How I Blew it on Mother's Day

Yesterday, my family made me breakfast in bed, we went out for Chinese food for dinner, and we made a little video with my children rising up around me and calling me 'blessed' (see Proverbs 31:28 if you are confused). It felt good to be honored. It felt good to take a break from the usual, get a long nap, and stop spinning my plates for just one day.

But, even on a day set aside to make me feel special, I am no one special. I am not a perfect mom. I am not even a good mom, some of the time. I blew my fuse completely yesterday morning when the baby (oops, I mean 'toddler') got into some lipstick and marked her face and clothes up with a deep brown red, just as I was heading out the door for church. I spent fifteen minutes grumbling and yelling and scrubbing at the shirt and my daughter's face, and felt that I deserved better on Mother's Day. 

But do I?

Ann Voskamp, author of One Thousand Gifts (which I haven't read, but heard many good things about), wrote this on her site: 

God wants Prodigal Parents, not perfect parents.

We are living in an exciting time. I say this because I feel that grace-full parenting is being taught in ways that it had not been taught before, with books like Grace-Based Parenting by Tim Kimmel and Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp. The generations before us equated being 'Christian' with 'having your act together'. Children needed to look and act a certain way, because the behavior of the child reflected on his/her parent. With a parent's reputation balanced precariously on the choices his/her children made, we now have Christians with the misconceived idea that their Heavenly Father carries a giant rule book and a whip.

This is exactly the opposite of the Gospel message! God offers us His love as a gift! He offers us forgiveness for all our failures! He sent His Son because He knew we would never have our 'act together'! He wants us to live lives full of grace, trusting in His Sovereignty and Power to do what we cannot do.

Like being perfect parents. I know of wonderful Christian men and women who have seen their child make hurtful choices. And I have seen these same men and women humbly admit that they don't have all the answers, while continuing to love their child through the tough stuff. Sometimes the child comes to know Christ in a deep and wonderful way. Sometimes, the parents pray until their dying day. And that's what it comes down to: knowing Christ is a personal choice that is a matter of the heart. A parent cannot do that for a child, no matter how hard he/she tries. 

Which leads us to this truth:

We are all in the same boat.

And that boat is sinking, no matter what we do. It is only by God's grace buoying us up that we are not all drowned. It is because I have been shown grace that I can do the same for my children. And that I do not have to put on a facade everyday in front of my children, pretending that I always know what I am doing. 

I did apologize to my children for being a bad role model yesterday. They were gracious enough to forgive me.