Struggles

So this motto of mine for the New Year - How you live you day is how you live your life - has equaled out to life this year not being so great so far. I have had lots of rough days lately and don't feel that I am doing too well emotionally.
I think it all comes down to living life in my own strength. Sometimes I just don't know what it looks like to be doing things in the strength and grace of God, I don't know what that looks like in parenting, keeping house, as a wife, I think I have always tried to do it in my own strength and float by on just my 'knowledge' of God and what I should be doing and how.

I just read the most convicting passage in my new book Heaven at Home. Ginger Plowman is the author but she had Valerie Shepherd (Elisabeth and Jim Elliot's daughter) share a passage about parenting. I can't type the whole things cause it is almost 3 pages long and in small print but my heart could SO relate to what she shared. Here is one part..

"I loved my ideals more than I loved God. I thought if I just had enough discipline and routine, the children would all want to be sweet, loving, and obedient. But I couldn't follow my own rules! I berated myself regularly because I couldn't, and I began to feel like such a failure....My own ways had not been working, because I had been dependent on my own strength and my own ideas. I had to repent of focusing on my ideals, which had become idols."

This is sadly true for me. It is very easy I am finding to create idols for ourselves. She shared a passage in Isaiah and I liked these verses, "In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength" Is. 30:15

I feel like so many moms I know have so much fun in their day and with their kids, not that they don't have stresses and hard times to, but they have FUN. And I feel like I get more stressed about trying to be the perfect person and do all these things, and I do more of that then have fun. I am missing living life and enjoying it and striving in my own strength which is not, I feel, how God intended it to be.

"The gospel has to make a daily difference in our walk through whatever circumstances or weaknesses or personalities we have. I saw how I needed to walk in repentance throughout the day. Some people are more disciplined than others, they seem to have the will to persevere and discipline consistently, without the struggle that I had of forgetfulness or giving in to the children's desires. I couldn't compare myself to those people, but rather, I had to accept who I was in the Beloved (Ephisians 1:6) because he accepted me! I found that God's grace is sufficient for all my failures, my inconsistent training, and that it was his grace that would draw my children to himself. I could not make my children godly simply by loving them or training them perfectly, but it was God's ultimate responsibility to change their hearts into desiring his righteousness." - Val Shepherd
This about sums up what God has been teaching me these last two weeks.