My husband and I had a date night last night. We sent the kids to Grandma's, picked up dinner at Applebee's, and then had a picnic on our living room floor while we watched the movie Eat Pray Love. I don't think Pip liked the movie very much. I thought it was okay, and I might've enjoyed it enormously if I weren't a Christian, but truth be told, I felt very sad watching it. It's all about a woman who comes to realize that she's very unhappy with her life. She assumes that she just doesn't like the life she's built, which is centered around her marriage, and she decides that a divorce will fix it. But once apart from her husband, she finds that her unhappiness still plagues her. She finds a younger boyfriend who is Hindu, but when her unhappiness transcends a new relationship and a new religious life of Hindu meditation and chanting, she decides to go in search of herself in a year-long trek from Italy to India to Bali. I can scarcely imagine a life full of such hopelessness - the hopelessness of a life without Jesus, and I felt very moved by that. One of the most interesting parts for me was when she was eating lunch with several of her Italian friends in Rome. They were taking turns asking each other what their "word" was - essentially what was the one word that would difinitively describe who they are. Our main character, Liz, had trouble answering. She says her word used to be daughter, and she was good at that. Then it was wife, but she wasn't so good at that. And then it was girlfriend, but that wasn't so good either. So, she concluded, her word is "writer." The man sitting across the table from her said, "That's what you do, Liz; it's not who you are."

That's what you do; it's not who you are.

I think a lot of us mommies have a hard time with that idea. Maybe a lot of other people have a hard time with it, too, but there's a reason this blog's not called Lawyer Thoughts. I don't have enough experience as anything else to be able to tell you. But being married to a minister, I could venture a guess that even ministers may have a problem with confusing what they do with being who they are. But as a stay-at-home mom, I'll tell you how this most affects me, and how I suspect it may affect other moms as well.

My husband and I have been reading through the Bible together this year. Not too far into the New Testament, I ran into a few verses that have always been hard for me to swallow. Matthew 22:23-33 says:

 ²³ That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question.²⁴ “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. ²⁵ Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. ²⁶ The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. ²⁷ Finally, the woman died. ²⁸ Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”

 ²⁹ Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. ³⁰At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ³¹ But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ³²‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’^[a]? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

 ³³ When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.

The Sadducees are really just messing with Jesus when they ask him this question, but what He says to them is so important when we're thinking about who we really are as wives and mothers. The question they ask is this: When a woman has been married to several different men in this life, which one gets to be her husband in Heaven? Jesus' answer is astonishing and unsettling. He says NOBODY. Nobody will be her husband. In Heaven, no one will be married to anyone else, and no one will get married once we get there. There won't be any marriage. We'll be celibate like the angels. And that used to scare me. That once my husband dies, he won't be my husband anymore. That's a big deal, and it's hard to understand.

I don't know about you, but I like being married. I love my husband. I love my kids. My little family is just about the most important thing in my whole life. We soak up as much time as we can possibly get together. We love being together and being a family. We hate to be apart. But in Heaven, none of that is going to matter. In Heaven, I won't need my husband. I'll have Jesus. I will bask in the glory of God forever, and I won't ever want for anything or need anything ever again. I'll have everything I need. That's why we won't be married in Heaven. Marriage helps us fulfill our earthly needs. But in Heaven, we won't have those needs anymore. All our needs will be met. Nothing could ever be better than that!

Those verses have helped me understand Jesus a whole lot better. I used to struggle so much with letting my family mean more to me than Jesus. I used to have such a hard time with that. When my kids were first born, I'm pretty sure I made them the most important things in my life. I'm pretty sure there were a lot of times when their needs came before my own needs, before my husband's needs, and definitely before my spiritual life. Those kids were everything to me. I was their mom and pretty much nothing else. You see, I got confused. I loved them so much that I got confused about who I was. I somehow managed to forget that I belonged to Jesus and not to my kids. And it got me into a world of hurt and suffering. I landed flat on my butt in postpartum depression. Now, I'm not trying to say that PPD is innately sinful because I don't believe it is. And I don't believe that it's totally controllable by those who suffer from it. But I do believe that I might have had an easier time coping with it had I remembered that I belong to Jesus. I was so busy wallowing in the self pity of having two kids who were sick and in such constant pain and needing so much care and attention that I completely missed out on experiencing God's goodness. Maybe if I had remember to Whom I belong, it wouldn't have taken me until my daughter had lived with her illness for 2 years and my son for 1 year before I remembered God's promise in the book of James and allowed the Holy Spirit to heal my children of their ailments. Their suffering could have been eased so much sooner if I had listened and believed and obeyed. But I forgot that being a mother is what I do, not who I am.

In Luke 14:26, Jesus tells us that “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple." Now I don't hate my kids or my husband. Like I said, they are one of the most important things in my life. But I've recently come to understand just how the love I have for them isn't nearly as great as the love I have for Jesus. It pales so much in comparison that it doesn't look like I love them at all next to how much I love Jesus. And the times in my life when I've loved my family more, I haven't been following Jesus, even though I thought I was.

I'm absolutely convinced that when we confuse who we are with what we do, we forget to do the things that are really important. When I focus on being a mommy and a wife and forget that I belong to Jesus, I stop serving and learning and putting my heart into worship and even life. Even worse, I forget just how important Jesus' sacrifice for me really is, and I start to think it's okay to keep it to myself. When I forget that I belong to Jesus before I belong to my family, I forget that other people need His grace. But when I remember that being wife and mommy is the job God gave me to do and not to be, I remember to get my identity from Jesus. And I have a hard time holding it in and keeping it to myself. If I know who I really belong to, if I know who I really am, then I have to tell people about it!

I'm making a very deliberate decision to make my word DISCIPLE.

What's your word?