Last week, I was a mess. Well, actually, I've been something of a mess for the past month, but last week was particularly unpleasant. A perfect storm of hormones, badly planned schedules, deadline pressures and kids who are more than ready for a spring romp around the park left me feeling more monster than human. Or perhaps I just felt more human than I'd like to think I am. I had to repent on far too many occasions of anger, selfishness, impatience, pride and general lack of grace, joy or hope.
So it was in some ways rather amusing for it to be a week in which several different people sent notes about how my writing had been an encouragement to them, and also a week in which we were informed that we make raising four kids look easy, and in which my kids--at their own initiative--put time into writing me letters about how much they love me. It was amusing, and at the same time humbling, because half the time I'm struggling to put into practice the things I write about, and more than half the time raising four kids makes me feel like I'm on the edge of insanity.
The truth is, I'm just an ordinary woman. I lack wisdom, I have to fight unbelief (and I don't always win), and I'm a sinner. I write about putting my trust in God rather than earthly things, and then I have a week where I put my trust in myself and end up like the peg in Isaiah 22 that gives way under the undue pressure put on it. I write about Jesus being my Sabbath rest and then I go through the week just clinging to the hope of some sleep on the weekend. I write about preparing for hormone dips, and then get myself into some trouble by forgetting to do just that. I write about seeing trials as glorious opportunities to see God's work, and then feel like I'm fighting to the death against my craving for comfort and ease. (Just keeping it real here, folks!)
But you know what? I'm an ordinary woman who has an extraordinary God. I write what I know to be true about HIM. And if people receive encouragement to press on in faith through the things that I write, it's not my great wisdom that is encouraging them. It's God's grace at work through me despite my own failings. If others see growth in my children, it's not my superb parenting skills that accomplished it. It's God's grace at work in these kids even on a week when their mom is falling apart. And if my children love me despite my frustration and yelling, that's not because I'm so wonderful that they just can't resist. It's God's grace toward this broken, sinful mother. It's His amazingly powerful ability to work through messy, exhausted, struggling, weak human beings to create beauty out of beasts. That's not to downplay the gifts, skills, abilities and insights that God has given me. But it IS to say that even those things are all gifts of God's grace, and even with these gifts, I still desperately need His grace to cover over all my inadequacies.
Last week, I was a mess. I was more a mess than I've been in a long time. And yet, last week God's grace was still just as available to me as it ever has been. It's there on my best days, filling up what is still very lacking in my holiness. And it's there on my worst, most sinful of days, when I'm extremely aware of how little I deserve it.
I'm so thankful that it's not all up to me and my abilities. I'm so thankful that God is able to use me even on the weeks when I feel the least useful, that He shows His strength when I'm at my weakest. I'm thankful for encouraging comments at a time when I'm so conscious of my failings that rather than stirring me to pride, there is nothing left to do but to turn the praise toward the one to whom it is really due.
"For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us... For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God." (2 Corinthians 4:5-7, 15)
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