Overcoming Mommy Guilt

I've gotten a lot of email about this article, which was orginally an email to a friend who needed to hear encouragement. Later, I edited it and sent it to my Yahoo group, Keeping the Home. I thought I'd pass it on to the blog tonight:

*******************

You have so much to offer the world. You have so much to offer to
God. Don't you think God gave you your magnetism (personality) and
your talent for a reason?

Of course!

Satan does NOT want you to use your talents or your magnetic
personality. He wants you to think you are a failure. He wants you
to look at your faults. He wants you to think you cannot possibly
have something to offer others. He wants to think that you are not
likeable or loveable. He wants to defeat you.

Why? You know how he works! You are a terrible threat to him! You
have a talent that was given to you by God for a purpose. Satan
wants the world to be ugly and people to be lonely. He does not
want you to accomplish what God has for you.

You could be used by God in an awesome ministry, even if only for an
audience the size of your little family (to God I doubt the number
of people we touch in a lifetime matters, but that we touch the ones
we were put here to touch). But you will never have a ministry -
not one of any kind, not even one to your family - unless you stop
listening to Satan's lies. In order to be used by God, you must
force yourself to listen only to God while shutting out Satan's lies.

God NEVER, NEVER focuses us on our faults. Satan does.

I once heard that guilt is from Satan, conviction is from God.

Satan wants us to think we are bad mothers (I hear that one daily
from him, too!). He likes "mommy guilt."

God would NEVER tell us that we are bad mothers. He is the eternal
optimist! He can see in us what we cannot see. He can see our
potential. He may convict us, as He did to me when I needed to
apologize to Brenden a couple of nights ago, after yelling at him
for hurting his sister. I did not handle it well at all. After I
sent him to bed in tears, I felt God convicting me to go to him and
apologize. I did that and Brenden and I had a nice time together,
talking (children are so forgiving!).

Later, I felt guilt and in tears I said aloud, "I am such a bad
mother! I mess up every single day!" But since I've been working
on recognizing that mommy guilt is not from God, I didn't keep my
mind there.

God would not want me to say that or to think that.

Saying that I am a bad mother does not glorify Him at all. He does
not think I'm a bad mother. He doesn't even think the worst mother
in the world is a bad mother. Instead, He sees the mother that she
could be. Only Satan is served by me thinking that I am a bad
mother.

Those words of doubt and guilt that you hear are coming from Satan.
He wants you to believe them. If you believe that you have nothing
to offer God, then Satan wins because you will not offer anything to
God.

Remember, God is the eternal optimist! He sees the wonderful
mother, wife and woman that we are capable of being and He
ENCOURAGES us to be that person.

God bless you today!

Lori Seaborg
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/KeepingtheHome (this group)
http://www.keepingthehome.blogspot.com (my blog)