Lisa Jacobson's Blog, page 3

7 Verses to Help You Thrive in Motherhood

In the Fall of 2013, the Lord placed on my heart something completely unexpected: a son.

I tell you with the utmost sincerity that I was content with my 3 daughters. Our family felt complete. I LOVED raising my 3 “Little Women”.

But God…

God told me he had a son for me.

I talked to my husband (the one who wanted 2 kids originally) about it. His response was expected, “Absolutely not! We can’t handle another kid! We can’t handle it financially, and I don’t think I have it in me to parent another child. These 3 are almost more than I can handle.”

As we talked about the logistics, the finances, the patience, and energy it takes to raise a child, how old would we be when they leave the house, and all that, one thing became painfully clear.

We couldn’t do this.

There was no way we could have another child with our limited resources. I mean, we would have to rely on God for everything.

Wait, what?

We would have to rely on God for everything.

This realization opened my eyes to all the ways I am dependent on God in my parenting.

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How to Get the Hands-On Biblical Training You Desperately Need For Your Marriage and Home

So many of you have asked about this, that I’m sharing it again.

Although��to be honest, I didn’t expect such an overwhelming and positive response. I guess that means that I’m nor the only one who’s faced these kinds of challenges.��And who needs some better and more helpful answers.

So with that in mind, here’s my story and it just might be your story too…

Looking back now, I realize it was a turning point.

A ��significant one.

I suppose that’s why the scene remains so clear in my mind.

I can still see my husband standing up in front of our church group and announcing this rather personal news.

We were part of a large adult Sunday School class – maybe 100 people or so – and he was our teacher.

But instead of opening our Bibles to I Samuel ��Chapter 3 or whatever it was, he began talking to them, as if they were some of his closest friends.

And he said something like this,

We have had a radical change in our home. ��

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The Best Way to Nurture Your Soul

God knows the deep places of woman; He created us. But He still invites us to enter in and freely share them with Him. What is the best way to nurture our soul?

When we open the raw, He presses mercy into the pain; the failure; the shame. God doesn���t want us to stay there. He wants to heal us and free us so we can live for Him. He created women with longing and desire, but often these are wasted on the wrong things; in the wrong places.

A Woman’s Deep Desire

After the fall, God said woman���s desire would be for her husband (Genesis 3:16), and while that might be true to an extent, having the redemption of Jesus has changed that.

I remember while I was dating my [now] husband and even in the early years of our marriage, I depended on Him for everything. Even things he just wasn���t capable of providing; that deep desire for constant connection.

I would get upset if he wasn���t with me as often as possible. He couldn���t fill the deep places because they weren���t his to fill.

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Do Your Recipes Match Your Season of Life?

Six ladies and I gathered around a table to talk purposefully about homemaking, with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and hot cups of tea in hand. The conversation took an interesting turn, and I think you should listen in.

We were talking about making meals, because of course, it���s a key job we have, to feed those people of ours. One mother of four, who is now an empty nester, sagged her shoulders in discouragement and said she loves to cook but is struggling to do that while working almost full time.

A 20-something single woman also shrugged her shoulders and said she loves to cook but finds it depressing to make a meal and have leftovers that last longer than her taste buds can stand.

So we hashed this out as a group, and may I say that if these women hadn���t been willing to share their struggle and frustration with cooking, the rest of us never could have encouraged them? It���s important for us to be brave enough to admit to each other that we have trouble spots in homemaking.

At the end of our chat, I suggested to these dear friends that they go home and find a bunch of recipes that fit where they are in life.

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4 Ways To Help Your Child Handle Peer Pressure

Peer pressure is a term that typically refers to the pressure that teens, tweens and kid���s face. However, feeling pressured by our peers is a concept that in one way or another, we as parents and adults, can relate to as well. ��Think about it:

Should we discipline like them? Should I work like him?��Should I dress like her?

���we���ve all been there.

My prayer is that as our kids mature, their confidence in Christ and the decision-making skills we are installing now, will live beyond grade school and provide the foundation needed to handle the peer influence that will continue to follow them and grow in consequence; for good or bad.

A list of tips for our children to use is a great tool to get them thinking and I am thrilled to provide one here, but what they’ll value even more than that is to come home to a parent that understands, sympathizes and gives her the extra push she needs to make healthy decisions.

Here are a few tips to help you as you help your children navigate through the pressure they may be facing with peers.

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What To Do When You Feel Like You Are Not Enough

The feeling lurks just under the surface so frequently, waiting until I am over-tired, over-scheduled, overdone, to rear its ugly head.

I concede as if I knew it all along.�� I���m not keeping up, failing as a wife, as an employee, as a housekeeper, a mom, a friend.�� If I look closely enough I���ll find it somewhere, sometimes everywhere; all the places I���m coming up short.

There could be 10 good days in between, a hundred or a thousand even, and still I���m tempted to nestle into the lie as if it were governing truth.

I ���m not enough; I knew it.�� I always knew it.

We live our lives risking this when we love beyond our limits.�� When we give big and live loud, offering ourselves to the world vulnerably, we���re bound to trip and sometimes it���s the dumbest things that start our spiral.�� The enemy doesn���t miss an opportunity.

Last week it was printer ink.�� Really, printer ink.�� We ran the printer dry and it insisted that my new replacement cartridge was damaged.�� My son had a report due in the morning and we had no suitable printer ink.��

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Irish Apple Pie

Like many��babies, sleep didn’t come naturally to my little son. He struggled with waking up multiple times during the night, thus waking me or my husband up as well. We would then proceed (in shifts) to change the diaper, make the bottle, and cradle him in our arms until he was drowsy enough to lay down again.

This went on for years (okay, maybe it was one year, but it felt like years). We tried a lot of things to help our son sleep. We bought one of those Baby Merlin’s Magic Sleep Suits, which he loved (and gosh, he looked like a cute little astronaut in it, too) and it did help him sleep, but when he grew out of that, the��sound machine��became very important. It not��only played lullabies and white noise, but it glowed in the dark, rotated pictures on the ceiling, and was fancy enough that when the machine turned off, it would start playing music again if he woke up and began to cry.

That sound machine has been my little man’s��soothing bedtime companion for years…and he has become quite��attached to it.

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5 Books for Big Picture Homeschooling

“Do you have a college degree?”

I had called to order something from the highly-educated Dr. Raymond Moore. He and his wife were home educating back in the 70’s when no one else was doing it.

He answered the phone��and then asked me if I had a college degree. Normally that would have made me really nervous, but I had read enough of what Dr. Moore had written about homeschooling to know where he was going with his question.

“No,” I told him. “I do not have a college education.”

���Good! That puts you miles ahead of those who do!���

You see, often education — at least our modern definition of it — gets in the way of real��learning. When we have been trained to teach in a certain way, we are more prone to lose sight of the overarching reason that we are homeschooling in the first place.

If I could give you one piece of sage advice after all my years of homeschooling it would be this:

Keep the big picture in mind every day that you are homeschooling your kids.

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What To Do When You Have Become That Yelling Mom

Nobody would have pegged me for a yeller.

Actually, I wouldn’t have guessed it either. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember ever having shouted before – except maybe at a college football game or catching a friend’s attention across the parking lot.

Other than that, I’d say I’m a fairly soft-spoken person.

But something seemed to have happened once I had small children. Yeah, it’s like something snapped!

I became a yeller.

A yeller? Me??

At first, I blamed it on all kinds of things. Hormones. Stress. Sleep-deprivation.

But after a while, I had to face up to the facts. No matter what the cause, I’d turned into a yelling mom.

And I hated it and wanted to change.

I cried out to God to miraculously overcome this awful struggle, secretly hoping for some kind of instantaneous healing. But it turned out to be more of a journey – by His grace, in His strength, and with a lot of determined effort on my part.

My Journey to a Quieter, Calmer Mom

One of the first steps of my journey was to start an anger journal.

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Take Your Love for Your Husband to This New Level

Do you love your man to the level of his most quiet needs? The needs that go unspoken. The needs he may not even recognize for himself.

My dad���s side of the family has a thing for writing corny ���Roses are red, violets are blue��� poems. So when I tell you I���m going to quote to you a line of poetry from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I hope you are truly impressed at how cultured I have become.

I heard this stanza in a song, and I thought it was the most beautifully written marriage advice I���ve ever heard. Let me give you the first half of Browning���s poem, and you can relish your moment of high culture as well.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day���s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

Although I have an English degree, you do not have to evaluate or write an essay on this poem.

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