Confidence in Parenting - What is It?

"I don't think I'm doing it right..."
-me (and every parent ever)

I have been a mom for exactly three months, three weeks, and two days, and already I have heard these words come from my mouth a dozen times. Since I have only been a mom for exactly three months, three weeks, and two days, I cannot consider myself an expert. However, I can't help but think there is something wrong about thinking those words so often.

This thought first struck me when I was visiting a friend who had an even newer baby than my own. As we talked about the ever-perplexing sleep schedule discussion, she said the exact thing that I had been saying to everyone. "I don't think I'm doing it right." 

Wow, so I'm not the only one, I thought.

This mommy was doing an awesome job for her baby boy; people told me Genesis was healthy and happy. Yet, this string of doubt came to our tongues as a sort of self endorsed disclaimer that came with our children. Here she is! Yes, she's cute, but I'm probably messing her up. Don't worry though, I am fully aware of this.

What a stressful way to live! Being a parent is hard enough without this added pressure (self-inflicted, I might add) to recognize our failings. Most of being a parent is learning anyway: learning what works, learning what doesn't work, learning with your child, learning without your child - nobody ever told me how different life is when your baby isn't even with you! Honestly, this can do no good for me or for Genesis, so the question remains: why do we feel so unqualified?

During my own desperate search for sleep during Genny's first couple months, I read the excerpt of Bringing up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. I have a three-month old, so of course I haven't read the whole book. But I did find some encouragement. Please indulge in these pieces from the first chapter which I have selected:

We quickly discover that two restaurant meals a day, with a toddler, deserve to be

their own circle of hell. Bean is briefly interested in food: a piece of bread, or anything fried. But within a few minutes she starts spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demands to be sprung from her high chair so she can dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

After a few more restaurant meals, I notice that the French families all around us don’t look like they’re in hell. Weirdly, they look like they’re on vacation. French children the same age as Bean are sitting

contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There’s no shrieking or whining. Everyone is having one course at a time. And there’s no debris around their tables.

...French parents are very concerned about their kids. They know about pedophiles, allergies, and choking hazards. They take reasonable precautions. But they aren’t panicked about their children’s well-being.

...I’m hardly the first to point out that middle-class America has a parenting problem. In hundreds of books and articles this problem has been painstakingly diagnosed, critiqued, and named: overparenting, hyperparenting, helicopter-parenting, and my personal favorite, the kindergarchy. One writer defines the problem as “simply paying more attention to the upbringing of children than can possibly be good for them.” Another, Judith Warner, calls it the “culture of total motherhood.” (In fact, she realized this was a problem after returning from France.) Nobody seems to like the relentless, unhappy pace of American parenting, least of all parents themselves.

After reading this, I considered my behavior in the past week. Any moment not spent holding Genny, changing Genny, feeding Genny, or rocking Genny was spent staring at the glowing screen of my iPhone, wearing out my thumb as I frantically scanned blog after blog, book after book, professional after professional to find an answer to WHY MY BABY WON'T SLEEP! I closely identified with the above described problem of simply worrying about parenting too much. Feelings of inadequacy brought up each time I read an article titled "10 Things You Should be Doing with Your Child", worry when she ate more at one feeding than the last, anxiety about talking to other moms about little things just in case it isn't "normal". 

It's true that it takes a village. We are not intended to do this alone. Because we have been placed in these roles, we are indeed to have confidence in our parenting, but not confidence in ourselves alone. This confidence is found in Christ and the promise He gave to us that He will always be with us and will never forsake us.

To all you self-doubting mamas, here is a passage for you:

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you?

 You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. 

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 

Such confidence we have through Christ before God. 

Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. H

e has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

2 Corinthians 3:1-6

Being a mom is hard. No matter where you are, who you are, it's hard. But the Lord chose each one of us to be the mommies and daddies to our kiddos, and we cannot doubt His sovereignty. So next time you see that book on parenting, remember before you pick it up that you have confidence in Christ to be the best parent you can be.

Perfect Love

My goodness, how life can change in the blink of an eye.

It seems that it was just a couple months ago that I was weeping over my heart being broken by a silly boy who I had crushed on for about three years. I can still remember the day I met my friend, Jessy, but I can't exactly remember the first time I met her brother. Back then I never saw what was coming, but everything has been such a beautiful picture of how God's plan for our lives is so far superior to our own.

On May 2nd, my boyfriend of then ten months, asked me a very important question. 

The past year has been a whirlwind in which I have had to hold on tightly to God's word and His promises at all times. Like those old merry-go-rounds at the park where someone would spin you and you'd have to hang on for dear life, if I let go for just one moment and decide to lean on my own wisdom (apart from God's), the result would be a painful landing and a stabbing regret.

As much as this falling sucks, it is the most vivid example of how deeply we need a Savior. Before we even started dating, Ryan and I were strong Christians, but this relationship thing has shown us that we knew nothing! How humbling is that?? 

We make each other the most angry and the most happy; we are the cause of the most joy and the most pain for one another; we have to come togther but keep God as the center or else we have nothing to hold us together. Love is a kind of paradox that makes no sense unless you look at it through the eyes of Jesus.

There are times when being engaged is the scariest thing in the world. There is this other person for whom you will soon be responsible, to love, to care, to feed, to give shelter...

1 John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives our fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." This verse causes a lump to rise in my throat because it strikes so close to home.

It is very true that there is no fear in love, but it is also true that perfect love cannot derrive from anything I can create. Perfect love can only come from one place, as anything perfect ever can. The only way to find this perfect love is to go to your knees.

Ryan likes for us to pray together on our knees, and as strange as it was to me at first, I now see that it is engaging your entire body in a posture that asks for grace and mercy. A begging position. That is what we are, after all. Beggars.

"You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of the dust. You are making me new." Those words from the Gungor song are so true. The dust that is our lives is made new by the Lord when we ask Him for grace and forgiveness. 

It is only through this perfect love that Ryan and I can experience no fear in our relationship, and that is not by anything that he or I have done, but it has everything to do with how great a God we have!

We Need Each Other

28 September 2012

~

We need each other...

Ever ask yourself, "what makes me different from everybody else?" Why does God love me as an individual when there are so many more attractive, smart, hard-working people who surpass my own life's accomplishments before breakfast?

The answer may seem cliche, but it's because He made you special. There is nobody else on earth like you, possessing your gifts, acting upon your thoughts and emotions. Everything about you may appear unexciting on the outside, but to God, you are a masterpiece continuously displaying the wonderful work of His creation.

How do I know? Because in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul devotes a sizable portion to this specific topic of "spiritual gifts" and the functions we have as the body of Christ. God loves us, yes, but there is so much more to our lives than simply existing in His affections. We were given our individual personalities for a reason! The Lord never does anything just for the heck of it. As human beings, we are automatically samples of His majesty and mirror images of our Creator Himself, but as Christians we are also given responsibilities. When God was putting you together in heaven, He put inside a flawless recipe that would become your personality. That personality was specially given to you so that you would use it.

gauyo.tumblr.com

Wouldn't it have been easier for God to make everybody the same? That way we would all get along, and we would never be jealous of anybody else's abilities, right? Wrong. As distinct individuals, we all come together like puzzle pieces to create something bigger than us all: it's called Christ. Thinking of little, insignificant me as part of Jesus sounds more than a little absurd, but nevertheless, when Jesus hung dying on that cross, He broke down the wall between Himself and all of us so that when the Father looks at us, with all our sins and flaws, He sees Jesus.

Looking at 1 Corinthians 12, Paul tells us, "The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ." Think of any successful movement in history, the key element was an integrated group of people. We were born with a need for companionship for this very reason. This is why studies show that babies deprived of physical touch actually die from depression.

french-knot.tumblr.com

"For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body - whether Jews or Greeks, slave of free - and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." In one succinct sentence, Paul completely dismisses any discrimination between race or class in God's eyes. We were all transformed by the same Spirit so that we might be acceptable into the body, regardless of our record of wrongs. One of my favorite passages in Romans reads, "And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who lives in you." That power that miraculously raised Jesus from the dead over 3000 years ago? That power is living in you! That same Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1, it not only exists inside of you and me, it lives, it thrives, it keeps us going from day to day. It's not about who you have become in this life, it's what you were made to be a part of. The big picture.

thespiderawards.com

"Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body." That accursed force of nature: self-doubt. We are amazing beings, obtaining unlimited potential from the Creator of the universe, yet we refuse to believe it. There's always that voice in the back of our minds saying, "You're not good enough."

Quite frankly, that's your sin talking. It might be more convenient to blame it on Satan, but the Devil has more important things to do than whisper in your ear. Instead of coddling us, however, Paul basically says, "get over it". Just because I'm not content in my place doesn't excuse me from the responsibilities I have in Christ. I cannot say, "I don't like my place in my family, so I'll leave," and then expect to have shed my responsibilities to them by simply walking away. No matter where I go or what I do, my dad and mom will still be my parents, and my brother will still be my brother. Even in completely throwing away my duties as the daughter of the family, I would still be abandoning those duties every single day that I ignore them. It's the same way with Christ. Funny thing about us...we think that if we can't see something in front of us that it doesn't exist. Or at least we tell ourselves that.

favim.com

"If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?" We need each other's individual, hand-crafted functions/gifts. Trading in your God-given gift would deprive the whole puzzle a whole piece; it could never be complete; it could never be whole. Do not feel inferior or out of place because you have a gift different from somebody else's. It can be easy to fall prey to this envy when other people make their abilities look so easy, so attractive.

Hugging was my deal for a long time. Girls I knew would throw their arms around each other with abandon, and I would kind of step back and hope that I wasn't the next target. Still, deep down I wished I could be like those girls: able to radiate love with a single action. But that was their gift, not mine. And now I can see that that's OK.

travelingcabinet.blogspot.com

"But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body every one of them, just as He wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body." By definition, "body" is "a number of individuals regarded as a single entity." Each edge of a puzzle piece has either a flat side, a little arm or two that stick out, or an empty space that scoops into the piece's side. Where one piece lacks, another piece fits perfectly, filling that empty space and by so doing making both pieces even larger and more significant than before. When every piece fills and fits into its designed location, the puzzle is complete.

weheartit.com

Can you see where I'm going with this? I'm not the kind of person who can joyfully run up and hug anybody anywhere, but I do have the capacity for listening to others talk about the things they're going through. Perhaps those girls lack that ability so they display their affections in a very outward manner. Together, we complete one another. :)

God has put you right where He wants you. We all work together to be Christ to this world, completing one another where we might have short-comings. You cannot dismiss your brother or sister in Christ, for he/she is a crucial piece to the puzzle, a vital ingredient in the recipe that is our lives. Even the smallest most taken for granted function is irreplaceable, regardless of whether we realize it or not. As French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin so eloquently put it, "We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate each other."

weheartit.com