A child, I stood parched for water, / I searched for a brook of life to nourish, / To carry me down the stream to wholeness, / And cleanse me from all that left its mark. / Yet you were a polluted water, / Your fatherly care poisoned me from within / Through toxins entering inside my skin, / And gathering on my hands to rot all life away.

Does your work as a stay-at-home-mom ever feel embarrassing and shameful? Do you feel less-than because of your “so-called job”? Here’s your encouragement, mom: Your work is worthy. Here’s how we can hold our heads high as we tell people we are stay-at-home-moms.

How are you teaching your children about God? As believers, we may think that as long as we share the key stories, send our children to church and youth groups, and memorize the passages from our curriculum, all will be well. Yet we live in a world of deconstructed faith and every wind of false doctrine. What if our children need more than memorized Bible verses and a children’s program at church?

We don’t like to think of our cute, tiny children as being sinful. As moms, we may feel uncomfortable even telling our children they’re sinners. Why do we want our children to feel guilty? But what if the uncomfortable, bad news is necessary before our kids (or anyone) can truly understand the good news of the gospel at all?

Being a mother has humbled me. Weekly I’m faced with my own questions and failures. Yet our Heavenly Father is the perfect parent to us all the time. And being our perfect parent, we can look to him and image his love to our children. In her latest book, Christina Fox reminds us of how God cares for us as his beloved children and how we can reflect such care to our children through our parenting.

As I sat next to Daniel at his grandmother’s funeral, I couldn’t help but marvel at what a legacy she left. Sitting at the front was her youngest daughter, Daniel’s mother, who she had raised in the faith. Behind her and Daniel’s dad sat me and Daniel, followed by Daniel’s sister and brother and his wife and children. Each of us, spouses and all, clinging to that same faith she taught her daughter who then taught it to them.

As the Christmas season approaches, memories around my twins’ traumatic birth start to tumble in my heart. How do we quiet our hearts to enjoy Christmas this year? How do we find the peace that was announced on Christ’s birth? I think of Mary, the mother of our Savior, and the example she left us.

One day as I struggled to burp one baby while the other wiggled next to me, I muttered to my husband, “God should have given mothers of multiples the ability to grow an extra arm.” But as each day passed and more people offered to help, I realized that God had given us something much better than extra limbs—he had given us whole people who loved us and our children.

April was c-section awareness month. All month long I scrolled past social media posts empowering me to stop seeing my scars as a failure but as celebration of what my body could do. Those posts angered me. My body did fail me, I thought. There’s a bit of truth to that, but I’m learning that there is still cause for celebration—though not in me and my body, but in a God who is much greater.

Discernment is the skill of seeing what is right from almost right. It’s the ability to recognize the truth about God and the gospel and recognize when it’s skewed. It’s one thing to do that for ourselves, it’s another to guide our children through it as well. It doesn’t need to be burdensome and fearful—rather, it can be rewarding and restful for the believer.

“Be patient,” has been our daily lesson lately. With newborn twins on the way, I especially wanted him to learn that it's okay to wait a few minutes before his requests were answered. And yet, at twenty-three years old, patience is a lesson I’m still learning. And like most lessons, to teach patience is also to exemplify patience.

Though we may rightly lament the pain our earthly fathers caused (and seek help if we are in an abusive situation), we can also find hope in our sonship with our Heavenly Father. Though our earthly dads fathered us in sin, he fathers us in perfection and righteousness. We are not fatherless.

Christina Fox’s book Sufficient Hope came to me during one of those waves of floundering and showed me what I truly needed: to be reminded of the gospel. “Whatever experiences we face in motherhood, we all need Jesus—and he is sufficient.” (p. 14).

“Morning Times, Nursery Rhymes, and My Journey Towards Sanctification.” Motherhood is sanctifying, and Cindy Rollins displays this through stories of laughter, tears, and celebration.

Has life not turned out the way you dreamed? Maybe you thought you would have a growing family with babies and toddlers in tow—but your arms remain empty. Perhaps you saw yourself going out on double dates with your married friends by now—yet you’re the only one who is still single. This piece is for those whose dreams have yet to come true.

My husband jumped up from the floor and opened his arms to embrace me. “You’re pregnant, babe! We’re going to have a baby!” He wrapped me in his arms, and immediately my heart and mind both began racing. How can it be? How did it happen so easily? How am I pregnant so quickly? And then, the inevitable thought, What if I miscarry?

For most pregnant women, preparing their nursery for the arrival of their precious baby marks an exciting time. Happy thoughts of rocking their baby to sleep fill their minds, along with sounds of their baby’s sweet coos as they snuggle in the crib. But my first thought was not so sweet. Instead, it was bitter: What if my unborn baby dies? How do we learn to trust God with our unborn child?