Where did that crochet hook go? I wanted to relax before going to sleep with a little crochet/TV time. But the hook was gone. We searched everywhere and couldn’t find it. I said a little prayer that I would find it soon and not have to buy a new one.
The next morning, Richard found the hook. It had somehow fallen into our bedding, and I slept on it all night without realizing it.
When he gave it to me in front of the kids, I told them, “This means I'm not a princess. I would have flunked the pea test.”
The kids howled with laughter. For a few moments, down had come the mask of the all-knowing, all-seeing mom behind the kitchen table, replaced with a mama who means well but can lose things and has been known to search for her contacts without realizing she's already put them in.
Not so picture-perfect any more.
When the kids see those moments, it can remind them we're all human, and we're in this struggle together. Despite our flaws, God can use our lives to make something wonderful!
Then I flashed to my own childhood thirty years ago. During my childhood before my parents divorced, my father was a church choir director. Our job in church was to be the picture perfect family, with the fashion-plate children who never had messed up hair, mismatched shoes, rumply socks, or bad behavior. Our priority was to make him look good.
It didn't matter what went wrong before we got to church — who fought, who cried, which brother got spanked, or how we cleaned up the car after the baby got sick on the way to church. The moment we opened the car doors when we got there, we were “on.” Tears had to be dried, smiles were plastered on our faces, and I could switch from tears to a mask of contentment on a dime.
I highly recommend this method if you want to teach children to build strong emotional walls and separate themselves from their own emotions.
We were under such pressure to reflect well upon him and his reputation that I often forgot why we went to church and what the Gospel of Jesus Christ was. Our kids deserve more than that.
The problem when we strive to seem picture-perfect is that photos are two-dimensional. They don't show who we are and miss the essence of our humanity.
Transparency does not come easily to me. It's taken years for me to learn to experience emotions instead of stuff them. Letting down that wall just enough to share with friends and family is still new ground.
If I forget, then I can easily push my own kids into the pressure-packed picture-perfect model I knew as a child. The problem with that model is it becomes an overstuffed pressure cooker with a blocked steam valve. It eventually blows up and splatters a rotten mess all over the inside of my house.
When I remember to release some steam, let down some walls, and show humanity, the pressure releases.
But something even more important happens. My kids see my heart, and we're more likely to work on the same team instead of on opposing sides of a civil war fought at the kitchen table.
When I risk admitting we've had a bad day, an over-packed schedule, or a rough math lesson, the most amazing thing happens. Other people I know have the same problems. We can share them with each other, lift one another up, and the fallacy of impossible expectations is no longer upon us. Then when something happens which does work well, we appreciate it all the more because of its contrast against the former well of desperation.
If I never admitted those bad days, then friends who experience the same thing might not feel free to discuss their own issues. Who wants to share problems with the perfect mother who has the most spotless house, best-behaved children who all super-achieve 6 years above grade level, play 4 instruments, participate in 3 sports, clean house, cook meals, and never, ever have a bad attitude? Such a family would have no way to relate to who I am or what we experience.
Whatever your thorn in the flesh, when you can admit it and work on it, God can use you to help others fighting the same battle. When God can work through our flaws and problems to achieve something spectacular, we minister to others and witness for Christ at the same time.
The family portrait looks great hanging on the wall. It's a portrait of real people. Sometimes kids get sick, siblings fight, boys pretend to be Spiderman in the locker room, and the car breaks down. Hormones hit. Someone takes a permanent marker and writes down the names of all his friends on the cloth seats in the back of the car.
Whatever the challenge, if we share who we really are with trusted friends, burdens become easier. And we have more friends to laugh with when we take a canoe trip down the river!
“Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.' So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:7-10).
Mary Biever is a homeschooling mother of two who publishes encouragement articles and runs Encouragement Workshops For Today's Families.
This article was adapted from one of her columns.
