In college, I attended a Bible study hosted at a pastor’s home. One week, he said our homework was to make a list of our biggest questions about faith, and we’d discuss them and seek answers in Scripture. So the following week, a group of twenty-year-olds bombarded him with all our burning questions. Can you guess which topic was most common?

God doesn’t make mistakes—His plan is perfect, His execution unparalleled. When the fallen nature of the world and all of humanity comes into play, however, the exquisiteness of His perfection becomes clouded and subject to complication—but it is not hidden altogether. This is true across creation but perhaps most poignantly in the realm of the parent-child relationship.

It was a month or so after our second child was born, and my almost two-year-old decided he wanted to join the rest of the family and stop sleeping too. Fighting bedtime, skipping his nap, waking up at night, you name it. We were all feeling cranky and out of sorts.

I’ve never been a person who really relied on or noticed patterns in my life. I never struggled with feeling too scheduled or the opposite feeling of overwhelmed with no structure. That is, until I became a parent. Our first daughter was born during our year of vicarage, and so, when I left my in-person job for maternity leave, I also left that position permanently. Navigating being a new mom with no weekly or daily sense of rhythm (except the endless time-loop of feeding every two to three hours), I felt that I needed to mark time passing in a new way.

The vocation of parent is the ultimate paradox. It is at once viscerally sweet, compelling, and satisfying—and then also just not. Not at all any of those things. In fact, parenting is often the very absence of those things, especially when life goes sideways in any of the many ways that life can.

I have no idea what or who my seventeen-month-old daughter will dress up as for our upcoming Halloween events. These days, it’s a big responsibility to make sure that your family costumes are aligned with your values and that the character or theme you are portraying is moral and upstanding. Will we show up as the princess of the year or the cute cartoon character? What if, down the road, the princess is no longer thought of as a good role model for young girls? Or if the cartoon character teaches (whether purposefully or not) a lesson with which I disagree?

“Don’t you see how hard I’m working?”

“I feel like my work goes unappreciated.”

“It seems like no matter what I do, it’s never enough. There’s always one more thing.”

Before having kids, my husband and I believed that family dinners would come naturally. Neither of our parents seemed to have much trouble making this happen, so we thought we wouldn’t either. Veteran parents might laugh at us for being so naive, but it hadn’t been difficult for us to eat dinner together before. Boy, did our baby girl change things.

Having my daughter last spring has definitely changed my walk with Christ. Busy days come with sleepless nights and quiet moments are often broken with cute coos and not-as-cute cries (though I do think her cries can be cute). It extends to my experiences at church. No longer is the Sunday sermon a time where I get to sit and soak up the nuances and meanings in God’s Word. Now it’s a time of wrangling, toy-picking-up, and diaper changes. I expected and longed for these days.

As a new mother, I’ve been struggling to figure out a spiritual routine for my daughter and our family. We say prayers at bedtime and read some books that are Christ-focused, but sometimes I feel lost when I think about teaching her about Jesus as she continues to grow.