Katie S. 28

What is the nastiest name you have ever been called?  What are the most cutting words that have ever been spoken to you….and more importantly, who said them? I was thinking about this question the other day as I was dusting the living room.  I accidentally knocked over a vase, and in the next instant I called myself an idiot.  Of course I didn’t say it out loud or anything. I just said it inside my head, in a sort of matter-of-fact way. But I called myself by name…. “Katie, you are an idiot.”

The words came so quickly that I had to assume this was not the first time I had mentally insulted myself. But for some reason, this WAS the first time that I noticed myself doing it.

For the next couple of days, I tried to be more aware of the words that were going through my head as I went about my routine tasks. And it was pretty shocking to finally acknowledge the evil and hateful things I have been speaking over myself. The tiniest misstep resulted in a near audible character assault that was out before I could stop it. I lost my patience with one of the kids, “Katie, you are a terrible mother.” I had to reread a sentence in my book, “Katie you are such a moron.” I grew weary as I was trying to clean the house, “There’s no way you can do this Katie.”

One of my biggest struggles as a stay at home mom is my tendency to feel defeated.  I usually attribute this to outward factors or my own character flaws.  I think that my introverted tendencies just don’t jive well with child rearing, or that too much unstructured time and too little organization leaves me feeling depleted.  But what I am starting to see, is that there is a much deeper, more ominous source of defeat at play in my life.  Somewhere along the line, I heard a lie about myself. And instead of asking my heavenly father to shine truth on that lie, I buried it deep in my heart.  And there it began to take root.  It grew quietly but quickly, and it took over my thoughts. Until one day, the lie started to sound like truth to me. So I began speaking death over myself, time and time again. In the Bible study I am currently doing, Beth Moore talks about how the devil really only has a few tricks that he can use on a child of God. So his favorite, and usually most successful trick, is to open his mouth.

I am so thankful that the Holy Spirit opened my ears to hear the things I was speaking over myself this week.  I am also thankful that He is speaking the truth that obliterates the lies over me daily. My words of defeat cannot outrun his powerful words of love.  I am not an idiot. I am not a bad mother. I am NOT DEFEATED!

Its true that I am terribly sinful and deeply flawed, but the greater truth is that my heavenly father speaks words of love and victory over me, not guilt and condemnation. The Bible says that:

• I am favored of God.
• I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
• My God rejoices over me with singing.
• My God loved me so much that he gave his only son as a sin offering so that I could have eternal life.
• And NO weapon formed against me will stand!

So these are the words that I am going to ask the Holy Spirit to retrain my heart to say. These are the life giving words that will get me through the day and help me to walk in the freedom that is mine through Christ Jesus.

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage and purity lately, and I believe God is in the process of healing my heart from some old wounds that, until recently, I have tried to keep hidden. I’ve made no great secret of the fact that I was not a virgin when I got married.  But what I have kept secret, maybe even from myself, is what I long believed that fact said about my relationship with God.

I grew up hearing the gospel.  At the age of four I prayed a prayer with my mother, asking Jesus to come into my heart and be with me forever.  Then when I was thirteen, I prayed that prayer again.  This time with a greater understanding of my need for a savior and a desire to know Him.  After that point I began to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.  In the midst of my teenage angst and confusion, some part of me knew that I had an advocate, a redeemer and a friend in Jesus.

I didn’t really date in high school.  Boys scared and confused me, and I wrestled with a complex mix of idealism and insecurity.  I was enthralled with the epic romances of literature, like Arthur and Guinevere, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.  The awkward reality of teenage relationships seemed appalling by comparison.

But when I went away to college, something changed in me.  I had chosen a school based on where the greatest number of my friends were going, as opposed to the place that felt right for me. I made the choice out of a fear of being lonely, which ironically, is exactly how I ended up feeling even as I was surrounded by familiar faces.

Part way through my first semester I met a boy.  I think I knew from the get go that he wasn’t the right boy, but it felt good to be pursued.  I rationalized the relationship by saying that I wasn’t looking for forever yet. It didn’t take very long for things to get physical, and as they did I began to distance myself more and more from those friends who I knew would hold me accountable.  By the end of my freshman year I had given away the piece of myself that should have belonged to my husband alone.  He never even pretended that he loved me, and in my heart of hearts, I never believed that he should.

I returned home for summer break devastated by what I had done.  I remember feeling like I had changed into another person.  That in a single act I had undermined everything that I was, and worse yet, everything that God had been in me.  I asked God to forgive me, but I suspected that I had committed an unforgivable sin and that any relationship I might have with God going forward would be somehow lessened, marred by my great disappointment.

Looking back, I still can’t quite figure out where I got this idea. I’ve shared the loving and gracious role that my earthly father played in this story here before.  My parents were both saved as adults, and they were always very honest with me about their respective testimonies.  I grew up knowing that I would not lose my salvation (or my parents’ love) because of sin in my life.  And although there were certainly individuals in my Christian high school who had implied that premarital sex and substance abuse were somehow bigger sins than say, pride or materialism, there were also a great many individuals who spoke honestly about their own struggles and the faithfulness of Jesus in the midst of their sin.

I suppose the only one who can truly be blamed for my misconceptions during that season is the enemy of my heart.  How much must the devil have wanted me to believe that my sins could somehow undo the active power of God’s grace in my life? How delicious it must have been to see me doubt the one thing that rendered him completely powerless over me. But here is the thing.  My soul had already been bought and paid for.  So no matter how far I believed I had fallen, no matter how fast I tried to run from the presence of my savior, the devil could not win. Let me say that again – HE. COULD. NOT. WIN.

My flesh was weak, but my God was mighty to save. I was and am a terrible sinner, but I was and am clothed in righteousness because Jesus Christ died for me.

So here is the part of the story that I believe God is addressing with me right now. I have long struggled with feelings of shame and regret over the fact that purity always seemed just out of my reach from that point forward.  Although my heart did begin to turn back toward God in the years leading up to my marriage, I struggled with the issue of abstinence right up until the day I walked down the aisle. As a dating couple, Chris and I were forever setting and breaking rules for ourselves.  And once we got engaged, I feared that God would not honor our union because we could not honor the promises we had made before him. I was first overwhelmed with feelings of unworthiness when things between us were good, and then convinced that we were simply reaping what we had sown when things were bad.

But the beauty of belonging to the Lord is this – I didn’t have to try to change the past or walk in constant shame in order to be in right relationship with God or my husband.  All I had to do was trust that mine is a God who forgives and makes all things new. He is in the process of gently revealing the huge chasm that existed between the truth and my perception during that time.  My struggles with that particular sin weren’t evidence that I was not truly saved.  They were evidence that I was (and always will be) truly in need of the savior who was already mine.

No white dress that I or any other bride has ever worn could be as brilliant as the robes of righteousness that he gives to repentant sinners. I am the pure spotless bride that I always wanted to be.  Not because I did anything good or right, but because the passionate lover of my soul fought and died for me.  Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have nothing on a romance like that!

Several months ago I was in a place of extreme discontent. I felt constantly frustrated with my circumstances and struggled to see the meaning in what I was doing on a day to day basis. I am ashamed to say that this frustration carried over into the way that I viewed and spoke to my children and my husband, and it definitely colored the way that I saw myself.

I was wasting so much time thinking about what else I should be doing, what use of my time and energy would give me the sense of purpose that I was craving. I was attempting to define myself and I was failing to see the amazing plan and purpose that God had already laid before me.

I shared these feelings with a dear friend of mine one day at the park. In response she asked me a simple question. “Have you prayed and asked God to give you peace within your circumstances?”

I had not. I had prayed and asked God to change my circumstances, to give me something more than what he already had, but I had not asked Him to simply change me. My friend then reminded me that I have an enemy who does not want me to know peace. He would delight in my destruction and he knows that the best way to accomplish that is to blind me to the truth.

So I started praying. Doubtfully at first, still somewhat convinced that an external rather than an internal change was in order. But as time went by, I began to feel God doing exactly what He promised me He would do in His word. He is removing the scales from my eyes, He is reminding me that He is in control and that my life is not defined by what I do or don’t do but rather by what has already been done for me.

I feel as if I am being given fresh eyes for my life and the many blessing I have been given. And while I still may not be constantly aware of the eternal significance of what God is doing in and through me at all times (particularly when I am say, emptying the dishwasher for the 11th time this week or changing a dirty diaper in the middle of a toy scattered floor) I am seeing more and more glimpses of the beauty that is all around me. I am enjoying my time with my children immensely, marveling at how they interact with one another and the world around them. I am feeling deeply thankful for the love that is extended to me by my friends, my family and by the amazing partner that God has blessed me with. And I am feeling a peace that I still can’t fully articulate. I know that God has me where I am, home with my children, working as a waitress, living in Nashville TN, for a reason. I know that His plans for me are not complete yet, but I also know that He is not waiting around to see what I will make of my life. That pressure I was feeling to do more, to be more, was not from Him, and I am so thankful that He is daily reminding me of His sufficiency.

I find myself so often wishing that I could do more for the people I love.  That I could say or do the right thing to ease their pain, their hurt, their fear.  I have a bad habit of empathizing to the point where I am rendered entirely useless.  I fixate so intently on the emotional aspect of a situation that I fail to notice the practical needs that I actually could be helping to meet.  Although I believe that the ability to empathize comes from God I also believe that the perversion of empathy can be (like so many other perversions of something good) terribly selfish.  I mean who I am to take someone else’s suffering, someone else’s journey, and make it all about me?

I have a feeling that when God told us to bear one another’s burdens he didn’t mean this.  He didn’t say sit down by yourself and think really hard about how you might feel if you were in that person’s situation and then get yourself into a really deeply useless funk about it.  I could be wrong, but I don’t get the impression that when Job’s friends came and sat with him in the ashes of his former life they were grieving because they were thinking about how much it would have sucked if instead God had asked the devil to consider them.  I think they were grieving because they loved Job.  Because they saw that he was broken in every possible way and they hated to see him suffer.  Like I said, maybe I’m wrong, but I really do wish that I personally could learn how to love the people that I love better when they find themselves in times of crisis.  I wish that instead of being so arrogant as to think that I can or should somehow fix their problems I would go immediately to the only one who is able and intercede on my friend’s behalf.

I tend to beat myself up a lot when it comes to my shortcomings as a mother.  I attribute every issue that arises in my children’s lives to my own failings and I balk at the ways in which they take after me.  I also have a bad habit of measuring myself and my children against standards that were set by man rather than by the one who created man.  According to several of the older and wiser mothers with whom I am blessed to be in relationship, this is a crippling (though pretty common) line of thinking.  I have written a few pointers/reminders for myself to try to counter some of the worldly parenting tips that can sometimes dominate my thinking.

1) Try to acknowledge that every child is different and that they are as God made them.  We don’t presume to know exactly what a person should be doing at 27 or 58 years old, so why is it that we assume its OK to lump all babies or toddlers into one category?  I understand that there are certain medically determined mile markers that we should be looking for, but we need to draw the line at comparing our children to others or allowing self proclaimed experts who have never met our children tell us what they should be doing and when.  I think that when parents fall victim to this trap it results in one of two scenario’s:  either it provides a false sense of value and accomplishment for parents who crave the validation of others, thus sending the message to the child that their value is also tied up in what they are or are not able to do; or it leaves parents who are already prone to self doubt and insecurity feeling defeated and ill equipped to parent their own children.

2)  Rather than spending the time you have with your children worrying about how you are supposed to be speaking to them, disciplining them and teaching them, try to focus on ENJOYING them.

3) Stop worrying about how things look from the outside.  I have an aunt whose children are several years older that I am and she recently told me that she had one main regret in the way that she raised her children.  She told me that if she had it to do over again she would spend more time just playing with her kids instead of being so  ‘house proud’ (which is northern English for ‘neat freak’).  This got me thinking, I bet that quite a few mothers share this regret but  few, if any, mothers look back and say, “I wish I had spent less time hanging out with my kids and more time ironing clothes, mopping the floors and scrubbing the baseboards.”

4) Accidents will happen.  Do your best to avoid the ones that you can, but try not to beat yourself up over the ones that you can’t.  Being cautious can be a good thing, but approaching your children from a posture of fear will only tear you down and potentially pass on a very negative world view to your kids.  Trust that the God who made them is also the God who sustains them.

5) When you are trying to own more than you are meant to or feeling crippled by your own limitations as a mother: PRAY!!  Ask God to remind you daily that His grace is not only sufficient for children, but for mothers as well.