“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it build itself up in love.”
~Ephesians 4:15-16~

One of the things I can no longer tolerate is a disembodied spirituality. It’s not enough anymore for me to spend hours of my life reading through YouTube comments. If you’ve ever wondered if you’re the only one suffering, I suggest you stay away from places like Instagram and Facebook. Go to instead to YouTube and Reddit, where people are much more freely real. I promise you’ll find ones with all kinds of problems.

There’s such a thing as compassion fatigue. You can experience, know of, and be personally surrounded by so much suffering that your soul will gradually begin to shut down. The human being can only take so much, and that “so much” is actually quite a lot to be sure. I can tell you with certainty that there is also such a thing as compassion anemia, where there’s not enough blood in your body to hold the love in your heart. Believe me, I have tried to ignore it, to bind up my heart and make myself as small as humanly possible, hoping shrinking myself down would be the cure for what ails me.

In the earlier days of motherhood, I’d come home from walking the empty streets. I remember seeing the blogs and entrepreneurship of women. They were simultaneously managing marriages, young children, homes, and personal-hobbies-turned-businesses. I wondered where they got their freedom, not in regards to time, but in their personal consciences. It’s not like these were secular women. They called themselves Christians. Surely they weren’t doing it all. Something was suffering. Something always does.

I was taught to be on guard against the siren calls of Satan. I remember a conversation I once had with another young mom and pastor’s wife. She was telling me how she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for others, how she wished she could do more and not be so inwardly focused on just her own life. I remember the feeling and the ways that I dealt with it. Mostly I just told myself that there was nothing more important I could be doing than raising my children. They needed me there, every minute of every day.

Discontentment with marriage and motherhood was the primary sign and symptom to watch out for. This is where the devil would get his foot in the heart’s door, to steal your joy, to kill deep love, and to ultimately destroy the entirety of your calling and personhood. The way I saw it, while I understood there were such things as joy and Christian freedom and Law and Gospel and liberty, there were only two choices when it came to my life: Keep watch, or fail to be the wife and mother God had called you to be.

Call it pride, call it sin, that the world religion of grace and mercy became for me the total opposite. If something wasn’t right, then there was something wrong with you, with me. In the darkest of moments I only had God, whatever figments and words of Jesus that still remained in my mind. I thought I was called to be holy and suffer. Keep going. Keep working. Do not let yourself become the one who calls it quits. Keep shrinking. Keep dying. Keep telling yourself this is what God’s good and gracious will for you looks like.

In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan writes, “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.” Indeed, the mighty chains are heavy.

How many times in a life can a person wander far from God? The more I live, O bless the Lord, the more the scales just keep on falling. It’s embarrassing to me to see the obvious ways I got things wrong. I want to curl up into his lap and rest my head upon his chest and say to him, “Never will I leave you, Lord. Never, Jesus. Never ever. Never will I foolishly forsake you again.” There comes this proverbial breaking point, where no matter how worldly or impurely selfish it sounds to say it, you have to be real and fully true to who you are.