Dear Sara,

Someday you will be 40 and only weeks away from graduating that curly-haired girl you call your oldest; that girl who was just in grade school yesterday. Life is going to change a lot between now and then. You will move. You will travel. Some friendships will come to an end. New ones will begin. There will be a death to some dreams and the birth of new ones, and in between there will be a sense of loss. The isolation of homeschooling won’t be forever and you will find yourself again.

One day, though, you will be forty, and you will be filled with regret and doubt and mama-guilt, even though right now you don’t believe in any of those things. You will wonder if you made the right choices, did the right things, spent those fleeting years wisely. You will question every parenting decision you ever made and you will doubt yourself to no end.

I want to remind forty-year-old you that you did the best you could in those years. It’s easy for you to look back now and see all the things you could have done differently and better. You are older and wiser, with more tools and more resources for handling life. You are not the same person you were when they were little. When they were little you did what you could to make it through each day. Some days were better than others, but you were there. You were present. You loved them the best you could. And you learned. You did not stay the same. You grew and changed and so did they. You leaned hard on Christ and you confessed to them when you were wrong, and they saw that we all need Jesus.

And in these teenage years, you all continue to grow and change, and one day you will be fifty and the last one will be out of the house and you will still likely question everything because that is what mamas do. At forty, with five girls in the house, there are hormones and feelings and opinions; they are legion and they are strong. But you will survive. And you will all be stronger for the process.

Persist, dear mama, never give up. Hang on by your fingernails if necessary. Fight for those girls and fight for your marriage. Fight for the life God has called you to. He is good and He is faithful. And He is more than enough, even when you feel less than enough. Especially then, in fact.

For His Glory ~

~ Sara