“How did you do it?” my daughter asks with an exasperated sigh, the kind that expires like a thin whisper from her soul. She is weary, and the noise level is high. She plops down next to me in a chair and then leans to one side and pulls out a Lego man from under her.

It’s funny how at my age I am writing blogs about little children. Mine are grown, or are they? It seems like all four of our children revisit me in the faces of their children, in the time warp of my grandchildren’s’ melded features. I see them again, the wonder is still there, and the same chatty persistent questions repeat themselves.

“Do worms yawn?”

“What do squirrels think?”

“Does God love Satan too?”

It’s like a giant tumbleweed of time rolling over and over again and again. Only now I know how short it really is, how fleeting, like a dandelion seedling floating in the breeze. I know what seems interminable, isn’t.

My daughter’s question transports me back like a thud into the same mess and the same frenetic background of twenty years ago. How did I make it through crazy-life? How does anyone at my end cheer on someone else in the messy-mud of middle to the finish?

Mommy-hood is a big deal. It is a consuming cycle of handling “mommy come wipe me,” “my tummy doesn’t feel good,” and “why is kitty in the toilet?”

It is full of little people’s needs, of worry, guessing and not knowing. It is a thousand daily decisions and a million sighs.

Perhaps our greatest danger as moms is to be distracted by the activities of motherhood and miss the calling.

Its purpose is much higher than the clothes we wash, the food we feed or the fun we provide. It’s broader and greater than getting through and making the most of. A child is much more than love wrapped in flesh, it is a soul wrapped in robes of eternity.

True love loves the soul.

The highest calling of being a mom is both simple and terrifying.

“…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might…” 

Our purpose as moms is not just the physical wellbeing of our children, their intellectual development, or filling emotional needs, important as all of those are. Paramount is their spiritual mentorship, a work of discipleship with a goal of loving God so much that it spills onto our children. Our lives’ purpose is to point to Jesus in our everyday.

“…These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart…”

Perhaps the greatest tension for me as a mom was juxtaposing the tangible with intangible and important with vital. Perhaps my greatest regret is not always seeing the difference.

“You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.”  (Deuteronomy 6:4-7; NASB)

This is how you do it. This is how one day bleeds into another with worth and meaning. This is how you get up and go again. You look beyond.

There may be other mothers that keep the house more organized, the furniture dusted, and laundry put away. But no one else is better placed to pour eternally significant spiritual foundations into your child than you, Mom. You are divinely chosen and matched together.

Motherhood’s supreme purpose looks past brief moments and long days. It gains perspective beyond what’s visible and reaches for something invisible.

So, dear weary mama, look beyond.