“The deal is — Motherhood isn’t sainthood and we’re all a bunch of sinners here and don’t let anyone tell you any different — pushing something out of your womb doesn’t make you a better woman. Real Womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father. Someone write that on a card with a bouquet of flowers. We all need that.

We all need that for the days that we hated our mothers — or hated being a mother.

When no room was big enough to find peace and no clock could tick fast enough to just get the day over with, and the truth is, facades only end up suffocating us all and it’s only telling the truth that lets you breathe –

and there really were days that felt pretty bad and looked pretty ugly.

And maybe that’s what it really was — maybe the days were pretty and ugly. Pretty…Ugly.

The ugly beautiful of reality and love and humanity and what it means to become real.

That was what was happening: the stacks of dishes and everests of laundry and the tantrums of toddlers and teenagers and tired mamas and all the scuffed up walls down the hall and through the heart, they were all wearing down the plastic of pride, wearing us down to the real wood of grace and the Cross. It really is okay.

To lose it and be found, to be rubbed the wrong way to be come the rightest way, to let all the hard times rub you down to real.”

-Ann Voskamp

“We have real difficulty here because everyone thinks of changing the world, but where, oh where, are those who think of changing themselves? People may genuinely want to be good, but seldom are they prepared to do what it takes to produce the inward life of goodness that can form the soul. Personal formation into the likeness of Christ is arduous and lifelong.”

-Richard Foster

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

-Victor Hugo