I'm going to tell you something you may be surprised to learn . . . I didn't grow up in a perfect home.

And the truth is neither did our sons.

Our world is full of brokenness and it's not meant to be wasted striving for perfection because if we do . . . we will miss so much.

Wholeness I believe is the beauty of healed wounds with the evidence of scars too. These markings together remind us of who we are and who we are becoming.

Wholeness often is mistaken for 'perfectly-put-together', which is strived after. We can look for it in success or in our achievements, but in the midst of messy living rooms and imperfect families oddly enough wholeness can be found here too!

Because even in the middle of what is hard there is something holy found too.

So much of the time we look at life desiring it to be pain-free but with our cluttered chaos all around us it can feel like anything but picture-perfect.

And it can be like this when we are raising our families too.

It can seem as if challenges are surrounding us and all we're doing is trying to get past them.

We wonder when these lessons will ever be learned and when our kids will ever quit fighting. We even tell them to 'act their age' and to 'grow up' in hopes it will help make it all better.

Yet the truth is, maybe this parenting thing is less about getting them to be who want them to be and more about who we are becoming.

The crazy + beautiful process of parenting is taking us through a necessary but hard growth spurt as much as it's taking our kids through one too. And we will do ourselves a kind favor if we will submit to the lessons as a gift, rather than a nuisance.

Because inside their somewhat gangly bodies is a soul, which is needing some deep understanding + some extra love.

And we need this same kind of compassion too!

We're all broken souls in need of the goodness-kind-of- gospel training that comes step after step and moment by moment each day.

I remember really getting this when our boys were teenagers.

You see back then I prayed for ease.

I prayed for what I thought was best.

I prayed for what looked good.

And back then if God would have given me all of this, there's so much I would have missed.

I would have missed learning to endure through what was both hard + holy on my knees.

I would have missed out on what didn't feel good to learn what really matters.

And I would have missed when I finally quit striving for perfection how all along I was actually enough.

And when I told God I'd go to the mission field, I had no idea my 'mission field' would be raising four sons and cultivating a strong marriage.

Because in the midst of all that can sometimes feel overwhelming there's plenty of things to count as gratitude.

The dirty dishes in the sink remind me that we actually have food to eat.

Baskets full of laundry remind me of all we've been given to steward and the sweet people we get to love everyday!

And when we look at life like this we realize just how much we've been given and the ministry that's right here beside us.

We see just how 'whole' our lives really are as we discover a purpose for our scars + the wounds we bear.

Because what we struggle through we first learn and we in turn share and it's in this we understand better the stories in our lives we weren't expecting.

And here . . . we're able to find some of the hidden beauties of God, which lay in our perfectly-imperfect lives we've been given to steward + share...