Scripture guides us, teaches us about salvation, and communicates the kingdom of God to us. In daily family life, we ought to ever turn to the Word and to works that keep the Word as their focal point to cultivate our faith. 

Psalm 119:15–16 states, “I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.” When I read this verse, I cannot help but feel just slightly guilty. You see, I definitely do not know Scripture as well as I would like. I feel like I have a pretty good excuse, I wasn’t raised with the Bible in my household. But at the end of the day, it’s an excuse. Psalm 119 not only reminds me of my desire to remember God’s Word but that I desire for my children to have the Word stored up in their hearts (see Psalm 119:11). 

My wedding anniversary is coming up. Every year midsummer, I think about the vows we made and how we continue to live out those vows. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I think about how we fall short on that.

“Daddy! Daaaaaaaaaaaa-deeee! Daaaaaaaa-daaaaa! Dada! DADA!” My two-year-old cries out in the middle of the night. We can hear her over our audio monitor getting more frantic. She is unsure if this will be the time she’s abandoned or if one or both of her parents are on the way. My husband and I both know she won’t go back to sleep unless one of us enters her room, lets her know we heard her, and gives her comfort. My husband gets up to make sure she gets back to a good night of sleep.

May isn’t just the month of Mother’s Day; it is also Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. Before I became a mother, I thought that the conversation surrounding maternal mental health simply wasn’t all that different from everyday normal mental health conversations. I’m not sure there was any way to prepare me for the shift that would take place immediately after giving birth. I’ve started to tell others that I see God’s faithfulness so clearly in labor, delivery, and postpartum—but what I don’t often say is exactly why.

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.