Strength for today.

Today could be rightfully called: Laura and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I'm not gonna lie... I've had better days. It started off wrong and the whole thing ended up in a heaping mess of rotten attitudes, tantrums, and not much love being shown from anyone to anyone else. As my husband likes to say: "Mother said there'd be days like this." 

I just see it so profoundly. The fact that there is nothing I can do to guarantee my kids' growing up into semi-decent human beings, much less their salvation. When I am tempted to think that things are okay, that somehow I've found that one thing that will make them all behave, it all goes away in one short twelve-hour span of time. 

I can give my best, be consistent, do all the right things, and still it is not enough. I am not enough. I do not have it in me to change myself, let alone change my kids. I am weak, frail, made of nothing but dust. I mess up, I trip, I fall flat on my face. We are a broken family. Broken parents, broken kids. 

But isn't this why God sent His Son? To save us. To lavish His grace upon us. To pick up our pieces and mend us into wholeness. To fill in our large, gaping holes of frailty with Himself. To carry us through. Even (especially) on the hardest days of all.

So on this day that ended in tears, both the kids' and mine, I will remember: 

He is here. He is gracious. He is enough.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

1 Corinthians 12:9, 10