5 Days to Discover the Mother God Made You to BeSampel

SO GOD MADE A MOTHER BEAUTIFUL

Exhausted Potato People

"If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!"
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)

The drawing has been taped to our bedroom door for six years. It’s so faded now the lines are a translucent peachy-orange, and I’m certain it was once red marker. It’s a simple sketch done by the hand of a preschooler—namely, my middle daughter, Felicity. “It’s you, Mommy,” she announced the afternoon she proudly handed it to me.

“Me” is a sort of stick figure/potato person, the body shaped like a melting Hershey’s Kiss with impossibly long legs and daddy longlegs arms. Her hair is standing on end but with movement somehow, like she had her nonexistent finger stuck in an electrical outlet. She wears a straight-line grimace, just like the emoji face, with two small dots for eyes and no nose.

It’s uncanny, really, how much it looked the way young, frazzled mom me felt.

Still, as I saw my precious daughter holding the paper, her face beaming with love, I couldn’t help but see myself through her eyes. She wanted to draw me (which, when you’re three and still learning how to hold a marker, is a big deal). She was proud of the likeness she’d created. She thought I was beautiful.

I taped it to the bedroom door. It still makes me smile when I look at it today.

The truth is, I don’t often feel beautiful. Pregnancy, motherhood, life—they’ve taken a toll on me, and I can see it. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder when it happened because I don’t feel that different inside. But there are lines on my forehead, gray hairs in my eyebrows (my eyebrows!), and skin that will never regain the grossly underappreciated elasticity of youth.

That sketch reminds me of something I often forget though: God sees me through the eyes of love, just as my young daughter did that day. He sees my flaws—on the outside and the inside—but He still calls me beloved. He sees the ugliness of my heart and washes it clean through the blood of His Son. He gives me grace upon grace upon grace. He knows me and loves me anyway.

It’s easy to lose sight of that truth, isn’t it? There’s so much pressure to be perfect—or at least to appear that way. As mothers, we juggle kids, marriage, job, home, friendships . . . it’s no wonder we feel disheveled and depleted so much of the time.

But your heavenly Father sees you for who you truly are: an image bearer of God. He knows your thoughts. He hears your heart. And He loves you, His precious child. He loves you.

Melty chocolate potato people aside, I’m not sure there’s anything more beautiful than that.

The heart of a mother is powered by love and grace and selflessness, and faith. It is beauty beyond compare.