Memory-Making Mom: Building Traditions That Breathe Life Into Your Home by Jessica Smartt

Author:Jessica Smartt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: religion, parenting
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

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A family that is only about the family is missing out.

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But a family that is only about the family is missing out. The Lord reminds me that my clenched-fist way of life isn’t safe; it’s sad. In fact, C. S. Lewis said:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.3

See, I have it backward. I sometimes feel in my mixed-up mind that we “have to” serve, but no—we get to. Real, deep, abiding joy of the purest kind is hiding just around the corner in our acts of love.

Kristen Welch has lived this. She and her husband sold their home and moved to a smaller one. They scrimped and saved, not for a family vacation but to travel with their children back and forth from Ethiopia, running a nonprofit that gives dignifying work to women in poverty. In her excellent book Raising World Changers in a Changing World, Kristen describes what it’s been like for her family to sacrifice so much. Spoiler alert: it’s been incredible:

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