and multiply it to the point that they had baskets left over.

Nancy: Not to speak of being a parable of Himself, that He is Himself the bread of life, so it all points to Him.

Erin: Right. It's an example of who Jesus is and what He can mean to our lives. And it all gets traced back to that little lunch. So God’s very much in the business of taking little things and multiplying them. I like to call it “Mom Math.” I’m not very good at the normal kind of math, but I like mom math—this idea that my small mom offerings, God’s going to multiply them exponentially to do big things.

Nancy: And you really have to exercise faith when you’re in the middle of "momming"—motherhood, and doing those little things because you can’t see the exponential outcome of it when you’re in the middle of it.

Erin: Right. Jesus gives us such a great example. Jesus loved to meet the physical needs of people before meeting the spiritual needs of people. That’s what you’re doing with your little flock. It gets redundant, and it gets boring, and it feels like a lot of little things, but you have to know that God’s going to multiply those little things.

You loving those little ones well day after day after day after day gives you a foundation to speak life and truth about who God is to you, who He can be to them, and that’s why motherhood really can be a ministry.

A lot of young women now think, I can’t have kids. I want to have a ministry. Well, loving your children well is a ministry.

We think back to that commissioning service. “I’m going to reach unreached people groups in Africa.” We would applaud. We would cheer. And rightfully so, but your children are an unreached people group. They come to earth without an understanding of God. They don’t automatically know Him as their Savior. Someone has to teach them. Someone has to train them. They’re your mission field. They’re a little flock of people who don’t know about Jesus unless you tell them, and so how can that be a small thing?

Nancy: You have to envision down the road what God will do with those seeds that are planted, with that lunch that is packed.

I’m sitting here, Erin, thinking of your mother, who I’ve not had the privilege of meeting, but just thinking there was a day when she was packing lunches and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and changing diapers and cleaning up messes and chauffeuring to soccer practice or whatever, and maybe feeling very small about all of that.

But I’m wondering if she envisioned the day when her daughter, Erin Davis, would be introducing her children to Christ and ministering to teenagers and writing a book for moms and shaping the lives of her children.

It has to be so gratifying to your mom now to see the mom-math that God has multiplied the investment of her life in the ways that you’re serving Him today.

Erin: This book was dedicated to her. I say in that dedication that hers are the shoulders on which all of us rest, and that is so true. My mom doesn’t have any sort of grand ministry that the church would recognize as being something spectacular, but she raised three kids well, and many of those years she was single while doing it. She always depended on Jesus for her strength. She always prayed for us. I am moved to think about how much credit she deserves. But for every family it impacts, my mom deserves the credit for that.

So for every mom and husband and little flock of children, my mom made little offerings of little things like just faithfully praying and packing lunches and speaking about Jesus and things that aren’t glamorous. Now the number of families and children and homes that’s going to impact is—I can’t even count it all.

So mom-math has certainly multiplied in her influence. That’s how it’ll be with all moms who decide to see motherhood as a ministry instead of focusing on the mundane parts of motherhood.

Nancy: And your husband has been a good cheerleader as well. It’s been fun to see Jason really take seriously and value the role of motherhood and be an encourager to you. It seems like at some just really special moments, he’s come alongside and said (and you thank God for husbands who will do this), “I really value what you’re doing.” I know that picks you up at some difficult spots.

Erin: He is my greatest cheerleader, and he is a great dad. He has taken it seriously from the beginning. He was trying to figure out how to swaddle the baby doll before we actually brought the baby home and all those things. It wasn’t because he wanted to learn how to swaddle. It was because he’s had an eternal perspective.

In fact, there was a day when I was feeling the mundaneness of motherhood. There was nothing exciting happening in my world. I think that day I had washed laundry, dried laundry, and folded laundry, and that was probably the extent of what I’d done with my day. I looked in my inbox, and there was an email from my husband, Jason, along with a picture of our youngest son Noble. Noble was just a little bit older than a baby. He was sitting in a canoe and smiling so cute. Jason wrote these words to go with it:

In case you were wondering why you work so hard, why you hit the ground running, and why each day is full of tasks that seem to never completely get done, here is a photo of why you do it. You do it to make his life better. You do it to show him what a life spent for Jesus looks like. And you do it so he knows Jesus is more important than he is, but nothing else is. You do it so he can learn important things and avoid learning things he doesn’t need to. You do it for me, and you do it for Noble. You do it for Eli, and you do it for Jesus. I’m proud of you.

If I was doing laundry to show Noble eternal things, if I was making little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, again, to show Eli what parental love looks like, what unconditional love looks like, and to have those opportunities to talk to him about more important things down the line, then suddenly it wasn’t mundane. It was ministry.

Dannah: It was ministry indeed. Erin Davis on the significance of small things. If you’re a mom, the sandwich making, the chauffeuring, the diaper changing—it matters. If you’re feeling swallowed up by work that feels mundane today, I hope you’ll take a deep breath. The Lord sees you. His grace is sufficient for you. And all of us here at Revive Our Hearts are cheering you on. 

Speaking of sufficient grace, let me read about that. Second Corinthians 12:9: “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.’ Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.”

Don’t you just feel that in your bones as a mom? This passage invites you to rest. And to remember that, if you’re an imperfect mom, you are very much usable by God. Our good friends Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler sat down with Nancy to talk about that. These wonderful women co-authored the book Risen Motherhood, and they’re passionate about helping you live out your calling in light of Christ’s love for you. Let’s listen to part of that conversation together. Here’s Emily.

Emily Jensen: I think there was this sense that motherhood is such a huge responsibility. You see that, “Okay, I’m supposed to be caring for their hearts and their bodies and helping them make wise choices, and all these different things. It’s like if I fail at this, does this mean I’m a failure as a person at the deepest level? Like, if I can’t do motherhood right, what does that say about me?”

So I think that there’s this real need to grapple with that at a deep level and say, “My identity is not found in how I mother and the way that I carry out all these different things. It’s rooted in Christ.”

Motherhood is one important calling that He’s given me, but I need to keep my eyes fixated on Him and be anchored to Him because that is going to allow me to keep walking it, because I am going to fail, and I’m not going to be good enough. But God can work in and through even my failure, even my sin, Lord willing, to show my children Jesus day in and day out, even as I confess that and say that to them. “Mommy didn’t say that right,” or “I’m sorry,” or whatever those different things look.

I can just be hopeful when that’s where my eyes are fixed, to say, “Yes, Lord. You can use a sinner like me. Thank goodness I don’t have to have it all together, but You do.”

Nancy: You’re talking, again, in the young-children season of life, but we have some women listening right now to this conversation whose children are teens or young adults or older and are far from the Lord—prodigals.

These are moms, grandmoms who cry themselves to sleep at night with heavy hearts over the waywardness of their children. And the enemy does a number on so many of these moms, overwhelming them with guilt, with recriminations, with, “If only you had been a different mother, a better mother.”

Any mother—or dad—or person for that matter . . . We are sinful. Right? But there are some moms who just need to get set free, that your identity as a woman isn’t now in how your kids have turned out. If you could be the best mom, baking the bread, having the chickens, doing the Pinterest-perfect home, that doesn’t guarantee your children are going to have a heart for Christ.

Laura Wifler: We always say, “Look at the garden.” Adam and Eve had a perfect Father that was there with them.

Nancy: And a picture-perfect home.

Laura: Yes. They had a picture-perfect home, and they took and ate and disobeyed their Father. So I think that can help us take heart. We are in no way going to be like the Lord, and His children were wayward. I think that’s where we put our hope in Him. He knows the story, and He is sovereign over the story, and we can trust Him with the outcome.

Nancy: Well, I think you’ve come to realize, too, as I’ve read what you’ve written and heard you talk, you realize that what your children most need is not the things that maybe were all a part of that picture you had before you had children. In order to become who God wants them to be, in order for them to experience the gospel and to love Christ, they may not need all those things, all those experiences that you hoped to provide for them, all the things that moms can guilt each other about—whether you do it this way or that way on some of the types of issues that you’ve brought up. Having this quiet, peaceful home isn’t necessarily what your children most need.

What they most need is to see the gospel at work in the midst of a sinful place. So if your home could be perfect—which it can’t be—your children might never realize how much they need a Savior.

Emily: That’s right. I think that that is, for me, personally . . . I have often pursued that perfection, that outward facade. I tend to be a fairly Type-A person. I’m very driven. I think I shared in a previous episode, I struggle with being self-reliant. I struggle with thinking, Well, I’ll just pull up my boot straps and figure it out and go.

That was something that I realized: What do my kids need most from me? Do they need the amazing first birthday party—which I could possibly pull off at a time or two? Or do they need a mom that loves them well and who’s willing to say, “I’m sorry.” A mom who’s willing to say, “You know what? We’re not going to do this part of the birthday party because it’s just too stressful. I’m not able to pull it off. Maybe we’ll do something small and simple,” and then do affirmation around the table because that means so much more than this big, elaborate party at a pool.

I think, for me, it comes down to sometimes weighing some of those decisions: Could I pull this off? Maybe, but would I be a mom that shows the gospel to my kids in the midst of it? Probably not.

Nancy: And would that thing—you might pull off, even if you could be Superwoman in that moment—is that what your child really needs?

Emily: And would it even matter?

I feel that’s helped me weigh some decisions of what really matters. Is this touching their hearts and their souls, or is this just kind of creating a little child that gets everything they want and everything does look like Pinterest around them? And what is it doing for my own soul? Am I being dependent on the Lord in this situation, or am I depending on myself?

I have appreciated that the Lord has allowed me to fall many times in motherhood where stuff didn’t go well, things got ruined. I thought I could do something, and in the end, it just didn’t work out. Those moments have really shown me my limitations, that I’m not a deity, I’m not god. And I’m so grateful that I serve a bigger God that catches me when I fall and provides everything I need.

Dannah: Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler on acknowledging our dependence. We need the Lord in our motherhood—and in every area of our lives. There’s more to that conversation. If you’d like to hang out a little longer with these lovely ladies, we’ll link to the whole series in the transcript of today’s episode. You can find that at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend.

Now, I was in the recording studio with another dear mom friend this week. Her name is Suzy Weibel. She’s been a ministry partner of mine for a long time, and she’s currently the theological director for the new Wonder App. As moms, it’s so important we create a safe space for our girls to ask questions—that they feel the grace we’ve received in Christ extending to them. We spent some time talking about that in light of Mother's Day, and we’d love to share that conversation with you. 

----------------

You and I are approaching Mother's Day, I think, in different ways, because I have a mother who I will have the privilege of having brunch with and celebrating . . . and your mother is with Jesus.

Suzy Weibel: She is.

Dannah: Yeah, but we both have been blessed with the treasure of mothers who created safe places for us.

How did your mom— know you were very close—create an environment where you trusted her to lead you morally and spiritually.

Suzy: It started when I was very young. I liked to read, and my mom never denied me the opportunity to spend time with her when I wanted it. So she would often pop her head into a room and say, "I'm running to the store."

And I'd say, "Can I come?" And I would ride along with her, and I would read a devotional to her while we rode in the car. And then then we would talk about truth from from that devotional and from God's Word.

And then as I grew older, I remember there was one funny incident where I had an opportunity to work as a page, basically, at a VA hospital. My mom was concerned, because I was fifteen years old, and she knew I'd be working with much older girls. She just was concerned about some of the things that maybe I would be exposed to working there in the VA hospital. But, she and my dad talked about it, and they thought it might be a good experience for me, but my mom's rule was that I had to talk to her about what was going on, and then if I had questions, I could ask her anything.

One of the very first days working, she picked me up from work, and indeed, we had been sitting in the lounge with all of these older—much older teenage girls, maybe even in their twenties—and they were talking about things that were definitely inappropriate for me to be hearing and encountering. I just plopped down in the seat next to mom, and I said, "Hey, Mom, what do you think about bleep?" It wasn't a bad word, it just was a word that I'm choosing to make a sound for right now. I think she regretted making that offer to me on that day. It made her so uncomfortable. But do you know what? She didn't avoid my question. She answered it. She went to the hard place.

Dannah: She did. My mom did something similar when I was eight years old. She handed me a daily devo for children, and she said, "You're a Christian. Christians read their Bibles. This will help you learn that habit." But she also extended invitation, if you have any questions about you read in the Bible, I want you to come to me. I'll help you understand it. She would tell me that over and over again, when I was eight, when I was nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, nineteen. And, you know, it rang through my head when I was in my twenties and I was on my journey to heal from sexual pain in my heart and in my life.

I remember sitting on a beach. Well, it was a lake beach, so I'm not quite sure it qualifies as a beach. But I was sitting in the sand with my mom and saying, "Mom, you know how you've always said I could talk to you about anything."

"Yes."

"I need to tell you . . . "

I confessed to her the secret I'd never told anybody else. I remember on that day as she wrapped her arms around me, feeling like this feels like the love of Jesus. As she spoke words of truth and love over me, God used her to wipe shame out of my heart and my life.

But she made that invitation available to me over and over and over again. I do believe I probably took her up on a time or two when I asked a zinger, like you just said. But when it really, really, really mattered so much, it was on that beach when God used that safe place for her to disciple me in what it means to experience the redemption, forgiveness, and grace of Jesus.

Suzy: That's special.

Dannah: That's an invitation, moms, it's an invitation for you to make a safe space for your daughters. And if you have a mom who's made a safe space for you and you haven't taken her up on that, it's not too late.

Suzy: You know Dannah, I think hearing that story of you and your mom, one of the great blessings for me has been able to pass that offer down to my daughters. I do have a daughter who has taken me up on that several times. 

I know that when you wrote And the Bride Wore White, a lot of that was because you were thinking about Lexi at the time. She was your only daughter at the time. I would imagine that you were imagining having conversations with her and making these offers to her.

Dannah: Yeah. I actually a great moment in my healing was when I was driving down the highway listening to a program a lot like this one. I heard two Christian speakers talking about raising their children to live in sexual purity. One of them said, "What is the number one question on a teenage girl's mind when she's talking to her mom about sex?"

And without hesitation, this woman's voice answered the number one question on that girl's mind is, "Mom, did you wait?"

And I pulled to the side of the road because my baby girl was six months old in the back seat. It was a moment where I realized one, I had to be a healing mom, not a wholly healed mom, because I think I'm still on that journey, but a mom who is moving in the direction of healing to be able to disciple my daughter. And, I needed to create a safe space for her, for her to talk about the things.

I think I did that pretty well. It's one of the greatest privileges of my life to continue to be a safe place for my three girls, because my Robbie has brought another daughter into my life through marriage. I meet with them once a month. I ask one question, how can I pray for you? And I usually say something like, "Spill your guts."

Suzy: They do a good job with that?

Dannah: They do. Yes, and I love carrying their burdens in prayer.

-----------------

I do love carrying their burdens in prayer. Now, I don't always feel as confident as I sounded when Suzy and I were talking just then. That's when I go back to that verse I read a few minutes ago. God's grace is sufficient for me when I don't feel strong as a mom. His power is perfected in every single bit of my weakness. That's how I let my girls see Jesus, when I show up as mom who is on the journey of healing and growing in Christ.

I don't know who needed to hear that today. If you don't feel like a perfect mom or a fully healed mom, just join me in allowing the strength of Jesus to show up in the places He is still working on.

Our heart for you is that in your motherhood, you’d experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. To help you to that end, we’ve got a new booklet from Nancy and the Revive Our Hearts staff. The title is Called to Thrive. It’s essentially your handbook for discovering what it really means to thrive in Christ—in motherhood, in grandmotherhood, in marriage, in singleness. Whatever your life stage, you can thrive in Christ! When you make a donation of any amount, we’d love to send you a copy. To give and request yours, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/donate. 

Speaking of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ, next weekend, we’re zooming in on one of those words—freedom. So many women today are living in bondage, whether that’s to fear, addiction, legalism, or something else. But there’s Someone who’s able to set us free. We’re gonna turn our eyes toward Him together. I hope you’ll join us for that. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

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

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.