Hiding Place DevotionalSample

Preparation for the Day 



You take a few moments in your morning to actually sit down as your kids eat breakfast and open your phone to skim through the pictures on Instagram. The beautifully edited photos fill your feed. You see a five course meal, perfectly put together children, and a spotless home covered in fresh flowers. Simultaneously, you glance down at the cold cup of coffee in your hand, your shirt stained in spit up and finger paints. Across from you at the table your four-year-old is using his yogurt as hair gel and more of the baby’s eggs are on the floor than in her mouth.

You sorta-laugh-sorta-cry at the sight of yourself and how your life looks nothing like what you see in those photos. Your idea of meal planning is buying two boxes of corn dogs and a clean home means being able to walk through the living room without stepping on a lego.

Although social media is an incredible tool, it can also spark nasty feelings of self-doubt, comparison, and unrealistic expectations. Satan must love Instagram for what it can do to our hearts and minds as women!

What if today instead of arming yourself with jealousy, comparison, and self-doubt, you armed yourself with the full armor of God? Instead of digging yourself into a hole of “what you should be,” you stood strong in the Lord and in who HE says you are?

Bear with me for a minute all of you type A mamas out there: what if we put away the meal plans, the fancy planners, and the budgeting binders, and the Word of God was all we used to prepare for our day? CAN YOU IMAGINE? I’m preaching to the choir here, because my planner is my third arm. It’s amazing how much more prepared I can be for the day when I put on the armor of God and enter His presence before I turn to my planner, binders, and pretty color coding.

Let’s find our preparation for the day in Him alone. Only then can we fight off the enemy of comparison and jealousy. When you open Instagram with a heart turned toward Him and see others’ lives through the filter of Christ instead of through the filter of jealousy, you will see the beautiful creation of God.