Wife, mother and in need of coffee!

For years now, I have been grieving over every single thing that I perceived as my failure as a wife, a mother and as a Christian woman. Today is the day that I am going to start treating those "failures" as wisdom-gathering experiences, and share my life with you. Self-doubt would be a word I could use frequently, were I to write an autobiography, and it certainly describes my feelings tonight. Yes, I am a homeschooling mother of four children. Yes, I am the wife of a wonderful man, whom I know loves us, even though we are often apart. And, yes, I am a woman that struggles with all the things that a woman today struggles with.

Because I know the Lord can use our weaknesses to help others, I share ours with you. While I love homeschooling, I struggle with guilt over choice of curriculum, working with my children's individual learning styles, providing sufficient extra-curricular activities, etc, etc, etc. If you homeschool then you probably get where I am coming from. If you don't, you probably still face numerous episodes of guilt over your individual circumstances. Somedays are great! I feel like I am successfully doing all those things that make me #1 Mom! Then I wake up, and realize I still need to get out of bed, make breakfast, find clean clothes, uncover the school work, score the tests I forgot about yesterday and make coffee----all before I lose my cool with some unsuspecting child. Oh yes, stop and have a meaningful quiet time with the Lord so that I do keep my cool-----which, of course, I would have done earlier if I had gone to bed on time last night, like I told myself I would.........Really need that coffee!

Now, I am sitting here again thinking I should hurry up and do what I need to so that I can get to bed on time. One of my favorite verses is Philippians 1:6 "Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ:" That is my encouragement. He really is still working on me! So that is how I am going to leave you for now. In our family we often dream about what heaven will be like. I'm pretty sure that if there is coffee in Heaven, that there, I will remember to prepare it the night before, and have the coffee pot on timer.