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This week has been tough! As many of you may already know, my husband, my sanity, my confidant, my literal other half, has been gone to Super Summer AR for the past 8 days and will finally be home tomorrow afternoon. It's times like these...ugg, when you're squeeeeezed, that your true self oozes out. No energy to "pull it together" or even fake it.

Several conversations with my best friends during this weeks ooze-fest have led me to post my ultimate fail!

Some conversation included a discussion about all the amazing blogs by Christian women I've been reading as well as the bible study I'm in at my church. Awe: The inspiration. The goals. The challenges. The utter disappointment in myself, as a wife, mom, and manager of my home.

Another set of conversations included major venting! Confessions rolled out of my mouth:

"I can't do this anymore! I cried, no, blubbered in my childs room before trying to make my way down stairs to appear unshaken in the eyes of my in-laws. I ignored the crying baby. I snatched up my daughter. I am not engaged with my children. I yell at my children to stop yelling. I lost a piece to my camera that makes it work. I let my kids watch way more than 2 hours a day of TV this week. I just want to hide in my pantry eating cookies. (true story) I love my babes and know God has chosen me to be their 'primary care giver' but I just don't want to today. I ate an entire box of oatmeal cream pies. I am out of Dr Pepper because I've been drinking way more than I should, especially while nursing. I spanked my child and told her we don't hit. My child (3) used the old-school phrase "none ya!" and I am the one she got it from. I can't find peace."

All the while the taunting thoughts, "I want to bottle what she has and bring her amazingness into my home. How does ______ do it?!?"

There it was. The very things I have been using to try to be who God wants me to be dug me deeper into Satan's lie- She has it all together. I was comparing myself to someone else. Wither the comparison is to exalt or belittle, it's wrong. Where another women is in her walk with Christ should have no barring on my relationship with Christ. My friend gently reminded me that "no one has it all together and they just aren't sharing those rough I-wanna-hide-in-the-pantry-eatting-all-the-cookies-in-peace days."

Though I have confessed this list of faults I want to you know that my ULTIMATE FAIL has been leading people, you, to believe I have it all together. Do you ever secretly desire to be that women that people ask, "GIRL, how DO you do it?" I do. I hide all kinds of faults and failures because of this pride built up inside me. I never again want to feel that desire to lead people to believe I have it all together.

Because I don't!

That's just it- GOD does it. Any and Every positive thing about my life is by the grace of God, not because I'm anywhere close to put together.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Cor. 12:9

Sorry for leading any of you to believe I have it all figured out! I'm sorry if you ever ask yourself, "How does she do it?!?" New commitment: to exposing my weaknesses! Lets be real with one another.

"Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in my weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For When I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Cor. 12:9-10

I am worn out!
I suffer a thorn!
I am undisciplined!

As I am writing this:

I keep flinching every time my stinky dog bangs against the siding on the front porch thinking...I don't know what, is coming to get me. I am fearful.

I am eating my 3-year-olds birthday cookies with a tub of frosting. -Sorry Nanna! Undisciplined.

Where are you on this journey of needing peer approval? Yours may not be the generic, "how does she do it". Do you struggle in with specific aspects of how someone else is pulling something off better?

Leave a comment so that we may "boast all the more gladly about [our] weakness[es], so that Christ's power may rest on [us]" and so we may encourage one another!