Dear Intentional Mom: Just Look Up

It’s incredible how inadequate I feel as a mother at times, how unintentionally I sometimes spend my days. I’ve previously confessed that I feel unqualified to talk to you on this subject of intentional mothering, and it’s true.

On the one hand, it’s a struggle every time I sit down to write about this topic, but on the other hand, I think that can be good. I’m not an expert on this, so I come to this space with emptiness and honesty. That’s humbling, but I also think that’s right where God wants us. I think He wants us to engage with transparency and authenticity. I think he wants us to be vulnerable about our struggles, because it’s in the middle of the messy and the gritty moments of real life that the Gospel becomes real. After all, you can only hear chains dropping off if they first enslaved. And that’s why Jesus came, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners (Isaiah 61:1).

I want you and I to experience that freedom from captivity, that release from darkness. I want us to embrace the gift of rescue and redemption, and I want us to live that out in our daily lives and our motherhood relationship. Oh how I pray that we can be a conduit of that message of hope to our own children and to others!

In order to pursue that kind of intentionality with our families, there must be brokenness, grace, and faithfulness. As previously discussed, those three elements are foundational to intentional mothering. They must be the heart attitude upon which we can begin to establish some transformative habits.

And today … today I want to talk about one such habit.

Aside from being faithful, the single most important thing you can do to cultivate a heart of intentionality is to look up … just look up.

Stop what you’re doing, put down the phone, step away from the computer, peel your eyes from the task at hand, remove yourself from the must-do lists and the can’t-miss tasks, go outside and simply look up. Pull your eyes away from the urgent and set them on that which is eternal, even if just for a moment. Because when we step away from the urgencies of our day and take time to breathe in the vastness and the majesty of God, it resets our perspective. When we lift our eyes, we suddenly realize that our problems pale in comparison to the awesome might of our great God.

Friends, we have a God who spoke the earth into existence! With a word he hung the stars in their place, and He knows each one of them by name. Our God is big. So big that our own galaxy can’t even begin to contain a fraction of His majesty! He lifted the mountains out of the earth’s crust and plunged the valleys below their peaks. He dug out the deep recesses for the depths of the ocean, and He knows the number of the grains of sand.

Do you want to be an intentional mom? Then practice the art of looking up. Because when we take our eyes off ourselves and our circumstances and place them firmly on Him, miraculous things occur: weights lift, burdens cease, troubles shrink, peace prevails.  

So next time you feel you’re failing at motherhood, next time you think you’re forfeiting intentionality, next time your heart needs a little encouragement to welcome brokenness, extend grace and remain faithful, step outside and simply look up.

This is Day 9 in 31 Days of Intentional Mothering. To start reading from Day 1, click here.

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