Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from Help! I’m Ruining My Kids by Abbey Wedgeworth.
*
Can we skip to the good part?”1
These lyrics from the band AJR have lived rent-free in my brain since the social media trend in which the snap of a finger instantly transformed a muddy yard to a newly sodded one, a cluttered pantry to a color-coded organizational masterpiece, or unstyled hair into an updo.
Who doesn’t love a good before-and-after? What resonates about this trend is the desire to skip the part between before and after. We love a good transformation, but we hate the process of being transformed.
It’s not all that surprising, really. Our culture doesn’t exactly give us a ton of practice with patience, as AI answers our questions in seconds and Amazon Prime delivers anything we could possibly need in just two days. We’re not accustomed to waiting. Why should we be surprised when that same impatience shows up in our approach to personal change in motherhood?
But that impatience isn’t just about us; it shows up because we love our kids. We want to snap our fingers and be different so that we can stop negatively affecting them. We want to show up to the task of motherhood as a psychologically healthy, emotionally available, and spiritually mature mom. And we want it now. Here’s the thing, though:
Scripture — and nature, for that matter — would suggest that God loves the transformation process.
Apparently, it’s His favorite way to work. We see this in the way He created the world. He didn’t snap his finger to turn “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2 ESV) into lush and fully populated. Sure, He spoke the world into being, but He did it over the span of six days, and even then, it was a world at the beginning of what it would become — a world in process.
God welcomed Adam and Eve to participate in this process, asking them to help grow the garden and to fill it with people through childbirth. We see God’s preference for process in the way that redemptive history unfolds, including His leading the Israelites in the desert for forty years instead of simply teleporting them to the promised land. We see it in His continued created order in nature. A seed falls to the ground, it germinates, it pokes up through the dirt, and slowly it grows until it buds and f lowers. Even Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature (Luke 2:52). God works in process. Creation and redemptive history reveal that it’s His preferred method of operation. The same is true in the sanctification of His people. Should we expect anything different for the way that he matures moms?
- Understanding the stages of God’s change process helps us to stop striving for perfection in parenting.
Justification — being declared righteous because of the finished work of Jesus — frees us from the need to be seen as perfect, to measure up, or to use motherhood to gain approval. Jesus was perfect for us, and we are fully accepted in Him. Sanctification — the ongoing work of the Spirit through which we are made more like Christ — helps us to embrace change as a process, seeing ourselves humbly and graciously as works in progress instead of resenting our lack of progress. And glorification — the future hope we have of being free from sin — frees us from the expectation that perfection is even possible on this side of Heaven, helping us run with endurance, knowing with confident hope that one day we will be perfected.
Letting Go of Perfection
Recently, I was telling someone about the effect that researching for and writing this book have had on my life. Being saturated in this content has made such a difference in my parenting. “I don’t even remember the last time I yelled at my kids!” I told them. Welp, I couldn’t say that the next day. And I didn’t just yell at them; I turned from yelling at them and sort of just yelled into the middle of the room, like a crazy person screaming into a pillow, except there was no pillow.
When I stopped yelling (both at them and into the middle of the room), got my kids and myself in the car, and finally backed out of the driveway (of course we were rushing to get somewhere #onbrand), the feeling I had reminded me of the board game Can’t Stop, where you make so much progress only to lose it all in one roll. Negative self-¬thoughts poured in. Truly, I thought I was past this struggle and on to another one, a more manageable one, a less obvious one, a less traumatizing one. Nope. As it turns out, I’m still a mom who yells.
When was the last time you felt like the house of cards fell? When was the last time your sin reared its ugly head, and the exposure led you to lament your lack of progress? How did you respond to that feeling of failure?
In his article “Perfectionism Will Only Make You Miserable,” professor of practical theology Jeremy Pierre defines perfectionism as “the tendency to expect flawless performance from self and others, resulting in frustration at any sign of failure.”2 He says that a perfectionist is unwilling to accept two truths that God says about all people: one, that we’re all limited as human beings and, two, that we are all fallen sinners. “In the end,” he writes, “perfectionism is the ongoing attempt to need Jesus less.”3 That hits hard for me.
I often find that I want Jesus to fix me more than I want Jesus Himself. I don’t want to need Him. But as we’ve established, the goal of the Christian life, and therefore your life as a Christian mom, is dependence.
Perfect parenting is the enemy of faithful (or faith-filled) parenting because when we are trying to need God less, we cannot possibly depend on Him more.
And depending on Him is the only way we can be the moms He created us to be.
Letting Go of the Need to Perform or Prove Yourself in Motherhood
I am always hyperaware of my kids’ behavior when we’re at family gatherings. There is no shortage of opinions, glances, and cryptic comments. I want my kids to act a certain way, and I want to respond to them a certain way, so that I’ll be perceived as a good mom. But the irony is, I end up being a terrible version of me when I am focused on how people perceive me. The poor behavior of my kids feels like a nuclear threat, and my poor reaction is almost guaranteed by how high the stakes feel. I imagine their thoughts: “Look at her, she’s giving parenting advice to people on the internet, and she can’t even put her kids to bed without a major meltdown.”
But I don’t feel this way just around family; I also crave the approval of women in my church and even my peers. Sometimes I even fear the opinions of the imagined adult versions of my children, not wanting them to blame or resent me.
Just think about your last public interaction with your kid, maybe at the grocery store or at church. Do you know the feeling of being more upset with someone witnessing a negative interaction than about how that interaction affected your child? The problem here is that a fear of others’ opinions leads us to be more concerned with looking like a bad mom than with what is going on in our hearts — which, ironically, leads us to act in a way that is wrong.
True, lasting, biblical change requires that we focus not on the approval we desire from others but on the approval we already have from our loving heavenly Father. It requires that we align our concern with His rather than being ruled by the opinions of people.
“You are a good mom.” I long to hear these words, don’t you? The benediction that you and I crave is spoken over us at salvation because the perfect life of Christ and His atoning work are applied to us. “Good” is not an accolade you have to work for; it’s a verdict you’ve received. And that verdict is delivered by the judge of all the earth, who is indeed the most qualified to judge, the One whose opinion matters more than any other opinion.
Letting Go of the Need to Measure Up
Some time ago, my literary agent sent me a little book called There Are Moms Way Worse Than You: Irrefutable Proof That You Are Indeed a Fantastic Parent.4 The book, which is hilarious and admittedly relieving, details the bizarre habits of animal mothers to provide comfort for moms who feel like failures. For example, don’t feel bad about having a dirty house; beetles raise their kids in decomposing animals.
Though we often employ comparison to try to make ourselves feel better, it ultimately leads to discouragement. In my less shiny moments, I have often soothed myself with the knowledge that I’m doing a lot better than the average mom. But sometimes, in my not-so-great moments, I think about the moms who look like they have it all together. Comparison and envy pop up all over Scripture, and every time, they distract people from the purpose of God for their lives and move them to act out of a sinful desire. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery, David kills Uriah, Sarai abuses Hagar, Rachel resents Leah and fails to love Jacob well. If we aren’t careful, looking around instead of up can cause us to worship and pursue an idealized version of motherhood instead of Jesus Himself.
But the ideal version of motherhood is the most Christlike version of you.
Pay attention to when you feel envy, pride, or discouragement.
If you are filled with envy, ask God to help you to be the most Christlike version of you, with your personality, for your kids, and in your particular circumstances. If you feel pride, intercede for the mom who is struggling. In humility, you can thank God for His work in your life, acknowledging that any good comes from Jesus. If you feel discouraged, let that lead you to seek comfort from God’s Word.
It could be that the discouragement you feel is actually godly sorrow over sinful failure. If God is using the Christlike example of another mom to convict you of sin, confess according to His Word, receive the relief of His pardon, and ask not to be more like her but to be more like Christ.
When we compare ourselves to others to feel “good enough,” we lose sight of our unique capacity, weaknesses, and calling. When we make another mom the standard for what it means to be a “good mom,” we take our eyes off Jesus, who is not just a perfect example but a perfect Savior who provides the grace we need to grow and change.
Trusting Jesus to be our perfect Savior, the one who frees us from the pressure to perform and the need to be perfect, also takes that burden off our children. When we know that Jesus has given us His perfect record, we don’t have to treat our kids’ behavior as the test by which our character or efforts in motherhood will be graded.
1. “The Good Part,” track 2 on AJR, The Click, AJR Productions, 2021.
2. Jeremy Pierre, “Perfectionism Will Only Make You Miserable,” Southern Equip, August 20, 2021, https://equip.sbts.edu/article/perfectionism-will-only-make-you-miserable/.
3. Pierre, “Perfectionism Will Only Make You Miserable.”
4. Glenn Boozan, There Are Moms Way Worse Than You: Irrefutable Proof That You Are Indeed a Fantastic Parent, illustrated by Priscilla Witte (Workman Publishing, 2022).
Excerpted with permission from Help! I’m Ruining My Kids by Abbey Wedgeworth, copyright Abbey Wedgeworth.
* * *
Your Turn
Let’s not let perfectionism keep us from enjoying the process of sanctification with Jesus (the part we so want to skip!) in our parenting and in our lives. You measure up. Trust the Savior! ~ Devotionals Daily