Welcome to the Back of the Flock

Introducing…..

A community of mamas trying to connect with God right within the beautiful, messy midst of motherhood.

This idea was born about 10 years ago and has been simmering on the back burner while real life boiled over with diapers and dishes and dirty floors.  I’d love to give you the back story. 

Once I had kids, everything changed. I went from eating leisurely meals with my husband to scarfing down leftovers with one hand while the baby cried. I no longer slept through the night, and showers went from something I enjoyed to something I performed at the speed of light with the baby monitor at full volume before the preschooler found the permanent marker stash again. 

Many of these changes I expected. Some I didn’t. But what I definitely didn’t anticipate was how much the ways I related to God would change. Gone were the quiet mornings with hot coffee and my Bible. Gone was my ability to attend a Bible study because I had a cranky baby who would not, for anything in all of God’s green earth, take a bottle. Gone were times for quiet contemplation because gone was the quiet…when my kids were little, it was baby cries and toddler tantrums and preschool “singing” while these days, it sounds more like the almost perpetual game of basketball between my boys in the basement and my daughter’s singing “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” on repeat, not to mention how my dog seems to think she needs to bark at every other dog who passes our house.

All good sounds, but all distinctively NOT quiet. 

I became exhausted from what turned into years of not sleeping through the night, and my days felt so full that most evenings I just collapsed after the kids were finally in bed. I wasn’t sure how and when to read my Bible, and my prayer life leaned heavily on whispers of “help!” throughout the day when we were going off the rails…again. 

I found myself untethered in my faith, feeling distant from God, and more than anything, feeling so, so guilty that I couldn’t keep up. 

There wasn’t a day I got through my entire to-do list because Lord knows babies and toddlers come out of the womb experts at interrupting productivity. I felt guilty for not reaching out more to friends, guilty for not exercising enough, guilty for not being able to concentrate in church as I nursed a baby or fished a crying toddler out of the nursery. In my first few years of motherhood, my Bible all but grew dusty. I didn’t want it to be that way, and I was consumed with guilt that it was. 

But conversely  to all of this, I found myself understanding love in new and astounding ways. My love for my children was fierce, emboldening and softening me all at once. I would do anything for their health and happiness. Even in my exhaustion, my love for them grew, and within days of having my first baby, I sat in the bathtub and sobbed, realizing for the first time in my life, that

God’s love for me was intensely more expansive than the all-consuming love I already had for the little baby napping in the next room. 

So I felt stuck between the tension of sensing God’s love in a tangible way as I never had before while suffering from the guilt of thinking I should be doing more to grow my faith. 

Mostly, I felt like I was failing God and falling behind.

Me, about 6 months pregnant, slogging through mud with my 2-and-3-year olds…a metaphor if there ever was one.

Early in my motherhood journey, my friend Sarah shared a verse with me that I’d never stumbled across before from Isaiah 40:11:

“He tends his flock like a shepherd:

    He gathers the lambs in his arms

and carries them close to his heart;

    he gently leads those that have young.”

He gently leads those that have young…
a visual that met me in such a powerful way. 

I was at the moment, decidedly with young, feeling like I couldn’t keep up with anything. I began to imagine Jesus the shepherd, gently aware of those ewes…the pregnant ones with their sides bulging and the ones whose lambs were slowing them down because those little lambies insisted on putting their shoes on themselves or nursing for 25 minutes longer than normal. In my mind’s eye, these sheep with young were definitely behind the rest of the flock, slowed down by their little ones, slowed down by the pace motherhood often requires. 

Prior to that, I had imagined Shepherd Jesus well ahead of me, at the front of the flock, barely visible, looking at his watch repeatedly and tapping his foot, letting out an annoyed “ugh” now and then like I did when my toddlers would stop to point out every ladybug on the sidewalk, turning a one-block walk into a twenty-minute journey. 

But this verse changed everything for me. Suddenly the Psalms that talked about God coming to us when we cry came to life in a new way.

I imagined Jesus not up at the front, but beside me at the back, having heard my cries and my newborn’s wails, having seen how I was struggling to keep up, and loving me anyways, gently helping me along. 

This is the Back of the Flock. A community of mothers who know they can’t keep up and who have exchanged the guilt of the pace they think  they should be keeping for the love of a God who walks right beside them, who gently leads them as they lead their young. 

It took me several more years to figure out what connecting with God really could really look like in motherhood, and in welcoming you to the Back of the Flock, I want to welcome you into that exploration with me…

…an exploration of what it means to be gently led

…an exploration of what it means to bear God’s image in motherhood

….an exploration of what it means to let go of the shoulds, the keep ups, the guilt

…an exploration of what it means to truly connect with God, right within the beautiful mess that is motherhood. 

I hope you’ll join us over at The Back of the Flock by hitting the subscribe button below. We’d love to have you.