As We Should Be

So Thursday of this last week, I was having a really bad day... one of those malfunctioning-car, ran-out-of-coffee, teeth-cutting, all-the-bills-came-in-today kind of bad days, and to top it off Daniel was scheduled for a double which meant a long 15 hours for both of us. I called my mom to ask her a quick question about plans for the weekend, she asked me how my day was going (she didn't know what a can of worms that would open) and then I just cried and told her everything.

She said something about how being a mom is a little bit like spending your life looking into a mirror, and it really is. I spend my days now changing diapers, reading stories, cutting food into bite-sized pieces, playing ball and cleaning up a thousand little messes, and few of these things provide much of a distraction from myself.
At the end of the day when Cohen is fast asleep, Daniel isn't home yet and I fall onto the couch with my hot tea (and maybe some leftover halloween candy), the feelings of failure and inadequacy that ensue are sure signs that I don't like what I see in the life-size microscope I married somewhere in adolescence.

I think it's just a part of human nature to measure success by the wrong standards and to look for and find identity in the wrong places and as a relatively new wife and mom, my relationships with Daniel and Cohen and my job as a homemaker are the first places I turn. The real clincher is that I have just as many bad days as good days, and the truth behind my performance, and the defensiveness that meets anyone who would criticize it, reached through my Mom's words and made things so clear.

I think you have this idea of the woman you want to be and honey, you are nowhere near being that woman. But that's okay. And you have made a lot of mistakes and some of that doesn't just go away, but that's okay. You have plenty of time to figure things out. And you are loved just as you are.

Her words vaguely reminded me of something the speaker and author, Brennan Manning, repeated often in his sermons... "God loves you just as you are, not as you should be, because you are never going to be as you should be."

I am nowhere near the woman I want to be, the Christian I want to be, the wife and mother and homemaker I want to be, the friend or sister or daughter I want to be. And the story of my life so far is nothing like how I planned. I can waste all this time trying to make up for that, trying to build myself into a saint, and trying to earn the approval of God, myself and the world around me, or I can find a new paradigm to live by in this new season. Maybe a paradigm of grace.

Brennan Manning also said that "to live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, 'A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.'" 

Our cavernous need for God's grace is best displayed in the darkest parts of our stories. And where we see chinks in the armor, He sees pinpricks of light- the places where He is chipping away at our "good" selves so that when all is said and done His goodness is fully and tangibly displayed.

And there will be a day when my story or your story, the dark and the light, will be a light in the window for the prodigal coming home, a mother across the kitchen table telling Cohen or my daughter or maybe someone else's daughter that it's all okay and that they are loved just as they are, hope for someone who feels like they always fall just a little short.

And on my bad days, and on your bad days, and even on our good days (maybe especially on the good days) we can know that we are loved just as we are, not as we should be, because we will never be as we should be.