Revive Our Hearts

Dannah Gresh: Calling all moms and those with moms to love. It's time to party. Mother's Day is here, and we think this is a day worth celebrating. I'm your host, Dannah Gresh. You're listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Let me start out with a little memory I have from Mother's Day. This was about 15 years ago. My daughter Lexi, I guess she was a little low on the budget for that year, and so she made me the world's most beautiful chocolate cake. Now, here's the thing about this chocolate cake. She decorated it using perfectly aligned little tiny chocolate chips, forming concentric circles all the way to the middle where there's a big strawberry on top. The time alone in which she took to put those chocolate chips in perfect order blessed my heart as a mom. So whether your budget's big or small, love on your mom. She's going to remember it.

Moms are servants. They make countless daily sacrifices, and sometimes they feel a little bit exhausted. If you're a mom, I know you're saying yes and amen right now. Now, we want to celebrate you today by inviting you to slow down, breathe deep, and soak up some much-needed grace from God's Word. First, we'll hear from a mom I love a whole lot. Her name is Aaron Davis, and she's no stranger to the Revive Our Hearts family. Today, Aaron is an editor at Moody Publishers and she's mom to four boys. But back when she only had two of those four little ones, she blogged here at Revive Our Hearts and she wrote a book called *Beyond Bathtime*, embracing motherhood as a sacred role. She's passionate about helping you see the mundane rhythms of mom life as ministry. Let's listen as she talks with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth about that.

Aaron Davis: And the vision that God gives us of the body in the word is of a unified body and of all the parts working together and all of them being important. And listen, if you're a mom, nobody is going to put you up on their missionary bulletin board. Nobody's going to write you a check every month. Nobody's going to ask you for a PowerPoint presentation or a monthly newsletter.

And so if you're a mom, you can start to feel like you're the least important member of the body and that nobody notices you and that you're not contributing to the greater functioning of what God is using your church to do. And that's I think because motherhood is made up of a lot of little things. We drive them around in our minivans, we wash their tiny clothes, we take them on little trips to school, little trips to soccer practice, little trips to church.

For moms with young children, I know we think in the smallest increments of time—two-minute timeouts and 30-second showers and five more minutes of sleep. And so all that littleness can reduce motherhood to make it feel like something small. And I think we often think of small things as insignificant things.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And yet you look in the scripture and you see that God chooses and uses so often things that are tiny.

Aaron Davis: There's so many examples of that in Scripture. And one of them that I found when writing this book that came to life to me in a new way that I just loved was the story of the little boy with the loaves and the fishes. And the story is that a boy comes to hear Jesus teach and he has the barley loaves and the fish and we know the disciples find him and Jesus multiplies them.

But can I make an assumption? A mom packed that lunch. I think it's very likely that a conversation went down where the little boy was getting ready to leave and the mom said, "Oh, wait, let me pack you a lunch. You won't be able to hear or learn on an empty stomach." And so if we trace that little lunch all the way through, that seemed like a little thing—mom packs the lunch, boy carries the lunch, disciples recognize the lunch, Jesus multiplies the lunch, and thousands of people are fed.

But it doesn't stop there. That story has been told and retold and retold as an example of what a powerful God that we serve, as an example of the fact that Jesus was divine. He was able to take this small thing and multiply and multiply and multiply it to the point that they had baskets left over.

Every time it gets traced back to that little lunch. So God's very much in the business of taking little things and multiplying them. I like to call it mom math. I'm not very good at the normal kind of math, but I like mom math—this idea that my small mom offerings, God's going to multiply them exponentially to do big things.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And you really have to exercise faith when you're in the middle of mothering and doing those little things because you can't see the exponential outcome of it when you're in the middle of it. Not to speak of being a parable of Himself, that he is Himself the bread of life, so it all points to him.

Aaron Davis: Right. And so that story has been told now, year after year after year to millions who it is an example of who Jesus is and what he can mean to our lives. And it all gets traced back to that little lunch. So God's very much in the business of taking little things and multiplying them.

Jesus gives us such a great example. Jesus loved to meet the physical needs of people before meeting the spiritual needs of people. And that's what you're doing with your little flock. And it gets redundant and it gets boring and it feels like a lot of little things. But you have to know that God's going to multiply those little things.

You loving those little ones well, day after day after day after day, gives you a foundation to speak life and truth about who God is to you, who he can be to them. A lot of young women now think, "I can't have kids. I want to have a ministry." Well, loving your children well is a ministry.

If we think back to that commissioning service, "I'm going to go reach unreached people groups in Africa," we would applaud, we would cheer, and rightfully so. But your children are an unreached people group. They come to earth without an understanding of God. They don't automatically know him as their savior. Someone has to teach them. Someone has to train them. They're your mission field. They're a little flock of people who doesn't know about Jesus unless you tell them. And so how can that be a small thing?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And you have to envision down the road what God will do with those seeds that are planted, with that lunch that is packed. I'm sitting here, Aaron, thinking of your mother, who I've not had the privilege of meeting, but just thinking there was a day when she was packing lunches and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and changing diapers and cleaning up messes and chauffeuring to soccer practice or whatever, maybe feeling very small about all of that.

But I'm wondering if she envisioned the day when her daughter, Aaron Davis, would be introducing her children to Christ and writing a book for moms and shaping the lives of her children. And it has to be so gratifying to your mom now to see the mom math that God has multiplied the investment of her life in the ways that you're serving him today.

Aaron Davis: This book is dedicated to her. And I say in that dedication that hers are the shoulders on which all of us rest. And that is so true. And my mom doesn't have any sort of grand ministry that the church would recognize as being something spectacular. But she raised three kids well. And many of those years she was single while doing it. And she always depended on Jesus for her strength. She always prayed for us.

And I was really moved when writing that dedication to think about how much credit for this book she deserves. But for every family it impacts, my mom deserves the credit for that. So for every mom and husband and little flock of children, my mom's little offerings of little things like just faithfully praying and packing lunches and speaking about Jesus and things that aren't glamorous—now the number of families and children and homes that's going to impact is I can't even count them all. So mom math has certainly been multiplied in her influence. And that's how it will be with all moms who decide to see motherhood as a ministry instead of focusing on the mundane parts of motherhood.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And your husband has been a good cheerleader as well. It's been fun to see Jason really take seriously and value the role of motherhood and be an encourager to you. And it seems like at some just really special moments he's come alongside and said, "I really value what you're doing," and I know that's picked you up at some difficult spots.

Aaron Davis: He is my greatest cheerleader and he's a great dad and he has taken it seriously from the beginning. He was trying to figure out how to swaddle the baby doll before we actually brought the baby home and all of those things. And it wasn't because he wanted to learn how to swaddle, it was because he's had an eternal perspective.

In fact, there was a day when I was feeling the mundaneness of motherhood. There was nothing exciting happening in my world. I think that day I'd probably washed laundry, dried laundry, and folded laundry, and that was probably the extent of what I'd done with my day. And I looked in my inbox and there was an email from my husband Jason along with a picture of our youngest son Noble. And Noble was just a little bit older than a baby and he was sitting in a canoe and smiling so cute.

And Jason wrote these words to go with it: "In case you were wondering why you work so hard, why you hit the ground running, and why each day is full of tasks that seem to never completely get done, here is a photo of why you do it. You do it to make his life better. You do it to show him what a life spent for Jesus looks like. You do it so he knows Jesus is more important than he is, but nothing else is. You do it so he can learn important things and avoid learning things he doesn't need to. You do it for me and you do it for Noble. You do it for Eli and you do it for Jesus. I'm proud of you."

If I was doing laundry to show Noble eternal things, if I was making little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches again to show Eli what parental love looks like, what unconditional love looks like, and to have those opportunities to talk to them about more important things down the line, then suddenly it wasn't mundane. It was ministry.

Dannah Gresh: It was ministry indeed. Aaron Davis on the significance of small things. If you're a mom, the sandwich making, the chauffeuring, the diaper changing, it matters. If you're feeling swallowed up by work that feels mundane today, I hope you'll take a deep breath. Know this, the Lord sees you. His grace is sufficient for you.

And all of us here at Revive Our Hearts are cheering you on. Speaking of sufficient grace, let me read about that. This is 2nd Corinthians 12:9: "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.' Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may reside in me."

Don't you just feel that in your bones as a mom? This passage invites you to rest and to remember that if you're an imperfect mom, you are very much usable by God. Our good friends Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler sat down with Nancy to talk about that. Now, these two wonderful women co-authored the book *Risen Motherhood*, and they're passionate about helping you live out your calling in light of Christ's love for you. Let's listen to part of that conversation together. Here's Emily.

Emily Jensen: There was this sense that motherhood is such a huge responsibility and you see that, "Okay, I'm supposed to be caring for their hearts and their bodies and helping them make wise choices," and all these different things. And like, "If I fail at this, does this mean I'm a failure as a person at the deepest level? If I can't do motherhood right, what does that say about me?"

And so I think that there's this real need to grapple with that at a deep level and say my identity is not found in how I mother, in the way that I carry out all these different things. It's rooted in Christ. Motherhood is one important calling that he's given me. But I need to keep my eyes fixated on him and be anchored to him because that is going to allow me to keep walking it because I am going to fail and I'm not going to be good enough.

But God can work in and through even my failure, even my sin, Lord willing, to just show my children Jesus day in and day out even as I confess that and say that to them. "Mommy didn't say that right," or, "I'm sorry," or whatever those different things look like. I can just be hopeful when that's where my eyes are fixed to say, "Yeah, Lord, like you can use a sinner like me." Thank goodness I don't have to have it all together. You do.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: You know, you're talking in the again young children season of life, but we have some women listening right now to this conversation whose children are teens or young adults or older and are far from the Lord. Prodigals. These are moms, grandmas who cry themselves to sleep at night with heavy hearts over the waywardness of their children.

And the enemy does a number on so many of these moms that overwhelming them with guilt, with recriminations, with "if only you had been a different mother or better mother." And any mother or dad or person for that—we are sinful, right? But there are some moms who just need to get set free that your identity as a woman is not in how your kids have turned out. If you could be the best mom, that doesn't guarantee that your children are going to have hearts for Christ.

Emily Jensen: That's right. We always say look at the garden. Adam and Eve had a perfect Father that was there with them and a picture-perfect home, and they took and ate and disobeyed their Father. So I think that can help us. We are in no way going to be like the Lord, and his children were wayward. And I think that's where we put our hope in him is he knows the story and he is sovereign over the story and we can trust him with the outcome.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, I think you come to realize too, as I've read what you've written and heard you talk, you realize that what your children most need is not the things that maybe were all a part of that picture you had before you had children. In order to become who God wants them to be, in order for them to experience the gospel and to love Christ, they may not need all those things, all those experiences that you hoped to provide for them, all the things that moms can guilt each other about whether you do it this way or that way on some of the types of issues you've brought up. Even having this quiet peaceful home isn't necessarily what your children most need. What they most need is to see the gospel at work in the midst of a sinful place. So if your home could be perfect, your children might never realize how much they need a savior.

Laura Wifler: That's right. I think that that is for me personally. I have often pursued that perfection, that outward facade. I tend to be a fairly type-A person and very driven, and I struggle with being self-reliant and I struggle with thinking, "Well, I'll just pull up my bootstraps and figure it out and go."

And that was something that I realized—what do my kids need most from me? Do they need the amazing first birthday party, which I could possibly pull off at a time or two, or do they need a mom that loves them well and who is willing to say I'm sorry and who is willing to say, "You know what, we're not going to do this part of the birthday party because it's just too stressful. I'm not able to pull it off," or maybe we'll do something small and simple and do affirmation around the table because that means so much more than this big elaborate party at a pool?

And I think for me it comes down to sometimes weighing some of those decisions of could I pull this off? Maybe. But would I be a mom that shows the gospel to my kids in the midst of it? Probably not.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And would that thing you might pull off, even if you could be superwoman in that role, is that what your child really needs? Would it even matter? Is it even good for your child?

Laura Wifler: That's right. And so I feel like that's helped me weigh some decisions of what really matters here. Is this touching their heart and their soul, or is this just kind of creating a little child that gets everything they want and everything does look like Pinterest around them?

And what is it doing for my own soul? Am I being dependent on the Lord in this situation or am I depending on myself? And I have appreciated that the Lord has allowed me to fall many times in motherhood where stuff didn't go well, things got ruined, I thought I could do something and in the end it just didn't work out. And those moments have really shown me my limitations—that I'm not a deity, I'm not God. And I'm so grateful that I serve a bigger God that catches me when I fall and provides everything that I need.

Dannah Gresh: Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler on acknowledging our dependence. We need the Lord in our motherhood and in every area of our lives. There's more to that conversation if you'd like to hang out a little longer with those lovely ladies. We'll link to the whole series in the transcript of today's episode. You can find that at reviveourhearts.com/weekend.

Now, I was in the recording studio with another dear mom friend this week. Her name is Susie Weible. She's been a ministry partner of mine for a really long time, and she's currently the theological director for the New Wonder app. As moms, it's so important we create a safe space for our girls to ask questions, that they feel the grace we've received in Christ extending to them. So we spent some time talking about that in light of Mother's Day, and we'd love to share that conversation with you.

You and I are approaching Mother's Day I think in different ways because I have a mother who I will have the privilege of having brunch with and celebrating, and your mother is with Jesus.

Susie Weible: She is.

Dannah Gresh: Yeah, but we both have been blessed with the treasure of mothers who created safe places for us. How did your mom—I know you were very close—create an environment where you trusted her to lead you morally and spiritually?

Susie Weible: It started when I was very young. I liked to read and my mom never denied me the opportunity to spend time with her when I wanted it. And so she would often be—she'd pop her head into a room and say, "I'm running to the store," and I'd say, "Can I come?" and I would ride along with her and I would read a devotional to her while we rode in the car and then we would talk about truth from that devotional and from God's word.

And then as I grew older, I remember there was one funny incident where I had an opportunity to work as a page, basically at a VA hospital. And my mom was concerned because I was 15 years old and she knew I'd be working with much older girls and she just was concerned about some of the things that maybe I would be exposed to working there in the VA hospital.

But she and my dad talked about it and they decided they thought it might be a good experience for me. But my mom's rule was that I had to talk to her about what was going on and then if I had questions, I could ask her anything. And one of the very first days working, she picked me up from work and indeed we had been sitting in the lounge with all of these older, much older teenage girls, maybe even in their 20s, and they were talking about things that were definitely inappropriate for me to be hearing and encountering.

And I just plopped down in the seat next to mom and I said, "Hey mom, what do you think about [beep]?" It wasn't a bad word, it just was a word that I'm choosing to make a sound for right now. And I think she regretted making that offer to me on that day. It made her so uncomfortable. But do you know what? She didn't avoid my question. She answered it. She went to the hard place.

Dannah Gresh: My mom did something similar. When I was eight years old, she handed me a daily devotional for children and she said, "You know, you're a Christian, Christians read their Bible, and this will help you learn that habit." But she also extended an invitation: "If you have any questions about what you read in the Bible, I want you to come to me, I'll help you understand it."

And she would tell me that over and over and over again when I was eight, when I was nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, nineteen. And it rang through my head when I was in my 20s and I was on my journey to heal from sexual pain in my heart and in my life. I remember sitting on a beach—well, I'm sure it was a lake beach, so I'm not quite sure it qualifies as a beach, but sitting in the sand with my mom and saying, "Mom, you know how you've always said I could talk to you about anything? Yes. I need to tell you." And I confessed to her the secret I'd never told anybody else.

And I remember on that day as she wrapped her arms around me feeling like this feels like the love of Jesus. And as she spoke words of truth and love over me, God used her to wipe shame out of my heart and my life. She made that invitation available to me over and over and over again. And I do believe I probably took her up on a time or two when I asked a zinger like you just said. But when it really, really, really mattered so much was on that beach when God used that safe place for her to disciple me in what it means to experience the redemption, forgiveness, and grace of Jesus.

Susie Weible: That's special. That's an invitation, moms. It's an invitation for you to make a safe place for your daughters. And if you have a mom who's made a safe place for you and you haven't taken her up on that, it's not too late. You know, Dannah, I think hearing that story of you and your mom, one of the great blessings for me has been able to pass that offer down to my daughters. And I do have a daughter who has taken me up on that several times.

And I know that when you wrote in *The Bride Wore White*, a lot of that was because you were thinking about Lexi at the time. She was your only daughter at the time. And I would imagine that you were imagining having conversations with her and making these offers to her.

Dannah Gresh: Yeah, I actually—a great moment in my healing was when I was driving down the highway listening to a program a lot like this one. And I heard two Christian speakers talking about raising their children to live in sexual purity. And one of them said, "What is the number one question on a teenage girl's mind when she's talking to her mom about sex?" And without hesitation, this woman's voice answered, "The number one question on that girl's mind is 'Mom, did you wait?'"

And I pulled to the side of the road because my baby girl was six months old in the backseat and I—it was a moment where I realized, one, I had to be a healing mom, not a holy-healed mom, because I think I'm still on that journey, but a mom who is moving in the direction of healing to be able to disciple my daughter and that I needed to create a safe place for her to talk about the things.

And I think I did that pretty well. It's one of the greatest privileges of my life to continue to be a safe place for my three girls—because my Robbie has brought another daughter into my life through marriage. So I meet with them once a month, I ask one question: "How can I pray for you?" and I usually say something like, "Spill your guts."

Susie Weible: They do a good job with that?

Dannah Gresh: They do. Yes. And I love carrying their burdens in prayer. I do love carrying their burdens in prayer. And you know, I don't always feel quite as confident as I may have sounded when Susie and I were talking just then. But that's when I go back to that verse I read just a few minutes ago—that God's grace is sufficient for me when I don't feel strong as a mom, that his power is perfected in every single bit of my weakness.

And that's how I let my girls see Jesus and his power in me, when I show up as a mom who's still on the journey of healing and growing in Christ. Our heart for you is that in your motherhood you'd experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. To help you to that end, we've got a new booklet from Nancy and the Revive Our Hearts staff. The title is *Called to Thrive*.

It's essentially your handbook for discovering what it really means to thrive in Christ—in motherhood, in grandmotherhood, in marriage, in singleness. Whatever your stage of life, you can thrive in Christ. When you make a donation of any amount, we'd love to send you a copy. To give and request yours, visit reviveourhearts.com/donate.

Speaking of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ, next weekend we're zooming in on one of those words: freedom. So many women today are living in bondage, whether that's to fear, addiction, legalism, or something else. But there's someone who's able to set us free. And we're going to turn our eyes toward him together. I hope you'll join us for that. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dannah Gresh. We'll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.