Midnight Lullabies

YOUR INVITATION

I sat in a heap on my bed, my hair in a messy bun; the baby was playing down on the floor. There was laundry scattered all over the room, some of it clean, some of it dirty. But if I’m being really honest, I was too over it to care.

I was six months into motherhood and felt like I was sinking beneath the weight of it all and wondering where God was in the middle of it. The high of the newborn stage had worn off and the exhaustion of mom life had set in. The reality that I wasn’t who I once was had hit me like a ton of bricks, and I realized that I couldn’t just keep trying to tread these uncharted waters any longer.

Not only was I unable to contend with the housework, but I couldn’t keep up with the emotions that were overpowering my mind, either. And oh, I had so many emotions: feelings that felt so big and so raw, feelings that I was defenseless against. And the enemy knew it.

I had tried to work through them on my own, and for a while I really believed I was beginning to make some progress. But just when I thought I was starting to see the fog lift, all of the other emotions would come tumbling down around me like a chain reaction. It made it difficult for me to do even the simplest of things, let alone enjoy doing them. Whether it was the middle of the day or the middle of the night, my emotions ruled my life and affected everything in it.

I was stuck in an emotional identity crisis of motherhood with absolutely no idea of how I was going to get out.

I think the thing that can be so confusing about our emotions is that they are instantaneous; our minds can go from zero to one hundred in a second. And if the emotion is strong enough for long enough, that feeling becomes our source of truth, and we get trapped into believing the lies that our emotions make us feel. Oftentimes, this feeling of being trapped leads us to making decisions and believing things about ourselves and God that we wouldn’t think to be true otherwise. And when we act on these feelings in a moment of heightened emotion, there are always repercussions, and it almost always ends up with my peace disappearing and my motherhood stolen.

Here’s the thing about emotions, friend. My emotions are indicators, not dictators. My emotions are not my source of truth.

But God is. And in a world that tells us to “follow your heart” and “do what feels good,” we must stand up to the lies that our emotions are going to try to tell us and look to what is completely stable instead. And that’s God’s Word.

God created us to experience emotions. He even allows us to feel the bad ones. But that doesn’t mean he wants us to stay stuck in them. And choosing to remain in bondage to these emotions will only leave you and me with an unsettled heart and a constant yearning for peace that seems so very far out of our reach. And it’s so tiring to keep reaching for something that seems so far away, isn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to know how to step back into that place of peace in motherhood. It’s overwhelming to think what I need to do first to get to a mindset where my vision is clear and my emotions aren’t owning me. It’s hard to act when you feel so stuck.

But together, this month, we are going to break through the darkness of our emotions and step back into the light of God’s peace. It isn’t going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to hurt. But what we are going to find is that our emotions in light of the love of God and who he says we are changes everything. And when you are given the opportunity to take that step back into his peace, back into the design for who he created for you to be as a mom, you can take that step in confidence, trusting that God is leading you back where he longs for you to be. In his perfect peace.

Do you find yourself sitting on your bed like I was that day, friend? Are you tired of being stuck in the chaos of your emotions? Are ready to break free of the chains enslaving you? What if you stood up against the lies of the enemy and refused to be a slave to them any longer, but became the woman God designed you to be and have your motherhood redeemed? Are you ready to take a stand?

A stand against:

The loneliness.

The lack of confidence.

The insecurity.

The anger.

The sadness.

The doubt.

The anxiety.

The exhaustion.

The envy.

The things that keep you up at night that you can’t stand to hang on to a moment longer.

It is time to reclaim our emotions, hand them back over to the One who created us to experience them, and renew our minds in the freedom of Christ. Are you ready?

You keep him in perfect peace

whose mind is stayed on you,

because he trusts in you.

Trust in the LORD forever,

for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.

ISAIAH 26:3–4

Day 1

THE STAND TO BECOME MORE AND THE LIE OF THE BIG-GIRL PANTIES

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

GALATIANS 5:1

They laid that baby on my chest, and everything changed. Half of my husband, half of me, and a part of my heart that I never knew was there was instantly overflowing with love.

Fierce, unwavering, terrifying love.

In an instant, the love of this babe changed my heart. And in those moments, everything was perfect, and I found myself wondering how I ever lived a day of my life without her. In those moments, everything was just as they told me it would be.

But nobody told me just how fast it could all change or how broken I could become.

When I was pregnant with our first daughter, I remember being given more than enough advice from other mamas. Because it’s the duty of those of us who have gone before to pass the gift of this knowledge on, right? Women would sit me down at church and take me by the hands, telling me how happy this next chapter of my life was going to be. Ladies sat around at my baby shower as we oohed and ahhed over teeny-tiny baby clothes and told me to savor every moment of their littleness. Even the random woman at the grocery store felt it her job to tell me about the overwhelmingly beautiful experience that I was about to partake in.

But nobody told me.

Nobody told me that the emotions of motherhood could make me become completely undone. Nobody told me in the midst of the happiest days of my life and in the songs of the midnight lullabies I would sing in my daughter’s nursery that I would find myself on my knees, trapped in the fury of my emotions and wondering who I had become and where the woman I once was had gone. Everyone had failed to mention that Satan was on the prowl to steal my motherhood and that he would start with the rawest emotions of my heart to do it.

One of the costliest pieces of advice that I was given by these well-meaning women was that of the big-girl panties. They talked about them like they were a prize to be worn, a trophy of strength and resilience. It’s based on the belief that mothers must not give in to the frailty of their own hearts; when one pulls up the big-girl panties, they simultaneously push down all of the emotions. For most, it is the battle cry of motherhood. But the big-girl panties came at a price, one that I, like most women, was willing to pay. And that’s the price of vulnerability. Not just with everyone else, but with ourselves and our unwillingness to let God into the sacred space of it, either.

This pushing down of our emotions, this compartmentalization of our very souls, is one of the greatest lies of the enemy we believe. It causes us to put our feelings into glass cases of emotion and push them as far away as we can, out of sight and out of mind. We think that if we can just pull our big-girl panties up far enough and safely tuck our emotions into the farthest corners of our hearts that we won’t have to deal with the insecurity we feel and the doubt that consumes our souls. So what do we do? We go through our motherhood, treading cautiously inside our own hearts and carefully tiptoeing around these glass cases, knowing just how delicate they are.

But tiptoeing means that we can never run free. Tiptoeing means that we aren’t living in peace. All because we choose to trust our emotions rather than the One who created us to feel them. In our tiptoeing, we’re naïve enough to think that if we keep these glass cases of emotion shoved down long enough and are careful enough around them, they’re never going to shatter. But when we put our emotions into those glass cases, they begin to silently multiply. And sooner or later, they’re going to run out of room and shatter. And when those cases shatter, so will your precious heart. So why not be the one to choose to take the cases out, open them up, and let the Holy Spirit unpack them? We can choose, friend. We can make the choice and then let God make the change.

In your life, there is always going to be one person holding you back from the freedom of your emotions. There is always going to be one person keeping you from experiencing motherhood the way you were designed to. There is always going to be one person who doesn’t believe that you have what it takes to become who you were destined to be.

And it’s you. You have to be the one to take the stand and say, “No more!” to the enemy. You have to be the one who believes that what God says about you is true. And you have to be the one who looks at her emotions through the lens of Jesus and the freedom of the gospel.

It’s time to take a stand to become more and be released from the bondage of our emotions. And it starts today.

The thing that Satan longs to steal the most from us is our identity in Christ. But Scripture tells us that Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). God longs for us to experience life to the fullest in him, including in motherhood. But the enemy comes into our minds like a thief, and the thing he is looking to steal is our peace. And isn’t that what we long for most?

Today we are going to speak peace over our emotions and declare victory over the enemy. I want you to take the emotion you feel most debilitated by today—anger, loneliness, loss of identity, insecurity, defeat, sadness—and write it on a piece of paper. Holding it in your hands, speak the prayer below to God, believing that he is capable of freeing you from this emotion that has a hold on your heart. When you are done praying, crumple your piece of paper up and be rid of it. Choose the rest of this day to continue to speak peace over your feelings, over that particular emotion, and surrender them to the Lord.

Day 2

WHEN THE ENEMY TELLS YOU THAT YOU’RE NOT ENOUGH

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

1 PETER 2:9

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the day that we brought our oldest daughter home from the hospital. I was a mess. Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life? I wanted it to be so badly, but it just wasn’t. I was physically exhausted. Mentally drained. Emotionally done. Hormonally raging.

And I was so scared.

I remember sitting on our couch, and once the tears started falling, they didn’t stop. As a first-time parent, I could hear the lies making their way toward the front of my mind. They were the lies of the enemy, and they shrouded me in a darkness like I had never known before.

“Your baby can’t breastfeed. You are a failure.”

“Your baby is losing weight. Your body is failing you.”

“Will you be able to love her enough?”

“Your baby won’t stop crying. You must be doing something wrong.”

“You. Are. Not. Enough.”

Oh, how I wish that I could go back in time and tell that new mama on the couch just how much she was worth, how much she was created to be this baby’s mom. I wish I could go back and tell her that she was more than enough because God had chosen her for something great, something so much greater than herself.

She was created to be a mama empowered with the strength of Christ, proclaiming his name in the trenches of motherhood.

Now three babies later, I’ve seen most of it—exclusively pumping, supplementing, exclusively breastfeeding, vaginal births, a C-section, chubby babies, skinny babies, babies with colic, and a baby who doesn’t make a peep… Each baby has been so different. But with each one, something remained the same.

I was enough for them, and it was because God was more than enough for me. And every time I chose to shout his name into the fear of the darkness of motherhood, the more empowered I became—even in the seasons that seemed the most hopeless. When my bones were the most dry and my voice shaky and parched, that first cry out to him in the night was always the beginning of his greatness manifested in my motherhood and his undeniable peace reigning in my life.

So, wherever you are today, mama, whether you are standing firm in your trenches or if you have fallen flat on your face, crying out for mercy from the Father… you were chosen for this. And it’s not because of anything you have done, but because of the matchless grace of a God who sustains you.

No matter how dark the night may seem.

Today is your chance to take a step out of the darkness and into his marvelous light, sweet friend. God has not given you a spirit of timidity, but one of power, and of love, and of self-discipline (2 Tim. 1:7). So today is your day to declare that you belong to him and that he is great! I want you to stand up where you are right now and say these words out loud:

I am chosen by God—I am his and he is mine. I am a woman empowered by the Spirit of the Living God. The darkness of motherhood has no hold on me. Today I walk in his light!

Really, stand up and proclaim these words with your mouth and shout them in your heart. Speak them in your kitchen and your bathroom, in your baby’s nursery and in your toddler’s bedroom. Write them down on a card and recite them while you scrub the dishes in the sink tonight. When we proclaim the truth about who God says we are, there is a shift in the darkness. And shifting causes cracks. And one crack in the darkness may be all the space you need for that ray of hope to shine into your weary mama heart.

Day 3

WHEN YOU BRING A SACRED OFFERING

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.