As before, throwing a book launch party this month had me terrified. I can write and speak, but marketing is another story.
(Yeah. There it is. You’ll probably never find me in multi-level marketing because the thought of trying to sell stuff sends me into a panic. I’d rather hug someone than try to convince them to buy something.)
But God was asking me to push through, trust Him, and do the thing. So I did, and He came through with all the right friends for all the help I needed. Amazing how we’re all good at different things and how wonderful it is to just be ourselves and do what we’re good at with rest and grace over it.
So here’s just a little spin on the new book:
Being a third born child in a family of ten children had me well acquainted with taking care of babies, and I entered the mothering world eagerly. There was little adjustment to having my own babies because I had helped my mother take care of my younger siblings for as long as I could remember.
I was going to do just what she did: home school, always be a stay at home mom, and be my daughters’ best friends even in their teen years.
I drove an old mini van so I could afford to be a stay at home mother. I home schooled, and did the whole bake-your-own-everything kind of lifestyle. And I loved my children like none other.
Then, my world fell apart. The years of doing everything “right” had to be replaced for a trust in the only One who is always right.
After years of turmoil, my husband had packed his bags, driven away, then pursued a romantic relationship with a sixteen year old girl only a year older than our daughter. There are no words for the turmoil this placed on my children, nor for the after math of devastation on all our lives.
I went to work and the children went to public school. They reeled, I struggled—but we survived, and we learned, and we knew that, though life can be altered by another, it can never be destroyed by another.
In the past three years I’ve told my children many times over, “No one can ruin your life except you. You have the strength to get back up and live a beautiful life.”
I had to hold them while they cried, face their deep hurt and anger when it erupted, and drive many hours to counseling sessions.
After a few years of struggle, I made a move from the west coast to the east, landing in the dead of night in a major airport with myself and the children to start life over in an area where we knew one other family, settled into a house we had never seen, and started searching google for maps to the closest schools and grocery stores. Covid- 19 hit right afterward, and the rest is history.
Along with my children, I struggled to survive until I was set free from the grief that would have destroyed me.
There, I learned all about Grace.
There, I learned that Jesus wants to be trusted more than we trust certain methods.
There, my eyes opened wide to the fact that God was moving in all kinds of places and people—and that the answers are not the same for every mother.
Home school was no longer an idol.
I bought food rather than made it.
And Jesus became altogether lovely in the face of tragedy.
Regardless of your circumstance, I invite you to gaze with me into the face of Jesus Christ, Who alone can bring life into your car while you drive the children to school, or wait with them for the bus, or teach them at your kitchen table.
Jesus wants to be everything for us mothers.
Parts of this book were written while I was in one world, and parts of it written while I was in another. Jesus Christ met me in both. He steadied me in both. He taught me that grief and gratitude are friends, interlaced, working together with one purpose—to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and overcomes the affects of it, as well.
And He comes to each of you, inviting you to overwhelming peace in a life not your own. The Son of Man will always rise over everything that goes down.
It remains then, that your greatest need as a mother is not a perfect method, but a deep understanding of a Perfect Master.
As Eric Gilmore so beautifully says, “Jesus Christ is greater than His gifts, more wonderful than His wonders, and more precious than His promises.”
Find the book here:
All is grace.
Love Always,
Sara
Women of Purpose 