What if God called you honey?

“I live with an embered faith”

This week on Mothering Spirit

Hilary Yancey gives words to what so many of us have felt: how to pray when we are no longer certain what we believe.

“Ask me someday if I have ever seen God send $100 to an empty bank account with no explanation. Ask me someday if I have watched God pour breath back into my child on the floor of his room. Ask me someday and I will tell you how God proved me wrong in the best ways. 

But God’s proving is also here, in the burnt down ashes of the building, when my sure belief of what good thing would happen does not…”

Read the whole essay here: Uncomfortable Conversations: Meeting God in the Present Moment.

Rachel Barga Simpson shares a tender poem-prayer about God’s loving care:

What if God called you honey? 
Spoon-fed you chicken noodle, 
pressed a patchwork quilt across your lap 
before you thought to ask? 

Read the whole poem here: What If God Called You Honey?

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This Week’s Recommendation

Each Friday we feature more work from our writers. This week we shared an excerpt from Anna Bonnema’s Creative God: Awaken Your God-Given Imagination:

In today’s 21st-century world, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that imagination for its own sake does not add easily quantifiable value to our lives. Tangible activities, like working extra hours to perfect that work presentation, creating the most Instagrammable dessert, or renovating one more thing in our homes—those tasks add value. They earn us cyber points, recognition from our bosses, or likes on Instagram. Creating something for its own sake, without intent to share—surely there is no value there, right? So, we neatly pack up our imaginations and relegate them to dusty shelves.

But, is it really true that there is no value in imagining? Is imagining truly a frivolous activity, a waste of time? 

To find our answer, we need to pause and ask a more critical question. What about our God? 

Read the full excerpt here: Creative God.

In Your Words

We know social media is a place where mothers of all ages and stages share from the heart about their joys and challenges. Each week we hope to bring you a glimpse into one mother’s life—in the hopes that her words might resonate with your own story.

This week’s post comes from

Emily Stimpson Chapman

(@emilystimpsonchapman on Instagram):

“Why would anyone do that to themselves?” Someone asked that about Ellie’s adoption recently. Not to my face. But the question got back to me.⁣

Never mind that Ellie was Toby’s biological sibling. This person still couldn’t fathom why any sane person would adopt a third baby so soon after adopting a second. She looked at our life, and all she saw was the hard. And the hard is real. I won’t argue with that. Our life is chaotic and exhausting. I constantly feel like a failure. Not just at one thing, but at everything. Motherhood has laid bare my weaknesses and made clear my limitations. It has shown me that I am not who I thought I was. I am less. Much, much less.⁣

Still, there is so much more to our life than the hard. There is dancing, running, and out of control giggling. There is digging, throwing, crawling, and clapping. There is snuggling, kissing, and sleepy heads resting heavy on our shoulders. There is less time for working and no time for fine dining, but so much more time for marveling—at water and rocks and sticks and leaves, at morning doves in their nest and hawks in the sky, at flowers that grow wild by the road, and at moons that still glow in the mid-morning light.⁣

But more than all of that, there is time for marveling at the children, at Toby, Becket, and Ellie, struggling, growing, learning, falling, changing, becoming. Chris and I get to be there for it all. We get to help them learn who they are and discover how God calls them to live. We get to clap when they crawl and hold them when they fall. We get to make them feel safe—in this home and in this world. We get to show them how beautiful they are, what great dignity they have, and how much they are loved. And that work is a gift. Every last bit of it. No matter how imperfectly we do it.⁣

So, if you too want to know why Chris and I “did this” to ourselves, it’s because our children are worth it. They are worth every sleepless night, every ache in my back, every mess in this house. They are worth every sacrifice, every struggle, every act of self-denial. They are worth it all.⁣

So are you, by the way. So is everyone. I pray my children know that someday. And I pray you know it, too.

Want to share your words here? Tag @mothering.spirit in your post on social media & we’ll let you know if we’d like to feature it in a future Substack.

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