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Extra essays & prayers for you this weekend - and much more to come in 2024

Welcome back to the Mothering Spirit Newsletter! We’re returning to our regular publishing schedule after an extended leave for both our editors (a new baby for Sarah and a major surgery for Laura) and we have lots to share with you from our writers in the interim. Check out these extra essays and prayers you might have missed while we were on break—and get ready for more good things headed your way in 2024!

This week on Mothering Spirit

Laura Johnson asks what to do when God feels far away—when prayer feels dry, when parenthood complicates our spiritual practices, and when we forget that God is always seeking us first:

“‘I just don’t feel close to God anymore,’ a young mom recently shared with me. Her life had been turned upside down, and she couldn’t find a spiritual footing in her new reality. Again I remembered that decade-old conversation with my husband, our frustration and spiritual malnutrition in the fog of early parenting. Only this time, I knew what to say…

It’s what I wish someone had told my newly-minted momma heart when I felt lost and far from God, when my prayer rhythms were disrupted and I felt like I was failing as a Christian parent. I wish someone had assured me: ‘It’s God who will find you, not the other way around. Just keep your heart open.’”

Read the whole essay here: When God Feels Far Away.

If you’ve ever felt the tug to create—with words, paint, ingredients, or music—here’s a blessing for the moment when you sit down to start creating (and can’t stop thinking about everything else clamoring for your attention). For all of us called to create and to care for our families:

“When I am with my family, 
Help me to be present to them,
Their loves and their needs, 
Their joys and their sorrows,
Even as I dream of coming here
To create with You. 

When I am making and creating, 
Help me to be present to my art and my craft,
Its energy and delight, 
Its challenges and growth,
Even as I long to be with my family, too.

Open the eyes of my heart to see all of it as creation,
The holy work to which You call me.”

(This prayer was originally written for Wellspring: A Mother Artist Project.)

Read the whole prayer here: A Prayer for Mother-Artists.

What you might have missed

Elizabeth Berget tells the powerful story of a chance encounter with a neighbor that changed her perspective on hospitality, Jesus’ own interruptions, and the Ministry of Availability:

“Eventually, we got the all-clear from the police. I walked Alex home. His mother greeted us at the door with a quiet thanks and tear-filled eyes. Alex and his family moved shortly after that. We never saw him again. 

But his words—a house with lights on—have stayed with me ever since.”

Read Elizabeth’s unforgettable essay here: Lights-On Love.

Steph Ebert explores her family’s experience of the tensions raised by South African loadshedding, wondering how God’s mercy can still shine where injustice reigns:

"We live on a piece of land between two communities that were separated for years by the apartheid government. We’re living here on purpose, trying to figure out what it means to build a home that is welcoming to all of our neighbors. It sounds very noble, but sometimes life feels like a question on a test that God is posing to me.

One that I feel I am constantly failing. It looks deceptively simple: 'Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.' But what does that even mean, God?"

Dive into Steph’s probing, prophetic essay here: Mercy’s Light.

For every mother who’s ever lost her temper (which is all of us), Holly Forseth offers the honest story of learning to listen to her anger & what it wanted to reveal to her:

“Looking back at that exhausted mom, I have so much grace. All of the typical new mother struggles were real, but there is one issue that I am fairly certain lay at the root of my anger.

I never meant to sacrifice myself to care for my children, but that is exactly what happened. At some point I came to believe that to mother well, I needed to attend to my children’s every need while denying my own.

What I didn’t understand was that there are infinite paths to good motherhood and exactly zero of them ask a mother to leave herself behind.”

Read Holly’s essay here (and enjoy her hat-tip title to everyone’s favorite dog-sipping-coffee-amongst-flames meme): It’s Fine. Everything’s Fine. Except I Lit the Fire.

Christmas and New Year’s are barely in the rearview, but Easter is already peeking around the corner. How can we navigate family dynamics and competing holiday traditions with grace? Julie Walsh invites us to see God’s deeper tug below the surface:

“Parental responsibility is a mundane but necessary pull. We mothers go through seasons when every holiday feels like an impossible calculation. I remember trying to pile them onto my too-full plate. Running the gauntlet at home with multiple babies and toddlers, exhausted, doing the best I could, and still feeling embarrassed to turn up late to dinner. Struggling to feed and care for my small children while also feeding myself and trying to engage with the people around me. Sitting in a darkened room nursing a baby while listening to muffled laughter and my own stomach rumbling.

Other sorts of changing family dynamics can also make for pulls: combining families and dividing families and accounting for the traditions and expectations of each. Moving and traveling, or growing too large or too small, to do things as you’ve always done. All of that can be touchy enough. But then there are the pulls you don’t expect or ever want—the illnesses, the deaths, even a pandemic—the brutal realities that must somehow be met in a healthy way.

There is just so much to balance, to figure out, to accommodate.”

Read the rest at The Pull of The Holidays.

Kelly Sankowski weaves a poetic perspective on pregnancy and church—what it means to be a growing, changing, breathing Body:

I must nourish this growth
with my own Body and Blood,
waiting for the hour
when my time will come.

When I must expand even more
and let the Spirit draw near.

There will be pain;
there will be blood;
there will likely be tears.

For indeed,
without them,
no new life could appear.

Read the whole piece here: Reflections of a Pregnant Church.

If you like what you read at Mothering Spirit, we’d love if you’d share this Substack with a friend who needs encouragement in parenting—or a place to pray in the midst of busy days. Thank you for supporting our writers by sharing their work, following us on Instagram or Facebook, or supporting us on Patreon.