4 Keys to Finding Balance {part one}

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Verse: 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

Have you ever struggled to find balance in your life?  Balance is an elusive thing for many moms, because mothers wear so many hats.  Recently I spoke at a conference in South Carolina and my audience was primarily working moms.  Now, we all know that every mom is a working mom—can I get an amen–but there are many moms who work both inside and outside the home.  It is challenging to try to juggle so many things and to try and please so many different people, isn’t it? From our children to our husbands, employers,  We tend to put an awful lot on ourselves, and the weight of struggling to be “everything to everyone” causes so much heartache and so many difficulties—more than I could have anticipated.

This fact resonates with other moms.  No matter where I’m speaking, I hear the same stories of women trying to wear different hats throughout their day: mother, lover, teacher, chauffeur, coach, cook.

Finding balance while juggling a family, marriage, homeschooling, career, children… it can be overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be.

The Bible has a lot to say about God’s grace being sufficient for you.  Perhaps the most often quoted verse about grace is found in 2 Corinthians where Jesus says to Paul (and to you and me), “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Here’s the part I want you to catch today.  When Paul understands this, he goes on to say,

“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”  (ESV)

When we have children, we begin to know what it means to lay our lives down for someone else. My oldest daughter is a new mom herself and just the other day, she was telling me how difficult it was becoming to balance finding time for herself and her husband while nurturing and taking care of little Noah.  That’s the way it is, isn’t it?  That’s the dilemma every mom must face:  how do I find balance in the midst of motherhood?

I want to write about this for a couple of days, I’d like to talk about balance, and I’m going to use the word “hats” to illustrate my point about finding balance.  I love using acrostics and so for the next two days, I’ll be talking about what each of these letters in the word “hats” stands for.  Ask yourself some questions as you seek to find balance in your life.

  • H is for “Have the right priorities.” Your priorities will determine how you spend your time.

Ask yourself, “what is really important to me?”  Time is a commodity.  We spend it just like we spend anything else. Where we invest our time says a lot about where our priorities are. When we waste time, just like wasted money, we don’t get it back.

It’s alright to be weak, it’s okay not to have it altogether—but we do not want to waste the opportunity that God has given us to prioritize our time.  Take a moment today and ask God to help you sort your priorities.  The Lord wants to help you put your priorities in order again, so that when you reach the end of the parenting years, you can look back be glad with the way you used the time you were given.

Take a moment today to ask yourself where your priorities are and then use your time according to what you value.

Begin the steps to finding balance in your life, busy mom!

You can do it,

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About Heidi St. John

Heidi has been married to her husband Jay since 1989. Together they have seven children and three grandchildren! The St. Johns homeschooled their kids all the way through high school. Heidi is the the author of seven books, host of the popular podcast "Off the Bench," and the founder of MomStrong International, an online community of women learning God's Word and how to apply it to every day life. She and her husband Jay are also the founders of Firmly Planted Family and the Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center, located in Vancouver, Washington.

3 thoughts on “4 Keys to Finding Balance {part one}

  1. Rebeca

    Hi Heidi!
    This is my first time on your blog and already I am feeling so grateful to have found you. Last week in my prayer time I was talking to the Lord about this particular subject. All my busyness and so on as I am a working mom, wife and also a student, in my prayer time I heard the Lord say Busy Mom blog and I started to research it and Glad I found you on Facebook. I look forward to going through the site and reading more of your blogs.

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  2. Emily

    Thanks so much for the podcasts! They make really getting those words to sink in SO much easier in a busy house! Sometimes just trying to read a devotional falls flat because I am trying to cancel out all of the noises off little people around me but being able to listen and read along is amazingly helpful! Not to mention the content is always useful and encouraging! Thanks so much for what you do, it is a blessing to me!

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