an heritage of the Lord

In a time and place when children are often considered extras, afterthoughts, burdens, challenges, complications, mistakes, or worse, I want to say, firmly and surely, that I know that families are divinely designed, and that children are truly an heritage of the Lord.

Not only are children our physical responsibilities, I believe them to be our spiritual and sacred responsibilities.  We have been endowed with this incredible honor and solemn duty to raise them as best we can.  Nothing else in life compares with the range and scope of parenthood.

But, also, the joy of it all.  Children are not just weights to be lugged, or nooses to be endured - I believe the greatest joys one can experience in the life are attached firmly to experiences we share with our children.

What an opportunity for growth it all is.  What an opportunity for elevation.


I'm blessed to associate with mothers of many sorts.  I see choice women who choose to sacrifice themselves, their time, their desires, their hobbies, their comforts, and more deeply, their very bodies to give life to their children, to raise their children.  Every mother that has ever born a child, or every mother-heart who has loved or served a child have physically, emotionally, and spiritually given of themselves. That sacrifice can be sanctified for the betterment of that child.

What a beautiful gift it is, to partner with God in the most heavenly undertaking this earth has seen - the creation of new life.  


My children - raising them, learning to love them without condition, trying to guide them as best I can - nothing has brought me greater joy, and nothing has taught me quite so much, aside from marriage.  My heart has never been as broken as when I've had to sit by as my children suffer pain, both physical and emotional, only able to comfort in small and weak ways.  My heart has never been so full as when I've held our newborn babies, so fragile and so incredibly strong all at once, against my body and marveled at their incredible perfect imperfection.

In both of those moments, I am brought closer to my Father, reliant on Him for all that I cannot provide alone.  In those moments I've transcended who I am as me, as a human, as a woman, and it is in those moments I've become a Daughter of God and a Mother.  In those moments I've surpassed any power I have inside of myself, and become more - more whole, more complete, more capable, more broken, more desperate, more in need.