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I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine, when she dropped a bombshell on me, “You know you are going to have teenagers for the next 14 years.”

SAY WHAT?!?

“Hold on,” I told her while frantically doing the math in my head. She was right. My youngest is five and the rest of them are spaced just perfectly to keep me in teenagers for a long time. I have already had teenagers for 6 years and I am adding another one in a couple weeks when my daughter turns 13.

Trying to wrap my head around this fact, I then realized that with 8 kids I will have a collective total of 56 YEARS of parenting teenagers! I am going to be navigating turbulent, hormonal, waters for a very long time.

I feel tired.

Up until my, (now former friend 😉 ) pointed this out to me, I thought I had done really well to survive the toddler years and to get all the kids mostly potty-trained! However, I just finished driver’s education with my 16 year-old and he successfully got his license, now my third born turns 15 1/2 September 12, so I can do it all over again! I don’t know how, but somehow this teenage thing had escaped my notice.

I am blessed to have pretty good kids though, and so far they seem to be on the right track. It is tricky to stay “Mom,” but also move into a more advisory role and let them stumble here and there. I try to remind them that they are actually young adults, and that this is a great time to learn about getting along in a big world while they still have a safety net under them.

As for me, well, I have to remind myself daily, sometimes minute by minute, that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” even raise teenagers for another 14 years!

P.S. For all my friends that might want to tell me about what comes after teenagers, no thank you! Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

A verse for the teenagers in your life: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith, and in purity.” I Timothy 4:12

A verse for the mothers of teenagers: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

For some reason at bedtime my living room turns into a triage unit similar to an Emergency Room. All of a sudden every child has a wound or an ailment. I, in turn, become a triage nurse inspecting, diagnosing and dispensing the appropriate cure. “Tummy” medicine, “leg” medicine, and bandaids stay at the ready for bedtime.

I have no idea why these things suddenly bother them as soon as their heads hit their pillows. Maybe that is when they finally slow down enough to become aware of their bodies, or maybe it is a last ditch effort to avoid going to sleep! Whatever the reasons, it does become rather irritating to have them continually parade back through after they are supposed to be in bed.

I really could learn something from my kids in this though. Most of the time I don’t bring my little hurts to God. I try to tough it out, or figure it out on my own. I don’t know why I don’t think He cares about my nicks and cuts, but it seems like I have to be gushing from a main artery before I’ll drag myself to Him and ask for help.

God loves to hear from us all the time. I am so thankful that He is much more patient with me than I tend to be with my children at 8:00 in the evening. He doesn’t care what time it is, and He never has anything more important going on. He is ready and willing to listen to all our pains, no matter how small. In fact, maybe if I brought my hurts to Him when they were still little they wouldn’t grow into large hurts.

I am going to begin doing this before I go to bed. Instead of laying down and allowing all the events of the day to swirl through my head, I am going to take them to Jesus and let Him put some healing balm on them. Will you join me in this? I pray that as we learn to lay our pain at Jesus’ feet, He will increase our peace, and out of that will flow patience and grace for others and their hurts.

“Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.”  I Peter 5:7

“On my bed I remember you; I think of you through the watches of the night.  Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings.  My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”  Psalm 63:6-8

We are told frequently that if we are struggling or in a hard place, that helping others can make ourselves feel better. This is very true in my experience. Just sending a little encouraging text or doing something nice for someone can lift my spirits. However, I never thought very much how the other person might have felt after my gesture of kindness! Not that my efforts were purely selfish, I just vaguely hoped that they made some sort of difference.

Well, the other day I got to be on the receiving end of a little act of kindness. I had been having a hard day, not necessarily a bad day, just the kind of hard day we all seem to be experiencing lately. My neighbor texted me that she had been thinking of me, would like to get together later in the week, (socially distanced of course!) and that she had bought me a product for my hair that I might like. This cheered me up so much, that I was actually surprised.

It also opened my eyes and got me thinking about the true impact of a simple act of kindness. Our world is DESPERATE right now for kindness and healing. We can feel overwhelmed by the needs surrounding us or the mounting difficulties and problems we are facing. However, there are around 330 million of us in this country. If we each just do one small act of kindness every day, that is 330 million smiles, encouraging texts or bottles of hair-product-gifts each day! What if we did 2 or 3 or 4? I believe we could change our world.

As things continue to change and new challenges arise, we need to pull together, especially those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus. In the book of Matthew in the Bible Jesus said, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father…for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink…Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give you something to drink?’…The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for Me.'”

So according to that passage, we are not even doing these kind things for each other, but for Jesus! That puts an even bigger perspective on this. Will you join me? Will you help me change the world with kindness?

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8

Do you ever feel like hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign around your neck?  I know I do.  I would like a break from the children’s minor emergencies, unexpected events that come up in life, people doing things that are irritating or hurtful.  In short, I don’t want life to disturb me!  I would rather cruise along, serene, in a clean-hotel-room-with-fluffy-pillows kind of existence.  I guess after a while it might get boring, but it would be nice to try for a few days.

I understand this is not reality, and definitely not what we are called to as followers of Christ, because I know this is not how Jesus lived.  In fact, it almost seems as though He had a “Disturb Me” sign around His neck.  The difference is in how Jesus reacted to what I view as disturbances to His ministry.  He sure didn’t react like I do!  He was able to look beyond the inconvenience to Himself and really see the person and their need right in front of Him.  This is so hard for us to do sometimes, especially with children.  After all, we have a to-do list and most of the items on it are things we need to do for them.  My kids don’t seem to understand though, and feel that their questions are more important than what I think I am supposed to be doing today.

My desire is to be more like Jesus when the unexpected happens, when I get that unexpected phone call, when a child suddenly throws up all over the floor, or when a friend calls and asks if I could do just a small favor for them.  I pray that this week we can have patience to approach the interruptions in our days with grace and peace, looking at them not so much as disturbances, but as opportunities to love others like Jesus did.

“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He had compassion for them because they were troubled and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  Matthew 9:36

I thought when I moved to the country I wouldn’t have to worry too much about vandalism.  Was I ever wrong!  I have experienced broken windows, graffiti, and trash dumped all over my property.  I would expect that if I still lived in the city, but I figured out the reason fairly quickly.

See, I brought the vandals with me.  My children can destroy something so fast it makes my head spin.  To date they have broken 4 windows, 3 doors, put several dents in walls and drawn on almost every surface in my home.  They are unusually adept at spreading trash to every corner of the property.

On my good-Mommy days I can chalk it up to boisterous creativity.  On my bad-Mommy days I see it as a concerted effort to reduce my home to a pile of rubble and leave me sobbing in the middle.  (Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea.)

I’m not sure if this is something only my children excel at or if it is common to all small people, but if you too live with small time vandals, know that you have my utmost sympathies.  I do have hope that one day they will grow out of this, learn how to take care of their things, and become responsible adults. 

There are a lot of verses in the Bible encouraging us in this adventure of child-rearing.  One of my favorites that I try to remember on hard days is Psalm 126:5-6.  It says, “Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.  He who goes out weeping, carrying seeds to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.”  It makes me think of all the things we try to instill in our children, and how when they are grown all those things will hopefully come to fruition in God’s timing.

In the mean time, hang in there dear sisters!  Know that you are not alone.  I really do believe that God knows right where we are and gives us grace to continue on, even on the hardest days.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” II Corinthians 12:9

I have to admit, there are times when I feel like the only crazy mom out there.  Even just writing that, a little voice in my head says, “Yeah you are!”  I’m the only one who yells at their kids, tells them to do a chore instead of giving them a hug, and loses her mind over an unwashed counter.  I know all the other moms are happily doing craft projects with their kids and reading them books.  They don’t ever feel like running away, and they enjoy every minute with their children.

When I start feeling this way, it is usually because it has been too long since I talked to another mother.  One of the things that happens though, is that the longer I am isolated from my friends the harder it becomes to reach out to anyone, and the easier it is to feel crazy.  When I get a chance to have a conversation with someone else who has either gone before me in the kid-raising journey, or is alongside me, I realize it is not just me.  This child rearing thing is HARD, and we need each other!

We moms put ourselves last.  We are too busy to get together for coffee, or a movie, or sometimes just a phone conversation.  My family has a lot going on and even when I have the best intention of making time for being with friends, things can come up.  We need to fight for that time though, and try to see it as helping our families in the long run.  If we can get together and share life: encourage each other through the tough times, pass a tissue when it’s really hard, laugh together about our toddlers, and celebrate when something goes right, we will be saner and stronger for our families.

I also need to be honest when a friend asks me how I’m doing.  It is easy to just say,”fine!” with a happy face mask pasted on my face, but if it is a real friend truly caring about me I need to answer with the truth.  More often than not when I give a real answer it opens up an honest conversation about life and we end up encouraging each other.

The bottom line is, we need each other.  And if it turns out we are all crazy, at least we can be crazy together!

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: if one falls down, his friend can help him up.  Ecclesiastes 4:12