Dear stay-at-home mom,

I am sure you’ve heard them—the comments, unintentional as they may be, regarding your role as a stay-at-home mom . . . 

“What do you do all day?”

“Doesn’t it feel mindless?”

Or the underlying assumption that it mustn’t be difficult, that this life is the easier road taken.

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These comments can sting, can make you feel the urge to defend your choice to stay home. You respect those women who choose to go back to work or financially have to go back to work and are making sacrifices of their own that you recognize you cannot fully understand. Apart from that, now that you’re knee-deep in this role called stay-at-home mom, you have come to realize that being a stay-at-home mom? It is anything but mindless.

It is one filled with sacrifice and devotion for your children and your family, so often you’re called to put others before yourself.

This role is anything but flashy and often isn’t a visible position our culture would marvel at. It is not what our society would call extraordinary. But within this role, there is extraordinary found in the ordinary, wonder found in the mundane . . . God just asks of us to look for it. And isn’t that how Jesus came into this world to save it? In the most ordinary (yet extraordinary) of ways? As a child, into a family, by a mother, in a lowly manger.

I am here to encourage you that while being a SAHM can feel tiresome, relentless at times, misunderstood by the outside world, lonely, and downright hard—this role is a calling from God. It draws us closer to Christ, asking us to humble ourselves, molding our hearts into a servant’s heart. We are asked to lay down our own desires and put others around us first. We’re asked to take on a unique set of challenges that you’ve so courageously taken on.

And, while it can so often feel unseen . . . I see you mama. And, more importantly, God sees you.

God sees you are pouring into your children in their most formative years. That you are nurturing their minds, bodies, and their souls. That these seeds you are sowing? In time, there will be a beautiful harvest. That in the messiness, there is beauty and a love you’ve never known. No investment you make now is ever wasted.

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And whatever you have sacrificially laid aside in this time in your life, that you’ve put on pause—whether it’s a career, going back to school, or whatever else (because stay-at-moms have aspirations separate from their children, too)—God has that. It will come in its time. And these years are years you will never get back and you one day will look back and see that your choice to stay home molded you into someone more Christ-like. You’ll look into your children’s eyes and realize God has you right where you were meant to be.

“He must become greater, I must become less” (John 3:30).