…but God is good.

Yup. That’s all I’ve got for tonight.

Sometimes I like to trick myself.

From time to time, I try to convince myself that I’ve arrived. That my marriage is totally healed. That I treat my husband with the honor and respect I am called to treat him with, even when he doesn’t deserve it. That I am a perfect mom.

But that’s not true.

There is simply no arrival with any of my struggles in this life. Until I get to Heaven, that is. I haven’t arrived as a wife. Or as a mother. Far from it. I don’t know if it’s just “that time of month,” or the normal ebb and flow of life or because of MckDaddy’s new 12 hour shifts, or what, but yesterday I was not doing so hot. This isn’t going to be a pity party. No, “Woe is me, I’m a wretched person, please say things to make me feel better about myself.” I’ve done that. This isn’t it. At least, I’m trying not to make it into that!

See, I struggle.

I know that at least one person in the entire history of the world understands exactly what I’m going through. Paul says in Romans that he struggles with sin; the frustration he feels with his human state is evident when he writes, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing.” Oh how maddening it can be sometimes to be human. Yesterday I struggled with being the kind of person I want to be. I chose to say an unkind thing to my husband because something he said caused me to feel low. My response to feeling low? To try to make him feel lower!

What kind of a person does that!?

A sinner. An imperfect person. A human. A broken person.

If you can, please resist the urge to tell me not to be so hard on myself.

Sometimes, I need to be hard on myself. I was the first person to remind myself, when the tears started to hit the kitchen floor, that God doesn’t want me to focus on my failures for too long, though. But as a human who wants to love my husband the way I should, it’s hard. I find that I am too easily down on myself. Well, it’s either that or the opposite approach: that I’m too full of pride and pleased with myself, forgetting that I have faults, too.

Can I find a middle ground?

On most days I, do. Usually, I realize I fall short, am broken and need my Savior. But at the same time I am able to be thankful for the fact that I am loved while realizing that I am a good mother, my love for my husband is true and I have nice teeth. You know what I mean? But yesterday that balance was gone. I cried so hard I gave myself a headache. I already had a head cold and a bit of a sinus headache as it was. Ugh. I was a mess.

But God is faithful.

Do you know what He did? He reminded me, through His word, a few hymns, through texts from friends, a reminder from my husband that he wasn’t going anywhere and is with me through thick and thin, just as I am with him, through a phone call with my wise mother, prayers from you out there who sent warm wishes or went to God on my behalf and through the innocence and trust of my children that He is near.

He is the one Who makes me good.

Alone, I would never be good enough. Oh, but sometimes I like to trick myself. From time to time, I try to convince myself that I am a good mother because I homeschool my children. Because I make them healthy food. Because I create structured days for them and have fun alongside them. Because I saved our toilet paper rolls so we could make these Christmas tree crafts the other day.

But those aren’t the reasons I’m a good mom.

I’m a good mom because I am their mom. Because I love them, trust God with them and try my best. I am no better than another mom just because I do crafts with my children. We all have our strengths. We all have our weaknesses. I may be very patient with my children, but I still am inconsistent with them more often than I’d like. I haven’t arrived as a mother just because the clothes were all folded last night and I put together an impressive blog post about how much we get done during our days together.

I still doubt myself, act in ways not consistent with my beliefs and fail.

But “the joy of the Lord is my strength.” I fell asleep last night in peace after remembering that He has promised to “be strong where we are weak.” I don’t need to be supermom. Or superwife. I forgave myself for my shortcomings, decided to share this bit of my human journey with you guys, went to sleep and awoke to a day full of new mercies.

Sometimes I like to trick myself.

But not today. Today I wear the blessed assurance that I belong to Jesus. While I haven’t arrived, I vow to remember today that He is made perfect in my weakness. I will do a new craft with my children and be thankful for the opportunity but not be so prideful as to think my value as a mother hinges on it. I am speaking to my husband with respect and love. Today, I am not tricking myself.

But one day again soon, I will.

And when I show my humanity again in the same ways I did yesterday, for as sure as death and taxes, it will happen, I will crack open my Bible again, listen to the words of faithful friends, re-read this post, put my head on my husband’s shoulder and remember anew that I am a broken person who needs forgiveness.

Okay, okay, maybe I am being a little too hard on myself.

But such is the ebb and flow of being human. At least, it is for me. This is my journey. My story. My life. And I’m thankful to have a place to share about it here on my blog.

Thanks for listening.

The burnt orange burlap fabric on the pews was rough, only slightly padded. It was where we sat for church, in that orange pew. Our family always sat exactly in the same spot. A stain on “our” pew, still there after years, reminded me and my growing sister of the time she brought a homemade squishy toy, a balloon filled with flour and water, to church. While softly squishing and flinging it back and forth, it burst open unexpectedly. All over Miss Roni in front of us and the pew we were in. The pew covered in orange burlap where we now sat.

We were older now, middle school perhaps. The three or four members of our small church’s choir made their way up the two steps to the top of the tiny platform behind our pastor’s pulpit. I was sitting on the white stain, or maybe my dad or sister or mom was.

We started to sing.

The church I grew up in used hymns for Sunday morning worship. At the time, all I really wanted to sing was “He came from Heaven to earth, my debt to pay!” with all the wild hand motions we learned at Bible camp. But on this morning, we parted our crackly hymnals, mine inscribed with the name of our Sunday school classmate and friend who had died suddenly at age 11 a few years earlier. “Turn to page 347.” We would sing about debts and stains that day. But with no hand motions. And not about the kinds of stain a flour and water paste leaves on a pew.

What color is crimson exactly, I wondered. The image of blood in the snow crept into my mind. My lips moved, but I wasn’t exactly pondering the depth of the words I sang. Jesus paid it all. Oh, little did my young self know how much those words would come to mean to me as I aged.

For now, I was thinking about the boy I had a crush on. Only one of two boys my age at church, my would be husband was tall, lean and blond. And he sat in the back. Because he was cool like that. His parents let him sit alone, with his brother and foster brothers. My sister and I were in the second row with our parents. Though my mind was on that boy. That boy who, little did I know at the time, would eventually become the father of my Many Small Children.

I wasn’t a leper, and my heart certainly wasn’t made of stone. Or so I thought. I was blissfully unaware of the vastness of my sin as a young girl. Therefore, my appreciation for exactly what it was Jesus did on the cross for me was lacking. But it would grow.

Marrying that boy in the back of the church many years later put me on the quickest path towards truly realizing how badly I needed the Savior I had long loved and known. There is nothing like two sinful humans marrying each other to bring out the worst in both of them. At least such was the case in our marriage early on. There was no hiding, except in the bathroom. No veiling of our true selves. The ugly sides came out to play. We asked forgiveness of each other often in those days.

There was nothing good in me, I came to know. At least, nothing that Jesus hadn’t planted there and was watering. Most definitely nothing good enough for me to earn the grace of a loving God. On my own efforts, I couldn’t do it. Be a good enough person for God to let me into Heaven. I had too many stains. Indeed, even one single stain would be enough to keep us from Jesus forever.

We had tried, my mother, sister and I, to get that stain out of the orange fabric on the pew. It was just flour and water, after all. How hard could that be? But water, fabric cleaners and scrubbing were no match to that faint white stain. So it stayed.

It was in that small yellow house I shared with my new husband, the house with the Christmas lights in the bathroom and the pink kitchen where I first fell to my knees, literally, crying out to a God Who had saved me, was saving me, letting Him know as loud as I could that I was so thankful that He washed my own garment white in the blood of His Son.

I owed a lot to Jesus. Still do. In the space between those four walls, after yelling at my husband and then finding nowhere to flee to hide from my shame, I realized my debt. It was large. And I could not pay it. Without Jesus’ forgiveness, my actions would keep me separated from Him. But God did not want to leave things that way. I was alone, crying on the floor of the living room with the rattly ceiling fan spinning above my head, but He did not leave me like that.

He ransomed my soul. He paid my debt. All of it.

It was around that time when a song often sung at funerals became one of my favorites. I didn’t perseverate on my own death, but it became something I thought about. I thought about my funeral and how I wanted a song about faithfulness to be able to be sung. About me, but more importantly, about my Lord. A longing to be found faithful filled my heart.

In dark moments, Satan tried to whisper lies to me. Still does. “You aren’t faithful. Look at how many times you’ve failed. You’ll never measure up. You’re worthless.” But I am able to triumph over his lies, stomping him beneath my feet as I call him out for what he is, a liar. In him there is no light at all. Of course, in one way, he’s right: I’m not faithful enough. I’ll never measure up.

But the truth doesn’t end with the period at the conclusion of that sentence. Rather, a comma belongs there.

I am not faithful enough, but I serve One Who is. I’ll never measure up, but Jesus threw away the measuring stick when He died on the cross for me.

Sadly, extending that understanding to others was a huge struggle for me. Sure I knew I’d never measure up, but like most people, I judged myself by my best intentions, all the while judging others by their actions. It was more comfortable that way.

The first time my husband forgave a large debt, I was furious and dumfounded. It was someone who had worked for my husband’s business. Always generous and benevolent, even to this day, my husband allowed this person to take large sums of money in draws, even before it was payday. When he up and left, refusing to return my husband’s calls or come back in to the office, we were out a lot of money. When it was clear this man never intended to pay us back, I suggested we sue. “Let’s take him to court! We need that money! He did us wrong; he must pay!”

My husband wouldn’t have any of it. The man was a friend, and my husband forgave him the debt. It wouldn’t be the last time he did that, either. I wrung my hands each time. I wrung them, that is, until eventually we found ourselves in a situation, largely self inflicted, where we had debts. Debts that we could not pay. Even as we slowly chiseled away, and still do, at our debts, it became clear we would need help getting out from under the crushing weight of it all.

But how much more than merely a financial debt has Jesus already paid for all of us? Even the grandest magnitude of earthly debt cannot compare to the debt of sin Jesus paid willingly for you and me. With debt on my mind so much lately, this is something that has been bouncing around in my brain a lot.

Oh, I praise You, Jesus! You are the One Who paid my spiritual debt. I can never thank you enough, nor can I truly comprehend the sacrifice You made. You are perfect, yet You shouldered the punishment for my imperfection. You were without sin, yet You allowed yourself to become responsible for mine.

Praise You.

My debt is paid.