Jul
12
52home
Filed under 52homeCuz sometimes this has to happen first. Hope your weekend is as yummy as mine!
Cuz sometimes this has to happen first. Hope your weekend is as yummy as mine!
“Sit Time” is a whole lot better with a helicopter and some rain boots.
“I feel like such a failure. I’m a horrible mom and a terrible wife. I’m exhausted, depressed, and overwhelmed.”
Sound like a mom you know? How would you counsel this woman? What gospel-centered words would you give her? Maybe you are that mom. As your soul’s counselor, how do you apply the gospel?
So often, in our sincere desire to be gospel-centered, we skip over a biblical diagnosis and assume we know what the problem is.
“You’re caught in the performance trap,” we tell the discouraged mom. “You just need to remember that God’s approval isn’t based on your performance. He loves you, in spite of all your failures. He doesn’t expect you to do it all or be a perfect wife or mom. You just need to rest in God’s grace.”
True, to a point.
But Scripture trains us to be more careful counselors, to apply the varied grace of God appropriately to various mothering discouragements:
“[A]dmonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all” (1 Thes. 5:14).
In other words, gospel-centered counsel looks different for different counselees.
“Discouraged Mom” may, in fact, be experiencing genuine conviction for anger or impatience or some other area of sin in her mothering. She may need an exhortation to repent and encouragement in the grace of God available to help her to grow (1 John 1:9).
Or a mom may be discouraged because she is comparing herself to other moms or cultural expectations of motherhood. She may need to hear our Savior’s words, “What is that to you, you follow me?” (John. 21:22)
Maybe a mom is looking to her children’s performance as the measurement of her mothering success. She may need to be reminded of her call is just to be faithful, and to trust God with the fruit. Her children’s sin isn’t the final measurement of her motherhood (Gal. 6:9).
Often a discouraged mom is an exhausted mom. She needs a good night sleep and an hour in God’s Word.
I could go on, but point is, gospel-centered counseling doesn’t make a blank check out to grace and hand it over to a discouraged mom. We must be diligent to discern the specific gospel-truth that applies to a particular discouraged mom in her unique situation.
So whether we’re counseling a friend or our own soul, let’s be wise, gospel-centered counselors.
~from the archives
Scary thunder, power outage, snuggles and Little House on the Prairie.
The Lord is constantly calling us to obey Him in connection with things that we don’t know what the next step is going to be. But He is saying to us, “Will you not trust me?”
Remember the conversation that Simon Peter had with Jesus on that day of the breakfast at the sea in John 21? They are walking along and Jesus actually says to him, “Now trust me Peter, you are going to die for my sake.” And Peter sees the apostle John hanging behind and he says, “Well, tell me about this man.”
And you see what he is saying. He’s saying, “That’s a huge challenge to my life. I want to know that I’m getting fair dues. And before I fully trust you for this, I need to know what’s happening. Are other people going to do this? Or is this just me?”
Isn’t it amazing, that in other respects if the Lord said to us, “I have an exclusive plan for you. I don’t have this plan for anybody else, you’re the only one that has this plan,” we say, “I want to have that plan if nobody else is getting it.”
But when it comes to trusting Him we’re inclined to say, “I might trust you if everybody else is on board.”
And we face that challenge constantly, don’t we? We find ourselves in situations where faith is challenged and because there are others on board we march on and we stand up. But there are situations where there is nobody else there. From the human point of view, people are challenging us.
But from the divine point of view, the Lord is saying now, “Trust me. Know me well enough to trust me.”
~from “The Old Couple” a sermon by Sinclair Ferguson, June 12, 2012
And no one cried the whole time we were out. Progress people!
For our family, and probably for yours, a ritual of summer is the weekly trip to the library for new books to fill the long hours. We are blessed to have, in addition to the public library system, a Christian library for children here in Louisville and we try to visit both often.
(On one recent trip to the public library my daughter, Tori, asked me who pays for all the books in the library. It was at that moment I realized—with with some small measure of civic pride—that I, in fact, am a regular contributor to my local library. Not only do my taxes fund my local library, I supplement the library’s revenue with my monthly overdue book fines. I like to think that I’m making a significant contribution to the furtherance of the education of children everywhere.)
My biggest challenge is finding new books for our kids to read or for us to read to them. I don’t want to miss out on a good book and I want to carefully monitor their reading diet. But as every parent knows, good recommendations can often be hard to come by.
That’s why I was excited when I recently I stumbled across this blog by theologian Ray Van Neste called The Children’s Hour. He reviews children’s books, shares what he is currently reading, and provides thoughts on Bible literature for children.
I don’t know how I missed seeing this blog before, but Dr. Van Neste has been posting there for some seven years now, so I have a lot of archives to mine and new books to read to my children.
As you peruse this blog you will not only discover wonderful resources for your family, you will be discipled by Dr. Van Neste in parenting your children to love words, and most of all God’s Word. That’s a worthy read.
Summer Days
The holiday weekend pushed the Friday Funnies to Monday. Enjoy this cute story from Laura:
One day my 4-year-old son and I were looking at a picture of myself from many years before he was born. We were talking about who was in the picture and he asked me, “Where am I?” I told him he wasn’t born yet. He thought for a second and asked, “So where was I, Mommy?” I didn’t answer right away as I was trying to figure out how to explain to a 4-year-old where he was before he was born! I guess he thought I was taking too long to answer so he said very matter-of-factly, “I was at Grandma’s.”
We watched this at our Independence Day get together today and cried. Thank you to all of the American soldiers who serve our country, and thank you to the families of active duty troops for your sacrifice. May God richly bless you all!
