How the Work of Christ Sustains the Work of MotherhoodSample

Motherhood is a gift, we know, but it is also one of the most challenging jobs we have ever worked. Yes, our kids are God-given joys. They make us smile, bring us to tears with laughter at their antics, and remind us how to be young again. Yet, in the next breath, we’re thinking about sending them back, and our tears are the result of overwhelm and discouragement, from sinning and being sinned against, or perhaps because life itself has thrown us a curveball.

As a mom of two young children, this has been true for me. As I write this, our daughter is three-and-a-half and our son is one.

Maybe you would describe your world at home as full and frantic as you manage a large family, needing all hands on deck. Or maybe your world feels tiny and isolated, like every day crawls by, and you wonder what happened to your sense of purpose. Either way, amid the chaos or quiet, you wonder if this is all there is to being a mom.

As I look at my own story, and as I talk to friends about theirs, it seems to me there’s something deeper going on, something rooted less in our circumstances and more within the core of our being:

Our weariness often seems to come from a disconnection between hands and heart.

We are busy serving, meeting our children’s needs while setting aside our own, and pouring ourselves out for these little ones. We’re using our hands to change diapers, nurse babies, read books, build towers, teach lessons, make lunches, and tend boo-boos. But if we’re honest we would admit that, while we love our kids, we don’t always like our situation. We struggle to enjoy it. It feels exhausting.

All day long, we work with a servant’s hands—but not always with a servant’s heart.

Many of us desperately want our motives to align with our actions. Wewantour hands to follow our hearts. We don’t just want to keep our kids alive, but to raise them with gladness and thankfulness. Instead of a dormant or a resentful heart, we genuinely want a humble one.

A heart like Christ.

But how?

We grow in humility as we walk closely with Christ, but why is this so?What makes Jesus uniquely able to impart humility to his people?

This is the question we will explore in this week’s devotion. We will meditate on Christ—because what weary moms need is a long, lingering look at humility in the flesh, the beautiful and blessed Jesus, who reveals to us what servant-heartedness looks like.