Heart Health for Mothers

You know you need time alone, but have you committed yourself to getting it? I encourage you to stick with your effort to have time to yourself each day by rising before your children do, or sitting still while they are napping, or relaxing instead of doing chores at least 30 minutes per day.

Why? Because you need to be in tune with your heart.

What are your burdens? What are your passions? What are your sins? What are your spiritual gifts? Who should you be serving? Who should you be forgiving? How will  you lose weight, gain weight, or get fit? Should you go back to school or back to work? Why do you feel lonely, sad, angry, confused? Why are you so tired and spiritually dry? What will you do with that fire of desire to follow your dreams?

Without time alone, absorbing God’s word, praying, and pondering, it’s hard to answer these questions and secure peace or direction. Having time alone is a sign of maturity. Babies, children and teens hate being alone, generally speaking. Adults recognize that solitude is beneficial for the soul. God built us to crave human interaction, but he also built us to crave him. If you’re feeling  hopeless or restless, you need more of God, not more things, not more girls’ nights or pedicures, not more food or wine, not more entertainment.

Soul restoration is essential for busy mothers and it’s up to you to ensure you are refreshed inside. Create a nook for yourself on your porch or in your living room with your Bible and a scented candle. Sit there every day. Put your earplugs in, close your eyes and allow worship music to refresh your heart. Most of all, realize you deserve the pleasures and benefits of solitude. Your heart is a special place. Christ resides there.

¹⁷ And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; ^18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

²⁰ Now glory be to God, who by his mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of—infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes. Ephesians 3.17-20