It's Just a Season

Design by Jeslyn Lanier

“It’s just a season,” they say. A mass of mini seasons really. Seasons of tinies and toddlers and tweens and teens. But motherhood is not as much a season as it is a journey. A journey to grow your children, your heart, your spirit, your faith. A journey toward a calling that you know is there but sometimes gets lost or forgotten in the throes of motherhood. Lost in the days of playing, schooling, cleaning, and cooking. In the days of feeling like you’re doing it all wrong, and the ones where you’re doing okay. The days of washing hands and hair and bodies and sniffing clean heads and nursing babies. The days that sometimes seem endless but somehow fly by. When we’re drowning in peanut butter fingers and runny noses. When our “go nowhere clothes” become our uniform and our mantra becomes “mama don’t get out much!”

This is in fact a season. A blink, a vapor but it’s hard to see that when we're in its midst. It’s a messy, beautiful, wonderfully difficult season with giggles and laughter stirred with cries and tears. It’s one that will be missed the moment that it’s gone. 

Learning in the Season

Sometimes when we’re in the mundane of everyday life, we lose sight of the bigger picture. Sometimes this season becomes our focus, our identity. There are gems of knowledge, wisdom, patience, humility, unconditional love, and compassion to be gained and learned in the everyday of mothering. There are opportunities to be grown and sanctified through the sparkly eyed baby teachers looking up at us. 

The Lord will use these years of days to shape us and mold us into something, into someone so much better than we are today. He will use the years of mothering to solidify the further calling He has for us. The calling for the years after the diapers and potty training and homework and attitudes. One day this part of our calling will be finished. It will be time for the kids to move on and move out. Time for what we’re being prepared for today, to come to life.

The Future

While we’re in this season of mothering we can learn to dance between living in the present and looking to the future. We can be aware of how the trials of today are transforming us for tomorrow. We can see glimmers of what is to come and what is being formed in us and in our children. Because just like we have a calling, our children do also. The Lord has created each one of us for a purpose and part of the mom call is to recognize strengths and weaknesses in our children, to pull out and magnify their strengths, while also encouraging improvement in weaknesses, to instruct them and help them walk in and toward their call, and to instill in them a passion and a desire to follow after Jesus. 

So let us breathe in every second of this season of mom life and see every moment as a gift. Let us remember that there is life beyond the yoga pants and we will be better for thriving and becoming. Let us be thankful that our Savior wastes nothing and we will be stronger women on the other side. We will be formed, sanctified, and ready to walk boldly into the next season.