Some days go off without a hitch. We’re five minutes early to school, no one battled anyone else to the near death over the bathroom, homework is finished and tucked away in backpacks, and it’s easy for me to feel like I’ve got this mom thing down. These days are rare. When our girls snuggle up with each other and giggle reading books together it’s easy for me to think we’re doing something really well and, that as parents, we’re raising really good girls.

Then there are mornings that I find myself pushing a boulder up a steep hill just to get to the car. Sharp tones are stabbing each other with unkind words, someone is crying, no one owns shoes, and I think to myself, what a failure you are.

What I’ve done in each of these moments is substituted myself into a place of imagined authority and credited myself to outcomes which are not mine to own. In the best of our moments, God is sovereign. In the worst of our moments, God is sovereign.

The Bible says in James 1:17 that, “every good and perfect gift is from above,” meaning that every good grace that comes our way is from the Lord. The Bible also says in John 16:33 that, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble.” Jesus knew that our days wouldn’t go off without hitches. He knew that the enemy would seek to disrupt our focus, distract us from obedience and righteousness, weigh us down with troubles that would keep our eyes from being fixed on the grace of the cross. But Jesus finishes this verse by saying, “but take heart! I have overcome the world.”

The rhythms of my heart can’t be so closely attached to the outcome of our circumstances or I’ll forever be ebbing and flowing with the tide of inconstant outcomes.

The points that I feel like such a failure, my lowest places, are the places where the grace of God redeems my shortcomings, and floods our life with His peace. When I release my hold on the expectations I have and give the moment to Him, yielding to His expectations for me in that moment, I’m given the opportunity to bear testimony to the redeeming work of Christ to my family. My flesh would think that if only I’d prepped lunches the night before, if only I’d lined up the shoes, maybe we should all wake up forty-five minutes earlier and we’d be able to avoid such catastrophe, but these are horizontally minded solutions, not vertically minded willingness to be aligned with the image of Christ in the midst of His moments, when they come at the cost of a disruption to my day. When I fall into the false notion that the moments are mine, I fail to see the truth that they have always been His. In the worst of the moments I have the opportunity to demonstrate the grace and love of Christ to my family, and in doing so keep with the rhythm’s He has ordained for our life.

Jesus encourages us to “take heart,” for He has “overcome the world.” In the short term, Satan is the prince and power of this realm. He has been cast here, not to hell, He and his demons are here. This is confirmed in Job 1: 6-7, “One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” So what does Jesus mean when he says, he has “overcome the world?”

In the garden, Eve chose the fruit that God commanded them not to eat, ate from it, and gave it to Adam who willingly disobeyed the command God had given him, ushering sin into the world. At this point man was forever divided from God, unable to be reconciled to God because of sin. When God addressed each of the characters from this story found in Genesis 3, He said to the serpent in verse 15, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” The serpent was animated by Satan, who sought to disrupt unity with God and His creation. It would seem, for a time, that Satan was successful. However, God’s words to the serpent are the first messianic prophecy, or proto-evangelium, that we find in scripture concerning Christ. God said, “He will crush your head,” referring to the offspring of the woman who would be born of the Holy Spirit, not man’s seed, meaning the child she bore would not be born into man’s likeness, into sin, but the first and only ever birth in which the child was born into the image of God. Between Adam’s creation and Adam’s first child, sin entered the world, the Bible says that Adam was made in God’s image, but that his son was born into his likeness, or born into a sin state that, from birth, every human is helpless to rectify on their own.

Enter Christ. Through His death and resurrection Christ has overcome the world. His overcoming of the world means that He has redeemed, for the believer, the sin state that each of us are born into and condemned by at birth. The long-suffering love of God allows the world to endure for a time so that all who will come to faith in Christ may be able to do so, but God’s long suffering nature is not all suffering and one day He condemn the world for its sin.

When the rhythms of our home fall out of sync, when our melody is more like nails on a chalk board, whatever is stored up in the base of my heart is what flows out of me into the midst of those moments and pours out all over my family. Do I trust that this disrupted rhythm is an attempt of the enemy to distract me from the calling of obedience to emulate the testimony of Christ’s death and resurrection to my husband and my children -my first ministry as a wife and mom- or am I too distracted by the shortcomings of what my expectations were that I allow a flesh led disruption to the faith and obedience to Christ, which I profess, to be the testimony that I bear to my family? My will or His?

Today is the day of salvation. If you haven’t received the overcoming work of Christ by grace through faith, trust Him today. The good days and the bad days are all opportunities for the love of Christ to be reflected by our conduct and there is no greater peace than trusting that the days belong to Him and that He has already overcome the troubles we face in this world.

God bless.