This week in light of Thanksgiving I am sharing a few of my favorite posts. Praying joy your way. Thank you for stopping by Smiles of Grace today. Wow, I am honored you’re here…

Life is this startling blend of beautiful and hard, joy mingled with sorrow, tempted to despair but daring to rejoice anyway. Seasons change, barren fields turn green…joys & sorrows intermingle swelling hearts mostly with thankfulness at how God can work anything…all things…together for good for those who love Him. It’s a miracle to be sure. There are days you feel like you might burst into bubbles, happiness exploding. There are days you feel like you are a bubble that just got popped (smile), the pressure of so many hard days pressing you into greater degrees of glory…into a clearer views of God. And there are mothers who led us so much of the way, so much of the trial-ladled path. 

They did it imperfectly just the way we do. They did it with more grace than we realized, with more love than we knew. Some of them married to men who loved them some wed to men who did not. Some of them living lives of relative ease and some of them living in relative poverty. Some of them saying mostly right things, modeling a beautiful blameless life, all of them struggling hard against their own determined flesh and the lot given them that seemed too hard. Either way, we love them with all our hearts.

The way a mother’s heart is knit eternally to her child is a thing you can mostly only experience. It’s a miracle. That moment in time when you actually understand what is to consider someone better than yourself, when you love someone else more than your own life. And really, really do. They call us, “Mom!” And we love it the first time it hits our ears…it tickles our hearts, wearing away some of our hardness. And we tire of it (smile), as they repeat the chorus again and again, “Mommy, mommy, mommy!!!” We long to hear it again when the walls of our home are emptied out of children who have gone on with life to pursue God’s call and make their own families. 

We long for them now, and we always will. There’s no way out of the glorious madness of mommyhood and the truth is we don’t want out ever. We pull those kids close and smell their hair. We’ve held them wet, sweaty, messy, every state in between.

We’re tired but rejoice that we can bend down on our knees and serve them…bathing them, kissing boo-boos, catching their eyes long enough to speak love and truth into their souls.

We are moms. We’ve forgotten if we’re much else, but somehow you find your life when you lose it. If motherhood is anything, it is losing your life and you do find it in the most surprising of ways. Rolling on the floor wrestling with your big, wild, sweaty boys. You find it singing songs over a curly haired doll all curled up with a classic grin stretched a mile wide across her perfect little face. You find your life in the middle of the night feeding a little baby…you didn’t know you could live with such little sleep, did you (smile)?

Jesus is right life is always found when we don’t try to keep it for ourselves and to ourselves…when we give to His will and purposes, we find life! We find that He is there, in every hard thing we face, in every beautiful thing we see…Jesus always with us.

All this makes me think of my mother, with the uncommon, lovely name of Delphine. A harder life lived I have rarely seen and greater joy and gratitude I have NEVER seen. She has lived JOY. She exudes it. Trials have pressed hard but her resolve to praise God pressed harder. Our family those years ago ached for Christ, and mom held on to hope that things would change. Believing her children would grow and things would be better for them. Maybe a white person would wave at them before they reached the age of 20 as was the case for her…maybe they would get a stellar education outside of the gates of impoverished Mississippi…maybe the course of history would change with her daughter and strong faith in Jesus would carry us on…and the grace? Things did change. But she did not as much, she only deepened in joy and gratitude. I didn’t learn the thankful life from Ann Voskamp’s beautiful book One Thousand Gifts  (which you ought to read), I learned the thankful life from my very own momma. To me, that’s the most beautiful thing, because I saw it behind closed doors, in times harder than you could possibly fathom. I saw it up close and it changed me. Mother’s can do that you know.

They can live lives behind closed doors so exemplary that they impress upon their children biblical truth and how to live that truth so much that it will change a child’s life forever.

I aim to live like that.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, my friend, you are the honored one, a Mom. Not all children belong to us by flesh and blood, but some belong to us by faith in Christ….raise up children, women! Raise them up.