A Gift for Mom! 🤍

What happens when we lose our faith? What happens when we stop believing everything happens for a reason, that all the struggles we face and the hardships we endure have no lesson tied to them, no point other than to show us how cruel life can be at times?

I can tell you what happens. I’ve been there. Some days, I’m still there.

Anger happens. When you let slip away your acknowledgement of unconditional love, your heart makes room and anger swiftly takes up residence. You begin dwelling on those who have done you wrong in the past. Grievances long ago forgiven seem to creep back into your mind and you begin to wonder how you could ever let something like that go in the first place.

You become angry with God. After all, He’s the one at the head of table dealing out the cards, right? If He truly cared, if He truly loves unconditionally, then why choose suffering?

Resentment happens. When you have no belief in a higher power, suddenly everything in your life seems wrong. You start focusing on your husband’s faults or your wife’s faults and suddenly, you’re overwhelmed by this feeling you are trapped in a marriage that has been wrong from the start. The person you’ve sworn to love until death do you part no longer understands you or values the things you do.

Guilt happens. Followed closely by doubt. Suddenly you’re surrounded by mothers or fathers who are perfect. Mothers who never burn the brownies the night before the bake sale. Fathers who never show their frustration with their child. Suddenly, the only one making any mistakes at all is you. And you start to believe you aren’t worth very much at all. You start thinking everything you do is wrong in one way or another. Then you revisit your anger one more time because why in the world would He make you a mother if He knew you couldn’t handle it?

All of these self-inflicted injuries continue to pile up until you start to feel like you’re suffocating, and you just don’t know how you’ll make it another day. But you will.

It’s a daily battle. Every day, we must choose faith. And it’s hard because for most of us, this means admitting that we cannot do everything alone. It’s admitting we don’t have all the answers. It’s admitting we need help and guidance.

Every situation in our lives gives us an opportunity to make a choice. We can choose to let stress at work affect our relationships. We can choose to let our grudges and pride poison our friendships. We can choose to cast faith aside and place the blame on everyone else.

But isn’t that one of the most beautiful aspects of faith? No matter how far we may stray, we are never truly alone. We are never out of sight. We are left to make our own mistakes and we are faced with choice whether we learn from them. And when we are ready to return, the door is open. And we quickly discover it was never closed.

So God Made a Grandmother book by Leslie Means

If you liked this, you'll love our book, SO GOD MADE A GRANDMA

Order Now!

Zabrina Vogelsang

Zabrina Vogelsang is a Work-from-Home mom who splits her time hanging out with her (best friends) beautiful twin boys and working for a software program as a Technical Writer. She is also working on starting her own event planning business (check out more here: eventseverafterllc.com). She spends her "downtime" binge watching shows on Netflix with her wonderful partner in crime and hiding out in the local library. She has a wide variety of interests which she loves writing and talking about with anyone who will listen!

I Lost My Sight at 16—But It Wasn’t the End of My Vision

In: Faith
Cross and sunset

After my father shot me, I lay in a hospital bed, and my world went dark. I was 16 years old. The injury left me completely blind. But the darkness didn’t stop there. As my physical sight disappeared, something else came into focus—the depth of the wounds I had carried long before that moment, wounds I had never fully allowed myself to see. For years, I had learned how to survive without asking too many questions. I had learned how to minimize what hurt, how to explain things away, how to keep moving forward as if everything were normal. But...

Keep Reading

Ministry Starts Inside Your Own Four Walls

In: Faith
Family around a table

When people hear the word ministry, they often think of missionaries, or the pastor who preaches every Sunday, but in our home, ministry belongs to all of us—even our kids. Growing up, I didn’t think of myself as a ministry kid. Still, when my dad packed our old Astro for the summer and we all piled in, we were on mission. Each kid had a part to play in my dad’s evangelical magic shows (yes, you read that right!). My brother would juggle, my older sister sang, my middle sister flipped the projector slides that shone pictures of Jesus on...

Keep Reading

These Holy Small Things

In: Faith, Motherhood
Children sewing at machine

My 8-year-old-daughter has recently taken up sewing, to my simultaneous delight and chagrin. My delight because I too love sewing; my chagrin because her enthusiasm often outpaces my own abilities, namely, in the undertaking of tedious projects with no pattern. Take, for example, the cloth doll diaper we designed and stitched up together. Granted, the design was fairly basic to draw up and scale. But the minuscule nature of the work, both for my hands and head, was enough to throw me into existential questioning. It was one of those moments when you wonder how the sum of your life...

Keep Reading

Life Lessons from My Grown Children

In: Faith, Motherhood
Two women's hands on teacups

“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.” – Rabindranath Tagore Quietly communing with a loved one in the early morning hours is such an intimate and precious time. Visiting with one’s grown child when all is dark and still is one of life’s purest pleasures. I remember the conversation clearly. My daughter’s husband, small children, and father were all asleep as we whispered and chatted. She and I are both fidgeters by nature, unable to be still for long. This inner restlessness must be remedied, and we are compelled by biology to...

Keep Reading

My Prayer Is Simple Now: “I Believe; Help My Unbelief.”

In: Faith
Woman sitting by water

I have spent most of my life in faith. Not circling it or analyzing it from a distance, but inside it—learning its language before I even realized I was learning it, shaping myself around it in ways that felt as natural as breathing. I was raised in Christian Science, which is a very particular kind of faith. It’s not really about “believing” in the way most people think. It’s about understanding. Aligning your thoughts with what is ultimately true about God and reality. If you can understand rightly, you can be well. If you can see clearly, healing follows. So...

Keep Reading

Your Worth Is Not Someone Else’s To Measure

In: Faith, Living
Woman looking over canyon

Insecurity is something we all carry in one form or another. For me, it has probably always looked confident and outgoing from the outside. But internally, it can feel heavy, complicated, and exhausting at times. And when someone comes along whose behavior reinforces those insecurities, it amplifies what was already there. There was someone I had hoped to genuinely connect with, but it was clear from the start that the feeling wasn’t mutual. From the beginning, their wall was up. No matter how kind I tried to be or how carefully I showed up, it never came down. Their distance...

Keep Reading

Lord, Give Me Faith Like Hannah

In: Faith
Woman walking in field with hand in wheat

Hannah knew what it was like to feel forgotten. She often clutched her empty womb and thought Surely the Lord has forgotten me.  She knew the bitter sting of feeling isolated and alone. She knew the anguish of praying day after day after day and seeing no fruit, not even a bud, from her faithfulness. Hannah knew what it was like to feel like the weight of the world was on her, and her hope may have dwindled. Even those around her did not offer encouragement. Quite the opposite—they did their best to sow seeds of discouragement. Yet Hannah pressed...

Keep Reading

God Carries Me Through the Deep Waters of Change

In: Faith, Living, Motherhood
Woman at the beach as waves come in

“Ahhh!” My underwater scream garbled in my snorkel tube as the manta ray’s cavernous mouth swept a hand’s distance from my face. My fingers tightened around the surfboard until my knuckles ached. My arms trembled. I jerked my head side to side, searching for my daughters, Mia and Megan. Recent college graduates, they had joined me on one last mother-daughter vacation before launching their adult lives. They floated easily on the vibrant Hawaiian water, relaxed, trusting. I wanted to borrow their calm. Earlier, our guide had explained that the LED lights built into the surfboard attracted plankton the way college...

Keep Reading

Faith After a Rare Disease Diagnosis

In: Faith, Motherhood
Family smiling in posed photo

My pastor frequently speaks of “kid pain” and acknowledges there’s nothing like it. I can testify to that. After nine months of uncertainty and unexplained issues following the birth of our now 4-year-old daughter, Harlow, we finally received her diagnosis of Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Complex Deficiency (PDCD), a life-limiting mitochondrial disease with no cure and no FDA-approved treatments. It was heartbreaking. In moments like these, a parent can fall into complete desperation. You go through a range of emotions almost too fast to name: fear for your child’s life; anxiousness about how much time you’ll get with them; overwhelming grief. And...

Keep Reading

What If I Don’t Hear God’s Voice?

In: Faith
Woman with folded hands looking up

There have been many times over the years when I’ve heard others share stories of how the Lord spoke to them or gave them a sign. Seashells scattered along a sandy beach, numbered to represent how many children they would have. A quiet walk in the park, followed by a clear sense that another little one was coming. What a blessing, I think, when I hear and read their stories. I often wonder how much more faith they must have than I do—to know with such certainty that what they heard was truly God speaking. I listen, I smile, and...

Keep Reading