Are You Running on Empty?

Raising kids is relentless work. There’s joy, too—lots of it—but when the sink is piled high with dishes, the infant is teething, the grade schooler keeps singing the same five bars of “Home on the Range,” you’re fighting a stomach bug, and the whole household is running late again, joyful feelings can seem tauntingly elusive. My friend Beth calls parenting “the only job you’ll be consistently and completely terrible at, but can’t quit.”

Preach.

Yet between the throes of exhaustion and the profound joys that come with parenting, many of us find ourselves longing for something deeper. Something more. You might remember the closeness you felt to Jesus in years past, back in high school or college or when you were first married or before you landed that full-time job that turned out to require eighty hours a week— back when you had time to give to God. Or maybe you’ve never really had a relationship with God before, not in any sort of established or consistent way, but you sense there’s something missing in your life. You long for depth, for connection, for your spirit to unite with something richer and more lasting than the ephemeral everyday.

As I searched for help, for ways to draw closer to Jesus in the intense crucible that is parenthood, I discovered two things:

First, there is a proven way to commune with Jesus and integrate the love of God into daily life. (The gospel really is good news, folks!) That way is time-tested and almost universally accepted throughout Christendom, whether you’re Roman Catholic, marginally Methodist, or decidedly nondenominational. This path is the journey of spiritual disciplines: soul-care practices like prayer and fasting, solitude and silence, worship and community. Each of these is a biblical, time-honored, ancient way to open our hearts to the things of God.

The bad news came second, as I quickly discovered that the bulk of the writings on spiritual practices comes from priests, monks, and nuns, each of whom lacks every parent’s primary personal concern: children. Other great guides came from men who primarily worked outside the home. Even modern classics like Richard Foster’s A Celebration of Discipline and Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (both of which have been quite formative in my own life) were written by men who served as pastors and academics, not primary caregivers to young kids.

Each of these people, to one degree or another, had what every caregiving parent is in extremely short supply of: time. George MacDonald could encourage me to pray for two hours every morning and Teresa of Avila could plead with me to retreat in solitude to be with Jesus, but I was all YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIFE.

If I spent two hours in prayer every morning, I’d have to get up at 3 a.m., and even then, it would be interrupted by at least one nursing session and seventeen requests for juice. If I retreated in solitude to be with Jesus, my kids would either starve to death or burn our house to the ground. (Look, Mommy! I can turn the oven on!)

Over and over again in Scripture we read of Jesus—our definitive model for what it is to be human and what it looks like to be in faithful relationship to the Father—withdrawing to a quiet place to pray. He goes up on a mountain. He takes a boat out away from the crowds. He sits in a garden. I rarely get to do any of that.

If I was going up a mountain, I’d have an alternately hungry and poopy baby in a carrier on my back. If I took a boat out, I’d spend all my time making sure everyone had a proper personal flotation device and no one hung too far out over the side. If I was sitting in a garden, I’d be answering a thousand of my older son’s questions about what that flower was, why the snail was hiding in its shell, and how come he couldn’t pour dirt down my shirt. Quiet places indeed.

There seemed to be only two real options for practicing spiritual disciplines as a parent:

1) It was impossible—at least until the kids either went to school full-time or graduated and moved out.

2) It was possible if I just tried harder.

The first option couldn’t be true. I don’t believe in a God who sets us up for failure or holds out spiritual gifts that will only be attainable if we head to a nunnery. God is intensely practical and interested in the ordinary, everyday, mundane elements of our lives. It’s why he chooses bread and wine to represent his body and blood in the sacrament of Communion, and plain old water for holy baptism. It’s why he came down from his heavenly throne to take on flesh—skin and bones and lungs and teeth—to live among us in the person of Jesus. God loves the ordinary, the everyday, the routine, and chooses to bless them, to make them divine.

So if the first option wasn’t true, then the second must be: these spiritual disciplines were possible for me as a parent of young kids if I simply tried harder. Right? But there seemed to be a trap there as well.

Often our churches—mine included—emphasize trying harder. Doing more. Being better. This focus strips the gospel of its central truth: Jesus came down to rescue us because we could not save ourselves.

If the spiritual disciplines modeled and taught in Scripture are given by God for our good and his glory, then they simply could not be about just trying harder, or they’d be the opposite of the good gifts God wants to give us through them. God is about grace, not works. Love, not exhausted striving. Our obedience, properly ordered, flows from a connection with the God of life; it’s not something we do for him as a way to earn his favor. As Hudson Taylor once put it, “God’s work done in God’s way never lacks God’s supplies.”

Plus, parenthood itself has enough exhausted striving. Who among us hasn’t been so tired our eyelashes hurt? Who hasn’t been woken up at an ungodly hour by a toddler speaking the most dreaded four words: “I just threw up…”? Who among us hasn’t done more heavy lifting in a single day of parenting than in four years of high school gym class?

Even if I wanted to, I simply couldn’t muscle more hours or willpower into my day. Sure, there were hours I could use better than I commonly did (social media addiction, anyone?), but there were also many days when surviving until that magical hour when both kids were finally asleep felt Herculean. If someone told me God was disappointed that I didn’t also fast, pray, and read sixteen chapters of Scripture that day, I’d wonder if that God really loved me at all.

But perhaps there is a third way. And maybe that third way has something to do with grace—that spiritual practices are possible for anyone at any time, even parents, because the God who created us and loves us wants us to draw near and has provided tools to help us do so. Perhaps that same God is already at work within us, sanctifying us through the constant daily grind of loving littles.

Perhaps the God who created my family and yours gave us these children to help us on the road to holiness, not to get in the way. It is entirely possible that because God wants us to be holy, he can and will make us so, even in this particularly exhausting season, if we will only let him.

This post is an excerpt from Almost Holy Mama: Life-Giving Spiritual Practices for Weary Parents, copyright 2019 Rose Publishing, used by permission of the author. Almost Holy Mama releases June 3, 2019. You can find it wherever books are sold.

Courtney Ellis is a mom of three, speaker, and author of Uncluttered: Free Your Space, Free Your Schedule, Free Your Soul and serves as a Presbyterian pastor in southern California, alongside her husband, Daryl. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, or at www.courtneybellis.com.

Photograph © Liana Mikah, used with permission