How the Work of Christ Sustains the Work of MotherhoodSýnishorn

Your circumstances may feel like they’re spinning out of control—a difficult child you can’t seem to reach, sleepless nights and foggy days, a messy house that makes you feel chaotic inside, a course-altering diagnosis with an unknown future, a season of stressful changes, tension with your spouse, a pregnancy you weren’t planning (or that you were planning and then you lost), an adoption that falls through, inexplicable waves of anxiety or postpartum depression—but none of your circumstances exist outside of Jesus’s loving authority.

When he is your Lord and Savior, you can trust that nothing comes to you apart from his goodness and perfect plan, even the trials that make motherhood a struggle. Sometimes our hardships are his grace in disguise, severe mercies straight from his loving heart to ours. A Savior willing to go to his death for your eternal sake is a Lord you can trust with everything else.

Even when it makes no sense to you.

Even when it causes you to question his love.

Motherhood is hard work. It is demanding, full of toil, and often dirty. Despite our best intentions, a mother’s love has an endpoint—but Jesus’s love knows no end. When we realize that our greatest problem isn’t the tantrums and conflicts and tiredness and messes and dirt and grime before us, but the lack of love in our hearts and in our kids’ hearts, our response to Jesus’s great, unending, cleansing love becomes like Mary’s—“Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ” (John 11:27)—and like Peter’s—“Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” (John 13:9).

Cleanse us, Lord! We need you! Humble our hearts with your love!

As you wash unlovely, dirty little feet with your hands, may your heart cling to his love that always supplies what you lack. When you stoop, may you do so as a picture of his high, wide, long, and deep love for you. May the song of your motherhood be service for him, as you love him with your hands from the worship flowing from your heart. And in that, may you love your kids in the truest way, to the very end, as a reflection of his inexhaustible love for you.