It Doesn’t All Depend on Me

Michelle Hamel ponders the struggle to remember that pouring love into the people in our lives, especially our children, does not depend only on ourselves.

A couple of weeks ago, after a particularly frustrating afternoon that was marked by feelings of inadequacy and failure, I was able to escape outside for a quick walk. Usually I listen to a podcast while I circle around our neighborhood, but on that particular day, I felt so emotionally discombobulated that I started the walk in silence.

On the surface, the source of my frustration seemed clear: my own tiredness, two rambunctious 4-year-old grandsons who struggled to listen, and the daily OCD behaviors of my special needs son that came to a boiling point all highlighted my own impatience and left me feeling like I had no control over anything. I felt like a failure.

As I shared my heart with God, other situations in my life where I felt inadequate and a lack of control also started to bubble up. I realized that some of my feelings were bigger than the issues of the moment. While it took a quiet Adoration hour the next morning to pray and journal to get to the root of where my feeling like a failure ultimately came from, talking to God on that walk kept my hurting heart open. And He had a little something to say to me, even though He didn't take away all the hard feelings as I walked my usual loop.

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After I spilled out everything to God and kept walking in silence, trying to take in the beauty of the spring world around me in an effort to calm my nervous system, I had a thought that I'm pretty sure came from Him: "I need to let God love them through me."

I realized that when I start to feel inadequate as I try to care for the people I love, I begin to feel like everything depends on me. That I'm the one who needs to fill them and fix them (which is a lie, and totally impossible, and just makes me feel more inadequate and more like a failure ... and perpetuates a negative-thinking spiral.)

The Burden of Enough

The reality is, I'm not enough for anyone, and I'm certainly not enough for everyone in my life at every given moment! That's God's job, and I can certainly never be successful at that!

As mothers, we pour into our family in so many ways that they never even see. We want them to know that they are thought of and loved so often in our minds and hearts. Yet, there are moments when all that we do never feels like enough. Those times when we lose our patience and say things we wish we hadn't seem to speak louder than all the love we try to pour into them. Discouragement can slip in and make us feel hopeless, like we are trying to fill up an ocean with a cracked plastic pail.

But like I learned on my walk, "enough" isn't supposed to come from me. It's supposed to come from God through me.

A Parent Who Tried to Be Enough

There's a parent in the Bible who tried to be enough for his daughter. Jairus was one of the rulers of the synagogue who was searching for Jesus to beg Him to come and save his dying daughter. Jairus does find Him, and Jesus agrees to come. Jairus must have felt such relief, but also a sense of extreme urgency to get Jesus to his daughter before it was too late.

But then there's a shift in the focus of the story. Jesus stops to minister to the hemorrhaging woman. I thought about how Jairus was carrying such a heavy emotional burden; it must have been so incredibly hard to stop, with the worry he had for his daughter. Even though Jairus had sought out Jesus, I think that Jairus still felt that it was all up to him to get Jesus to his daughter in order for it to be enough and to save her.

In the midst of this interruption, Jairus’ worst fears came true. People from Jairus' house arrive and tell him his daughter has died. Grief must have permeated Jairus along with the sense that he had failed his daughter by not getting Jesus to her in time (see Mark 5: 21-24,35-43).

But we all know that's not the end of the story. Because Jesus' abilities go far beyond our limited human strength.

This little girl's healing came from Jesus through Jairus' efforts to love and care for his daughter. Because it came from Jesus, it was more than enough, and her healing transcended interruptions, hopelessness, and even death.

And this gives us hope as parents. God, not Google, needs to be our first stop when our kids are facing physical, emotional, or spiritual situations that seem impossible for us to fix. We need to remember that whenever our best efforts fall short, that is exactly where God is waiting and where His power shines the brightest. We do not fight for our children on our own … and that’s something that I need God to remind me, over and over again!

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