When was the last time you felt overwhelmed?  I know I have had several moments of overwhelm in the last few weeks!  Motherhood is a vocation that is very prone to moments of overwhelm!  It's a challenging vocation in and of itself and now more than ever, mothers have limitless opportunities vying for their attention.  Everywhere you look, there are things that you will feel like you should be doing.  And even if you are able to pair things down to just the essentials, motherhood by itself can be an overwhelming task.  Where do you turn when you are overwhelmed?  I know I tend to throw up my hands and say, "I can't do this" and blame others for the overwhelm instead of doing the only thing that will actually help me.  The only real and lasting solution to overwhelm is Jesus.  No amount of self-care will actually solve overwhelm.  It might help.  When you're out, everything is great, but when you come back home, nothing has changed and the overwhelm just comes right back like a flood.  However, Jesus is a lasting solution.  He can grab our hand, comfort us, change our mindset, and fix our focus.  He can actually change things, unlike a shopping trip or trip to the salon.  

I think we can all agree that we want to create a bank of beautiful childhood memories with our children!  It can be challenging though as we as a society get busier and busier.  As our children get older and get involved in more activities, we can find that the bulk of our interactions with our children are telling them to get ready for the next thing.  "Hurry up! Change for practice!  Grab a snack, we need to leave in 5 minutes!"  Obviously, we don't want our children to just remember us as the one who was always telling them to get going.  We want to create lasting beautiful memories with them!

Motherhood is hard.  It's one of the most important and wonderful things you will ever do, but like most things that really matter, it's hard.  Unfortunately our society tries to avoid hard things.  We like to shop on our phones instead of actually walking through a store to pick up our groceries.  (And for the record, I'm not bashing grocery pick-up.  I think it's amazing and I use it all the time.)  We have all sorts of modern conveniences to make our life easier (washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, cars)  There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but it's the mentality that we try to avoid hard things that is damaging to motherhood.