a week defeated

let me tell you a secret. i have lived in sin this week.
got your attention, huh?

yes i know it is only wednesday.

let me elaborate.

all day long, every day this week (so far), i have felt defeated. from the time i woke up, to the time i finally fall asleep, i have let satan con me into believing that i am failing my children as a mother, and my husband as a wife. i have let him convince me that my worth is in clean, put away laundry, and in a fit-less happy attitude of my toddlers. but that is a lie.

but that's the thing about defeat, and more so, the thing about sin. you let yourself believe it because of what you feel. and satan uses those tiny feelings/insecurities/worries and blows them up on the big screen of your mind to rob you of all the promises of God that you know to be true. because satan knows that i am weak. but I know that when i am weak, HE is strong. my God is so strong and so mighty, whom shall i fear? and in my case this weak, what shall i fear?

i have this big issue with failure. if i don't get something right on the first try, i give in to defeat and let it swallow me up its tsunami of solitude. it isolates me to where i feel like i'm ate up in failure and i should quit and try something else. but the word of my almighty God tells me that i am MORE than a conqueror through Christ. that i am able to do abundantly more through Christ. so i lay it down....and rest. yes, rest. i rest in my piles of clean laundry that sit in their hamper begging to be put up, i rest in my patience while my kids fight over the same toy for the millionth time. because if i am not letting jesus shine out of me, then i am letting satan win.

i guess i am writing all of this to say, that parenting is capital H-Hard. i could list the dramatics all day long, but that is not the point. the point is EVERYTHING is hard. life is hard, because it is in this world. and the world fights God so hard. even knowing jesus, life is hard. but it's because of jesus, and what he did for me, that i can get through it. that i can make jokes to my husband about our small army of tiny people who won us over with their cuteness and sneak to take over us when they smell weakness ;). anything and everything that is good in me is Christ. so, in confidence i can say, that satan might have duped me monday through half of wednesday. but no longer will he get me. i am more than a conqueror. God does not make mistakes, he has equipped me to mother my children, to be blake's wife. i have to be willing to set aside my pride, my will, to lay at his feet and honestly admit my struggles.

there will always be a to-do list. kids will always cry. they have no other ways of expressing negative emotion. it will be okay.

maybe you needed this, too. or maybe you quit reading 5 sentences in because i bore you with my run-on sentences. either way, God is still good. and there is ALWAYS a quiet closet to hide in somewhere around here ;)