3 Things Every Mom Needs to Read
I’m a little under the weather this morning, so I can’t write anything particularly brilliant or insightful.
But this week I’ve read 3 extremely brilliant and insightful posts, and I’d like to share them with you today. You can read them instead of reading me!
Gary Thomas: 6 Marks of Healthy Sexuality
I love Gary Thomas’ writing, and consider him a friend.
He wrestled over this blog post, but wrote it out of deep concern with what he saw was happening with sexuality in our culture. Too often our church teachings don’t recognize the damage that certain sexual practices have.
So he wrote 6 marks of health sexuality–and they’re all so, so good. I’m going to be commenting on different aspects of this in the weeks to come, but #3 spoke to me the most, and it’s something I’ve been trying to say when I speak, too. Healthy sexuality does not promote sexual brokenness. It just doesn’t. Not every fantasy is okay. Not every whim should be indulged.
Here’s a part of what he wrote:
Many of us stumble into marriage as sexually broken people. We think marriage will cure our sexual brokenness, but problems re-arise when we want to express our sexual brokenness as part of our marriage. That’s like asking a doctor to serve your addiction instead of curing it.
Beware of coercive marital sex. Some men and a few women will use their spouse to serve a sexual addiction—let’s watch pornography together. Let’s swap partners. Sometimes, men will use sex with their wives to deaden their own pain—anesthetizing themselves—and thus put inordinate physical demands on their spouses. Men who insist on daily sex (I’m not talking about the honeymoon phase here) may be using their wives to fight back an addiction or an intimacy problem rather than cherishing and affirming their wives by giving her pleasure.
Women, you’re not helping your husband if he tries to fight the urge to cross dress by openly doing it with you. A potentially ruinous desire will grow not diminish by being indulged.
In our culture today, the most common silly notion (not even questioned by many) is that all desire must be legitimate, equally respected, tolerated, and even indulged. That’s foolish, ruinous, and not true in any other life experience.
But please–read the whole thing.
To The Moms Out There: Don’t Forget Yourself
This is just a beautiful, raw piece of writing about how so often moms become invisible in their own lives. Their lives are all about their kids–and they forget who they were. Here’s a piece:
One day, I stood in my bathroom staring at myself in a mirror with water splotches and towels on the ground reflecting back and I realized how easy it would be for the years to tick by one after another after another and to all of a sudden wake one day when the kids were grown and to look in the mirror and have no idea who the person staring back at yourself was.
I know that because that was what happened. If someone would have asked me what I loved to do I probably would have replied with a dozen mom things but probably wouldn’t say the stuff that I loved.
The truth is that none of us have perfect lives, perfect stories and perfect motherhood days. We just don’t. And the more we spend chasing after idealistic perfection the less time we can spend doing things that matter.
You are part of your story.
Read the whole thing from Finding Joy.
God Cares About You As Much as He Cares About Your Kids
One of my favourite bloggers is Natalie Klejwa from Visionary Womanhood. She has been on an incredible spiritual journey from the patriarchy movement where she tried to be a perfect wife and make up for her husband’s abuse, to learning to draw boundaries and stop enabling sin.
And she’s so open about how much of a mess her life is, and how much she needs Jesus right now.
I find it heartbreaking to read her, but exhilirating as well, because you can see that God is showing up in the midst of her mess.
I read her post yesterday right after I read the above one, about how moms matter. And I thought how well they went together. Here’s Natalie:
I wish I could go back to that girl I used to be and tell her. Tell her she is significant simply because she is. Tell her she doesn’t need to be married to be safe and loved. Tell her she doesn’t need to be perfect to be heard. Tell her she doesn’t need to be successful to matter.
But she is gone. That girl is over, and I am what is left. Instead of getting bigger, I have been compressed into something small. Maybe a seed? I hope so. Because inside a seed there is potential for something living to grow up toward the light. I used to think in my uber conservative, somewhat ascetic mindset that, as mothers, our job was to die. Just die and let the children live. But I think God sees it differently. We are all His children, no matter how old we are and no matter what we did during our lives. God doesn’t carefully tend the potential-full college student more than the bent and twisted woman in the wheel chair at St. Johns Nursing Home.
All three of these pieces are far better than I could write today, and so I invite you to read them, think on them, and soak them in. I’ve read them all several times. And now I may just spend my day in a Netflix marathon with some cold medication. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. I’ll talk to you all tomorrow!
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