Lately, I’ve been thinking about my time. How I spend it. How I want to spend it. And recently, I was reading Missional Motherhood by Gloria Furman where she spends some time exegeting Titus 2. In verses 3-5, it says–

Titus 2:3-5, “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, ⁴ and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, ⁵ to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”

The call to older women is to live in a God honoring way, and to teach (and train) younger women.

The call to younger women is love their husbands, love their children, and essentially to manage their households.

Both are for the purpose of making sure that the word of God is not reviled. i.e. living in such a way that God is magnified and that His Gospel shines brightly in the world. Now before I go further, I don’t think this passage is saying that women should not work outside of the home. I do think it is saying that young women have a responsibility to care well for their households, but I don’t think this negates them from work.

So anyways–I was thinking about my time and reading this portion of Missional Motherhood and I realized that I feel very much torn between these two invitations to women.

In some respects, I feel like a seasoned mother–I had my first miscarriage back in December of 2016, which means I have been a mother for 5 1/2 years now with one baby heavenside and 3 babies earthside. And I love getting to share what I’m learning in motherhood, especially with the More for Motherhood community.

And on the other hand, I feel very much like a young woman in the throes of the survival years. Regularly needing the reminder to love my husband, love my children and manage my household to the glory of God. And many days, that’s just all that I have capacity for.

Over the past year and a half since I started the More for Motherhood community, it has expanded in many ways. It’s grown to be a blog where I create content; a social media platform where I curate content unique from the blog; and the occasional email where I write yet again, more content. I have loved having a creative outlet, and even more so, I have loved the relationships I have built with many of the mamas in this community.

I have also come to realize that creating at least 3 different types of content on the regular is simply too much for this young mama. In the season of needing to focus on doing the main things God has invited me to do well. Love my husband, love my kids, manage my household to the praise of His glory.

So I’ve decided to simplify. I want to write a weekly email for the More for Motherhood community–essentially, letters from a young mother–if you will. I’ll write about motherhood, struggles, joys, resources, food and stories. And once a week, I’ll post about it on social media to let y’all know an email has dropped. I also intend to keep the More for Motherhood website running because I love the resources that are on it.

But for now, I’m choosing to pause on writing more blog posts. Hitting pause on creating unique social media content and writing separate emails. I figure, let’s do one thing well, and see how it goes. Overtime, I hope to be back in a fuller capacity. But right now, this is my time as a young mom. I only get it once. And I most certainly don’t want to waste it. I want to be on my phone less, and face to face with my people more.

When I think about this change, the hardest part about it is losing out on some of the daily interaction I’ve had with you mamas. But I still intend to use Instagram, so you better believe I’ll still interact with the content you post so I can keep up with your beautiful families. And I would absolutely love your interactions with the emails I send, so I can know how you’re doing, how I can be praying for you, what you’re learning, etc etc.

If you are already on the More for Motherhood email list, you’ll get these emails. They will also populate to a page here, so that you can go back and refer to various letters if it’s helpful. And if you’re not receiving them but want to, you can sign up here to make sure that you get them.

My prayer for us as young mothers is that we would spend more time loving our people—our spouses, our kids, our neighbors, our co-workers, to the praise of His glory. And I hope that these weekly letters from a young mother will encourage you on the journey.

Because I truly believe that Jesus wants more for our motherhood. More joy, more peace, more purpose.

Come and see.