Me: Livia is making me CRAZY!
Jeremy: Well, sometimes *you* make people crazy.

Can’t argue with him there.

As delightful as dark rainy mornings are, they are not my favorite when it comes to getting Livia ready for school. We’re a family of sleeper-inners. All summer long we would sleep until 9am and then we’d slowly get up and get moving. Alas, the public school system doesn’t care to start their day when the sloth-like Tredways walk through the door. They have a start time and an end time that must be respected.

Motivating my seven-year-old to complete her morning tasks and walk into first grade on time is a challenge. It’s a challenge that I often screw up entirely. I have a love/hate relationship with timeliness where each minute I seem to get more wound-up about being late. I become something of a pressure cooker and then I explode with statements like the one above. And truly, no one looks crazier than me when I’m yelling, “Livia is making me CRAZY!” Oh yeah? Well, you’re looking like a nut yourself, mama.

This morning I watched my child walk ever so slowly down the hall to meet her teacher at the door to her classroom. (She’s the same kid at home, at school and everywhere after all.) As I opened my umbrella and walked back out into the rain, I felt like weeping over my sin. I really wish I hadn’t hollered at Liv this morning. I really wish I was more creative in my approach toward her. I really wish I had handled myself with more self-control. But deep down, I *really* wish I didn’t have to apologize for my behavior, that I could be perfect on my own.

I am being drawn to Christ.

I am not drawing myself to Him.

I wish (again with the wishing) that I could approach God on my own terms. Pop open the Bible when my heart is happy and content, when I’ve delivered a skipping first-grader to school on a sun-shiny day, when I feel like I have it all together. But that would be a total lie. In my weakness I see my need for forgiveness. And the need looks something like a mountain, looming large and impossible before me. It makes me grieve because I so much want to be good without a Savior. With the utmost stubbornness, I want to do it myself. But I fall time and time again. I can’t be good all the time, or even some of the time.

The Gospel pulls my eyes away from myself and towards Jesus. The mountain of need, the giant mess of sin in my heart, becomes absolute forgiveness in Christ. His record of perfection, claimed over me and for me. It’s not something I’ve done, not something I’ve earned, but it’s given to me freely.

And can it be that I should gain

An interest in the Savior’s blood?

Died He for me, who caused His pain—

For me, who Him to death pursued?

Amazing love! How can it be,

That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?


Forgiveness, such a sweet word. As a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, an artist, I need forgiveness. I crave grace moment by moment to be a better person, to lift my head up and make sense of the day that stretches before me.

The sun is coming out just a little bit. May God give me grace to be more patient, more joyful, more creative and more gentle when I pick up Livia from school this afternoon. I want to try again, by the strength of Christ, to be the woman God has called me to be.

**The lyrics to Charles Wesley’s And Can It Be? are so so good.