Faithfulness in All Things

We are moms–we clean up the messes! Over and over again. Little ones = messes. Big ones = more messes (no personal experience with that yet, but I’ve been told/warned).

I have to share the latest mess, which, ironically, was created in an attempt to do some deep cleaning. Because it was my two year old doing the cleaning. Yikes.

I had set her up in front of the TV with a Clifford episode so I could give my four year old a bath. Well, the four year old was not cooperating, and it took a little too long. By the time I got back to our family room, my two year old had abandoned the big red dog. I heard gleeful sounds coming from our downstairs half bath. I opened the door to find her scrubbing the bathroom floor.

She has seen mom clean with water, soap, brushes, and an abundance of paper towel (we’re far from a green household, sorry). Since she’s a resourceful girl, she was making use of the materials accessible to her. She had somehow pulverized our bar of hand soap and taken a roll of toilet paper off the holder. On the floor, clumps of soap and wads of toilet paper were were floating in a lake of…yes, toilet water, and she was gleefully swishing the water around with the toilet bowl brush.

I didn’t really scold her. She was trying to clean after all. One of her favorite things to do.

I’ve been doing some reading on the fruit of the Spirit. By “reading” I mean a sporadic 5 or 10 minutes squeezed in between mom duties. But God can bless even those brief, disjointed moments. Particularly when such a moment is followed closely by a “Noooo–my two year old is scrubbing the bathroom floor with the toilet bowl brush and toilet water!!!” moment.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. (Galatians 5: 22-23)

It is faithfulness, I realized, that enables me to keep putting one foot in front of the other on days like these. It gives me staying power. Faithfulness makes it possible for me to fulfill my responsibilities as a mom, day after day, and–let’s be honest–mess after mess. It keeps me steadfast.

I’ve been reading that faithfulness means steadfast fidelity to God, to our profession of faith in Jesus as our Savior. It also means steadfast fidelity to the people God has put in our lives, and all the many duties we carry out on their behalf.

In and of myself, I can’t be faithful the way God requires or my family needs. But I have supernatural power from a God who loves me. He has put everything in place for me to be faithful to him, to my beautiful little mess-makers, and to the responsibilities I must fulfill.

The Holy Spirit gives me faith, and enables me to hold fast to God and His Word. The Holy Spirit empowers me to carry out faithfully every task in this day-to-day, mess-to-mess adventure we call motherhood. This is the fruit of faithfulness that He produces in me.

And he produces the same fruit in you. It shows itself in “little” ways: cleaning up for the twentieth time, and knowing that if it happens yet again tomorrow, we will be on it with the disinfectant. It shows itself in bigger ways: guiding our kids in learning about God’s love for them, a steadfast love that demonstrated the ultimate loyalty to us: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

Thanks to Him, we are faithful Moms.