I’m 26 years old. A mom. No makeup on. No Botox. No filler. No editing. No work done.

Just my face.

And lately, I’ve been thinking about what it might look like to let it stay that way.

I should probably say early that I have absolutely nothing against cosmetic work. I actually think so many women who get work done look killer. This isn’t an argument against Botox or filler or plastic surgery, and it certainly isn’t a declaration that women who choose those things are doing something wrong.

The most attractive thing a woman can be, in my opinion, is confident. Maybe Botox makes you feel confident. Maybe never touching your face does. I’m not particularly interested in deciding which woman is doing it right.

I’m more interested in asking myself:

What if I just let myself age?

Because somehow, at 26, aging is already something I’m supposed to be thinking about preventing. There’s preventative Botox. Products for fine lines I barely have yet. Treatments to preserve collagen. Lip filler everywhere. Advice about what I should start doing now so that I don’t look old later.

And I understand the appeal. Of course I want to feel beautiful.

But I’ve lived long enough—even at 26—to know that culture is a terribly unreliable authority on beauty.

The body we’re supposed to want changes every decade. Be impossibly thin. No, have curves. Bigger butt. Smaller waist. Thick eyebrows. Wait, skinny eyebrows are coming back. Have big lips. High cheekbones. A tiny nose. Get rid of your buccal fat. Actually, youthful facial fullness is desirable now.

Keep up.

The target moves constantly.

And I know that more personally than I sometimes realize.

I grew up mixed race. For much of my childhood, I felt like I existed on an island somewhere between categories. I didn’t feel fully accepted by Black people. I didn’t feel fully accepted by white people either. I was just… somewhere in the middle.

And when I looked at television, magazines, and the rest of the media around me, I didn’t see many girls who looked like me.

I want to be careful with how I say that, because I’m not someone who believes every person needs to see an exact replica of themselves everywhere in order to feel represented. But I also can’t pretend it had no effect on me.

When you’re young, you’re collecting evidence about who you are.

Who gets called beautiful? Who gets chosen? Who gets the guy? Who is cool? Who belongs?

And I rarely felt like the answer looked like me. I never really felt chosen or desirable. I felt like the odd one out.

Which makes what happened later kind of fascinating.

I grew up.

Culture changed.

And suddenly, mixed was cool.

The features that had once made me feel difficult to categorize became desirable. Mixed-race women were everywhere. Features associated with women of color were being celebrated, imitated, bought.

And suddenly people were telling me I was pretty.

It took me a long time to believe them.

Because the funny thing is, culture had changed its mind about me, but I had already spent my most formative years developing an identity under the old rules.

That does something to you.

And now I find myself watching the beauty standard change again and again and thinking:

Why would I trust this thing?

Why would I hand something as precious as the way I see myself over to a culture that cannot make up its mind?

If I had changed myself every time the standard changed, I would have spent my entire life chasing a finish line that keeps moving.

And eventually, the finish line becomes impossible.

Because eventually, it isn’t enough to be beautiful. You have to be young, too. Or at least look like you are.

And that is a race every woman, if she is lucky enough to live a long life, will eventually lose.

Which has made me wonder why we’re running it in the first place.

There’s a verse I keep thinking about when I think about all of this. Jesus asks in Matthew 6:27:

“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

He’s not talking about Botox, obviously.

But I think about the larger invitation of that passage often: this call away from anxious striving. Away from obsessing over tomorrow. Away from living as though everything depends upon our ability to control what comes next.

A few verses later, Jesus says:

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”

And I wonder how much of our obsession with aging is really an obsession with tomorrow.

How do I make sure tomorrow’s face still looks like today’s? How do I stop the line before it comes? How do I preserve this version of myself? How do I stay young?

But I don’t actually want to stay 26 forever.

I want the years.

I want to watch my son grow up. I want to watch his little hand get bigger inside mine until one day it doesn’t need to hold mine to cross the street anymore.

I want decades of marriage. I want to look across a dinner table at my husband someday and see an older man looking back at an older version of me, both of us knowing exactly where all those years went.

I want birthdays that start requiring more candles than anyone wants to bother putting on the cake. I want ordinary Tuesdays and Christmas mornings. I want friendships that have lasted so long we’ve told each other the same stories a hundred times. I want a table that gets more crowded as the years go by.

I want to laugh. A lot. Enough that someday there are little lines beside my eyes showing exactly where all that laughter lived.

I want my face to remember my joy.

I want the crease between my eyebrows to tell of all the years I spent thinking deeply and worrying unnecessarily and squinting into the Tennessee sun while I watched my son play. I want cheeks that have softened and skin that has changed and a face that no longer looks 26 because the woman wearing it hasn’t been 26 for a very long time.

Maybe aging isn’t only the slow loss of youth. Maybe it’s the slow accumulation of a life.

A face collecting evidence that you were here. That you laughed and cried. That you worried and healed. That you spent summer afternoons outside and stayed up too late talking and smiled across thousands of ordinary dinners at people you loved.

Maybe our faces aren’t betraying us when they begin to show our age.

Maybe they’re keeping the record.

I want that record, because I want the life that made it.

Scripture has some interesting things to say about beauty, too. Not that physical beauty doesn’t exist—the Bible describes people as beautiful plenty of times. But it repeatedly refuses to let outward beauty become the most important thing about a person.

“People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7

And in 1 Peter, women are reminded not to locate their beauty merely in outward adornment, but in the “unfading beauty” of who they are within.

Unfading.

I love that word.

Because apparently God knew we would spend an awful lot of energy worrying about the things that fade.

Our skin will change. Our bodies will change. Our hair will change. Our faces will change.

But Scripture keeps redirecting our attention toward cultivating the things time cannot take from us. And maybe part of aging faithfully is learning to believe that.

Not abandoning beauty. Not pretending I don’t care how I look.

I do.

I love clothes. I love makeup. I love skincare. I love feeling pretty. I will probably still be trying to put together a good outfit when I’m 80.

This isn’t an argument for neglecting ourselves.

Maybe it’s an argument for refusing to worship youth.

There is a difference.

I know it’s easy for me to write this right now. I’m 26. It is relatively easy to announce that I’m embracing aging when I haven’t done very much of it yet.

Forty-six-year-old me may find this essay adorable. Sixty-six-year-old me may want a word.

And I want to leave room for those women.

I don’t know that I’ll never get Botox. I don’t know that I’ll never get filler. I don’t know what I will choose when my face looks significantly different from the one in this photo.

I don’t need to make a lifelong promise about any of it.

This isn’t really about proving that I can go my entire life without cosmetic work. It’s about examining why I would want it before I do.

Is it because I genuinely want something? Or because I’ve been convinced something about me has become unacceptable?

There’s a difference there, too.

So for now, I’ve made a little challenge with myself:

I want to see my face age.

I want to know what I look like at 36. At 46. At 56.

I want to meet those women—not despite the ways they’ll look different from me, but because of them.

I want to see what twenty more years of smiling writes beside my eyes. I want to see the face my son remembers when he thinks of home. I want to see the woman my husband grows old beside.

I want to look at an old photograph of this 26-year-old face someday and recognize her without wishing I could become her again.

She got to be young.

I hope I let the women after her get to be something else.

I want to give each version of myself the dignity of meeting her before deciding she needs to be changed.

Because I’ve already lived through one version of culture telling me that the way I looked wasn’t quite right, only for another version of culture to turn around and celebrate the exact same things.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for culture to tell me whether I’m beautiful.

It changes its mind too often.

And my faith asks me to build my identity on something far more permanent than that.

So maybe the goal isn’t to convince myself that every wrinkle is beautiful. Maybe I won’t think they all are.

Maybe the goal is to become so rooted in who I am that beauty gets to be something I enjoy without becoming something I obey.

To take care of myself without being afraid of myself. To enjoy being young without worshiping youth. To become older without believing I am becoming less.

And to remember that the woman in the mirror was never supposed to remain unchanged.

She is supposed to live.

The most attractive thing someone can be is confident. For some women, that confidence might include Botox or filler or changing something they’ve always wanted to change.

I think that’s great.

For me, at least right now, confidence looks a little different.

It looks like fighting the instinct to fix something simply because the world has decided it needs fixing. It looks like trusting that I don’t have to chase every new definition of beautiful.

It looks like believing that God knew what He was doing when He made me—even when I didn’t look like the girls around me, even when culture didn’t quite know where to put me, and even when someday the face He gave me has lines all over it.

So here I am.

Twenty-six years old. A mom. Sitting across from my husband with no makeup on while he takes my picture.

This is my face today.

I like her.

And I think I’d like to meet the woman she becomes.

Which feels slightly ironic now, considering how much I talk about motherhood.

I always knew I wanted children. I loved children. I assumed that someday I would get married and have a family. But it wasn’t the dream.

I wasn’t collecting baby names or imagining myself pushing a stroller through the neighborhood. I wasn’t counting down the years until I could stay home with babies. I was much more interested in the person I was going to become.

And for most of my life, the person I imagined becoming was successful.

Like, really successful.

I wanted to write. I wanted a career. I wanted to travel and do interesting things and be accomplished at something. I wanted to be independent. Capable. Impressive.

I wanted, in the language handed to so many women of my generation, to make something of myself.

The womanhood I knew

In many ways, that vision made perfect sense given the family I grew up in.

My mom was a commander in the Navy. She was strong, successful, incredibly capable, and held a demanding career while raising a family. Because military life required us to move wherever her orders took us, my dad found work wherever we happened to land and, during some seasons, stayed home with us.

There was nothing unusual about this arrangement to me. It was simply my family.

And I’m grateful for so much of what watching my mom gave me. I never questioned whether women were intelligent or capable or able to lead. I grew up assuming I could walk into a room and figure things out. I saw firsthand that a woman could do hard things exceptionally well.

But it also meant that when I imagined my own adulthood, professional accomplishment was naturally a significant part of the picture.

Culture reinforced it everywhere else.

Be independent. Build your career. Chase your dreams. Make your own money. See the world. Never need anyone too much. Become someone before you settle down.

By high school and college, I had absorbed that vision pretty thoroughly. Success existed somewhere ahead of me, and I intended to go get it.

So I did what I thought you were supposed to do. I went to college. I started building a career. I chased opportunities. I cared about titles and salaries and what came next. I wanted to be good at what I did, and I wanted other people to know I was good at it.

And there were things about that life I genuinely loved. I loved writing for a living. I loved creating things. I loved being ambitious. I loved having coworkers and projects and somewhere to be in the morning. I still love those parts of myself.

This isn’t the story of a woman who hated working and finally escaped to the life she had always wanted. That would be much tidier. It just wouldn’t be true.

But before I ever became a wife or mother, something started changing.

Before motherhood, my definition of success had already begun to shift.

About six months before I met my husband, I started encountering a vision of womanhood and family that felt almost foreign to me.

I was reading more about biblical womanhood and asking questions I hadn’t really thought to ask before. I read books like Elisabeth Elliot’s Let Me Be a Woman. I started looking more seriously at what Scripture said about womanhood, marriage, family, service, and the purpose of a life.

And for the first time, I began wondering whether I had unconsciously allowed the culture around me to define success for me—and whether God’s definition might look different.

I had to ask myself a question I’d never really thought to ask: Why did I believe what I believed?

Had I arrived at this vision for my life because I had searched and wrestled and asked hard questions and ultimately decided it was what I truly believed? Was it actually rooted in who I was, what I valued, and what I believed God wanted for my life?

Or had I simply inherited it?

Maybe my ideas about success, independence, career, marriage, and family weren’t conclusions I had carefully reached at all. Maybe they were assumptions I had absorbed from the family structure I grew up in, the culture around me, and a world that had been telling me for as long as I could remember what a successful woman was supposed to look like.

I realized I had spent years confidently pursuing a definition of success I had never actually stopped to define for myself.

And once I started questioning it, other questions followed.

What if the goal of my life wasn’t simply to become as accomplished, independent, and impressive as possible? What if faithfulness mattered more than recognition? What if building a family could be important work rather than something squeezed around the edges of the “real” work? What if dependence wasn’t inherently weakness? What if success had less to do with how much of myself I could build and more to do with how faithfully I stewarded whatever God gave me?

These ideas weren’t an overnight transformation. I didn’t read one Elisabeth Elliot book, close it, and immediately start yearning to churn butter in a prairie dress.

I still had ambitions. I still wanted to write. I still wanted to do meaningful work.

I still do.

But the picture in my mind had begun changing.

And I should probably say here that I don’t think asking these questions leads every woman to the exact same conclusions I reached.

Families are different. Circumstances are different. And faithful people can have different convictions about what work, marriage, motherhood, and family life should look like in their own homes.

I can tell you why my husband and I have chosen the life we have, and why I’ve come to believe what I believe about my own role within our family—but that’s probably an entirely different essay.

For this one, the point isn’t that every woman should arrive where I did.

It’s that, for the first time, I wanted to know why I believed what I believed.

I didn’t want to build my life around a set of assumptions simply because they were the ones I had inherited.

I wanted to search Scripture, ask questions, think honestly, and decide what I actually believed.

And slowly, the picture in my mind began changing.

Before I ever met my husband, God had already started loosening my grip on the version of success I had inherited.

Then I met him. We got married. And eventually, I became a mother.

Then motherhood rearranged everything.

Something I had begun to understand intellectually became something I experienced with my entire being.

Motherhood did not gently introduce itself into the life I had built.

It completely rearranged it.

Suddenly my days revolved around someone who could not care less about my résumé. There were no performance reviews for keeping a newborn alive through another night. No promotions for learning exactly which bounce would finally get him to sleep.

No one was particularly impressed that I could nurse a baby while eating lunch with one hand and ordering groceries from my phone with the other, although frankly I still think that deserves some kind of certification.

So much of what I did all day became invisible.

And yet, almost immediately, it mattered to me in a way I hadn’t expected.

That was the surprise.

I knew I would love my baby. Of course I knew that.

What I didn’t know was how much I would love motherhood.

I didn’t know how deeply satisfying it would feel to build my days around caring for another person. I didn’t know I would find so much meaning in making our home feel like home, thinking about what we would eat for dinner, or taking my son outside and watching him discover something I had stopped noticing years ago.

I didn’t know that the tiny, repetitive, extraordinarily ordinary work of raising a person would feel more consequential to me than so many of the things I had previously considered important.

And I definitely didn’t expect motherhood to make my life feel bigger.

I’d started to believe that perhaps the world had gotten something wrong about what makes a life meaningful.

Motherhood was where I began to experience just how wrong.

I thought giving myself away would leave less of me.

There is a particular fear woven into the way we talk about motherhood now:

Don’t lose yourself.

Don’t let motherhood become your whole identity.

Make sure you’re still doing things for you.

And there is wisdom buried somewhere in those warnings. Mothers are human beings, not machines for meeting everyone else’s needs. We need friendship and creativity and rest and marriages that are cared for and interests that belong to us.

I still write. I still care about beauty and clothes and making things and traveling and moving my body and sitting across from my husband at the end of the day with a sweet treat and something good on TV.

I’m still me.

Actually, I think I am more myself than I was before.

That’s the part I didn’t expect.

Motherhood has not required me to become less interested in life. It has made me more interested in it.

I notice things even more now: the way my son reaches for my husband’s hand. The first warm day after winter. Flowers blooming along a sidewalk. The ridiculous joy a tiny person can experience over seeing a truck. The miracle that is an uninterrupted cup of coffee.

Things that once would have registered as background scenery have somehow become the substance of my life.

And somewhere inside all of this giving, I haven’t found myself disappearing.

I’ve found myself expanding.

My marriage means more to me. My parents mean more to me. My friendships mean more to me. My body means something different to me after watching it grow and feed another human being. Home means more. Ordinary days mean more. Even time itself feels different.

Motherhood made my life more limited in some very literal ways. I can’t just do whatever I want whenever I want anymore. There are naps and bedtimes and tiny opinions and approximately eleven thousand snacks to consider.

But limitation and smallness, I’ve discovered, are not necessarily the same thing.

I thought purpose was somewhere ahead of me.

For so much of my life, that’s how I imagined purpose. It was something I would eventually accomplish. A career I would build. A level of success I would reach. Some future version of myself who had finally done enough meaningful things to feel that her life was meaningful.

Motherhood gave me a completely different experience of purpose.

It wasn’t waiting for me somewhere in the future. It was already sitting in front of me.

Usually asking for another snack.

There is something almost offensive to our modern ideas about success in the fact that some of the most important work of my life will leave almost no evidence behind.

The meals will be eaten. The laundry will be dirtied again. The toys will be put away and dumped back onto the floor tomorrow.

My son will not remember most of the days I am currently spending so much energy making good for him. There will be no portfolio containing the thousands of tiny things I did to make him feel safe and known and loved.

But they matter anyway.

Maybe especially because they matter without being impressive.

Motherhood has been slowly teaching me that a meaningful life and an impressive life are not necessarily the same thing.

Purpose isn’t always found in building something everyone can see. Sometimes it’s found in faithfully tending what God has already placed in front of you.

And I think that’s why this life has surprised me so much.

Because I spent years learning how to build myself.

Motherhood began teaching me what it means to give myself.

And somehow, giving has not left me emptier.

It has made my life incredibly full.

That’s why I write about motherhood.

Not because I think every woman has to become a mother to live a meaningful life. Not because I think motherhood is endlessly magical.

Some days are exhausting. Some seasons are hard. Sometimes I would very much like to go to the bathroom without company.

And not because I was always destined to become the woman waxing poetic about motherhood on the internet.

Again: lol.

I write about it because I didn’t see it coming.

I thought I understood what ambition looked like. I thought I understood what purpose felt like. I thought independence was the thing that would make me feel most like myself.

And then this tiny person entered my life requiring more dependence, sacrifice, patience, humility, and self-forgetfulness than almost anything I had ever experienced.

And I loved it.

Not every second. But this life. This work. This version of myself.

I love it.

Motherhood snuck up on me. I expected it to ask a lot of me. I didn’t expect to find so much of myself in the giving. I didn’t expect the ordinary, mostly invisible work of loving and raising a person to become some of the most meaningful work I have ever done.

I didn’t spend my childhood dreaming about becoming a mother.

I became one anyway.

And then motherhood changed what I dream about.

For many of us, those stories are shaped by social media. It can feel like a million different voices coming from a million different directions, each telling us something different. But lately I’ve started to wonder if it isn’t actually a million voices at all.

I think it may just be one voice. One voice that keeps changing costumes. Sometimes it sounds like, Your home isn’t enough. Other days it whispers, You should be doing more. Sometimes it disguises itself as ambition. This season is keeping you from your purpose. Sometimes it dresses itself up as hope. You’ll finally be happy when…

Different words. Different costumes. The same voice. Always leading us toward the same conclusion: This simply isn’t enough.

The Story of “Not Enough”

I notice it when I innocently open Pinterest. One beautiful kitchen becomes another. Better tile. More natural light. A prettier faucet. Perfectly styled shelves. None of those things are wrong. In fact, I love beautiful homes. Beauty reflects something true about the God who made this world.

But after years of consuming the most beautiful corners of millions of people’s lives, I’ve realized how quickly my own heart begins telling a different story. I look around my kitchen—a kitchen that answered prayers not all that long ago—and instead of gratitude, I can suddenly notice everything it lacks.

The reality, though, is that we aren’t comparing our lives to another person’s life. We’re comparing our ordinary Tuesday afternoon to millions of carefully chosen moments gathered into one endless scroll. Our minds were never designed for that.

We stop experiencing those images as millions of individual people sharing millions of individual moments. Instead, our minds begin stitching them together into one imagined picture of what everyone else’s life looks like.

One person’s beautiful kitchen. Someone else’s vacation. Another person’s body, marriage, career, garden, wardrobe. Slowly, they blur together into one fictional “everyone else” who seems to have it all.

And against that impossible comparison, our own ordinary lives inevitably begin to feel lacking.

The voice is subtle. It rarely says, You should be ungrateful. It simply asks me to keep looking. Keep comparing. Keep believing that peace is waiting on the other side of one more change.

The Costumes It Wears

I got social media for the first time at nine years old, before I was even old enough to recognize that it was shaping me. I grew up learning to notice beautiful things, photograph beautiful things, and share beautiful things. There is goodness in that. Beauty points us toward the Creator, and I think this world desperately needs more beauty and far less fear, outrage, and cynicism.

But beauty becomes dangerous when it begins telling us that our lives only matter once they’re beautiful enough to be shared.

As a young girl, the voice wore one costume. It met me in the endless scroll of Instagram models posing just suggestively enough to leave an impression. It taught me, long before anyone ever said the words out loud, that my body was my greatest asset. That beauty was something to cultivate, display, and measure. That being desired was the same thing as being valued. The message was subtle, but unmistakable. You’ll be loved when you look like this.

Later, as my faith deepened, the costume changed. The voice didn’t disappear. It simply learned the language of Christianity. Now it whispered that real faith had to be visible. That if I was reading my Bible every morning, someone should probably know about it. That if God was working in my life, it should somehow be documented, photographed, shared. It slowly convinced me that being faithful and appearing faithful were almost the same thing.

Yet Jesus seemed remarkably unconcerned with being perceived as holy. He spoke often of the quiet places—praying in secret, giving in secret, serving without recognition—as though the Father delights in the things no one else ever sees.

Now, as a mother, the costume has changed again. It finds me at the end of an ordinary Tuesday. The dishes are done. The crumbs beneath the highchair picked up. I’ve read the same set of board books fifteen times. I’ve kissed scraped knees, folded tiny laundry, wiped sticky hands, prepared meals, and rocked a sleepy little boy until his breathing slowed against my chest.

Then, just as I finally sit down, the voice arrives, as if right on cue. You didn’t do enough today. It tells me I’m wasting my education. That my gifts are sitting on a shelf somewhere while the world moves on without me. It reminds me of everyone my age building businesses, climbing careers, and accomplishing impressive things. It whispers, You’re falling behind. Motherhood is keeping you from your purpose.

And if I’m not careful, I could start believing that faithfulness somehow became less valuable simply because fewer people saw it.

Who Told You That You Were Naked?

Recently, while I was journaling, one question kept returning to my mind.

“Who told you that you were naked?”

Those are God’s words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 after they chose to believe another voice over the voice of their loving Father.

I couldn’t shake the question. It echoed in my mind until tears filled my eyes. Because I realized God wasn’t simply asking where they had gotten information. He was asking where they had gotten their story.

Who taught you to look at yourself this way? Who convinced you to hide? Who made you afraid of being seen as I made you?

Before sin entered the world, Adam and Eve lived before God completely known and completely unashamed. Then they believed a different story, and immediately, they became aware of themselves. They covered themselves. They hid.

As I sat with that passage, I began asking those same questions of my own heart. Who told me my worth depended on how I was perceived? Who told me I needed to manage everyone else’s opinion of me? Who told me my value rose and fell with my productivity, my appearance, my influence, or my success?

Because when I traced those voices back to their source, they never sounded like my Father. Instead, I found expectations God had never placed on me. Pressures He had never asked me to carry. Stories about beauty, significance, and success that looked strangely familiar to the world but strangely foreign to the kingdom of God.

I wonder if one of the greatest consequences of listening to the wrong voice is that we become endlessly aware of ourselves. Always evaluating. Always performing. Always managing. Always wondering how we’re being perceived.

The Better Voice

Something I’ve begun noticing in Scripture is that God rarely argues with every individual lie. He simply tells a better story.

He tells me my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, worthy of honor rather than performance (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). He reminds me that faithfulness often happens in secret. Jesus says, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:4, ESV).

Apparently, heaven places tremendous value on the things the internet never notices.

The more I read the Gospels, the more I notice that Jesus seems remarkably unconcerned with image. Again and again, He directs our attention beneath the surface—to roots instead of leaves, character instead of charisma, secret places instead of public platforms, faithfulness instead of performance.

I don’t think Christ is opposed to beautiful homes, beautiful meals, beautiful gardens, beautiful work, or even sharing beautiful things. He is the Author of beauty. But He does seem deeply concerned with where that beauty is growing from. Is it the fruit of a heart at rest in Him? Or is it secretly fueled by the belief that what we’ve already been given isn’t enough?

The world teaches us to curate a beautiful life for others to admire. To strive. To impress. Christ teaches us to receive the life we’ve been given with gratitude, and to cultivate it faithfully before the Father who already sees.

That difference changes everything.

One life is constantly reaching for more proof that we’ve finally arrived.

The other asks, Father, thank You for what You’ve already given me. Help me be faithful with it.

I’ve started to realize that the opposite of display isn’t hiddenness. I think it’s contentment. Not because contentment asks us to stop creating beautiful things, dreaming big dreams, or pursuing excellence. Rather, it gently loosens our grip on the belief that those things will finally satisfy us.

It frees us to plant flowers no one else photographs, prepare meals no one else compliments, read Scripture no one else knows we opened, fold tiny clothes that no one will ever applaud, and become the kind of people who are more concerned with stewarding God’s gifts than constantly searching for different ones.

Maybe that’s why Jesus so often led people away from performance and into secret places. “When you pray, go into your room…” “When you give, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing…” “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do…” (Matthew 6).

Over and over, He redirects our attention from the audience to the Father.

Perhaps that’s what contentment really is. Not having less beauty. Not having fewer dreams. Not pretending we don’t enjoy beautiful things. But finally trusting that God’s goodness isn’t waiting for us somewhere else. It’s already here.

And we’re free to receive our lives instead of constantly trying to replace them.

The First Lie

I’ve started to realize this isn’t really a modern problem at all.

I wonder if comparison was never the real problem. Nor was performance. Nor our obsession with image. Nor the restless feeling that life is happening somewhere else. Those are all fruit.

The deeper issue is much older.

Can I trust that what God has given me is good? Or will I believe the voice that insists I need something more?

That’s Eden. That’s Israel in the wilderness longing for Egypt after God had split the sea before their very eyes. That’s Martha, so consumed with doing more that she almost missed the goodness of simply sitting at Jesus’ feet. That’s me on social media, standing in the kitchen of a home I once prayed for, somehow convinced another tile, another window, another renovation would finally make it enough.

It’s the same story, told over and over again.

The serpent’s first temptation wasn’t simply to persuade Eve to disobey God. It was to make her question the goodness of what God had already given. “Did God actually say…?” (Genesis 3:1).

The enemy has never needed to convince us that God’s gifts are bad. He only needs to convince us they are insufficient.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus so often describes Himself as a shepherd. Not just because sheep need protection. But because sheep need to know His voice.

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” — John 10:27 (ESV)

The voice of Christ has always told a different story. One where ordinary faithfulness matters. One where unseen work is never wasted. One where the life God has entrusted to you is not an obstacle to joy, but the very place He intends to meet you.

Perhaps the beginning of wisdom isn’t simply learning to recognize the wrong voice. Perhaps it’s learning to love the voice of the Good Shepherd so deeply that every counterfeit begins to lose its power.

Because, in the end, the voice we learn to trust becomes the story we live inside.

And the stories we live inside become the lives we live.

(hc√ƒ µ — he would like that left in as evidence.)

Which is exactly why I’ve never quite known what to do with the phrase, “Don’t make your child the center of your life.”

Like any complex statement reduced to a perfectly curated Instagram graphic, it carries more assumptions than words. Depending on your own experiences, you’ll read that sentence and immediately feel either relieved or frustrated. The problem is that there are so many layers to it.

Do I believe mothers deserve time to themselves? Absolutely. I believe we should nurture our marriages. Move our bodies. Sit down with a hot cup of tea every now and then. Laugh with friends. Ask for help. Rest. We are whole people, not machines.

But somewhere along the way, I think we’ve begun confusing caring for ourselves with resisting the transformation of motherhood.

Because if I’m honest, motherhood didn’t simply become another part of my life.

It became the life I was living.

And I don’t mean that in a sad or resentful way. I mean it in the most obvious, practical sense imaginable.

Children are needy by design. They’re supposed to be. My son doesn’t apologize for needing me. He isn’t manipulating me when he reaches for my hand, cries out in the night, or follows me from room to room. He is doing exactly what he was created to do.

So why would I spend these years pretending he shouldn’t require so much of me?

When my son was born, he came a month early. His nursery wasn’t even finished. I was in labor and couldn’t have told you where we’d put the newborn clothes because I hadn’t unpacked, washed, and folded them yet.

My husband and I were painfully underprepared for what it actually took to raise a baby. I had never even changed a diaper before.

We were rookies.

Amateurs.

Idiots, to name a few things.

And then suddenly, there he was.

Our entire world rearranged itself overnight.

For the next eleven months, he rarely slept longer than two hours at a time. I didn’t get a full night’s sleep for a year.

It was exhausting.

It was inconvenient.

It was nothing like I imagined.

And somewhere in those months, I realized I had two choices.

I could spend every day grieving the life I used to have—counting everything motherhood had taken from me, quietly resisting how much was being asked of me.

Or…

I could let motherhood change me.

Not because every moment felt magical. Not because I suddenly loved being sleep-deprived. But because I began to wonder if God was doing something deeper than simply teaching me how to care for a child.

What if He was teaching me how to become someone new?

Motherhood isn’t an interruption to who we are. It’s an invitation to become someone new.

A child is born.

And in many ways, so is a mother.

One enters the world.

The other enters an entirely new one.

Scripture tells us that God is conforming His people into the image of Christ. Yet throughout Scripture, we also see that He does not force our obedience or our surrender.

A.W. Tozer wrote in Our Unclaimed Riches that God has placed before His redeemed children “a vast world of spiritual treasures,” yet many never claim them. Why? Because, as he says, “God will not force anything on you… You must go to the land.”

I wonder if motherhood is one of those promised lands.

One of those places where God quietly offers us patience, gentleness, selflessness, endurance, and a deeper capacity to love—but never forces us to receive them.

There is a sanctification the Lord desires for us through the circumstances He places us in, and I believe He invites us to lean into it.

I don’t want to miss it.

I can’t help but think motherhood is one of His most extraordinary classrooms for doing exactly that.

Because motherhood exposes everything.

My impatience.

My selfishness.

My desire for control.

My tendency to prioritize comfort.

My lack of trust.

Not so He can shame me for those things.

But so He can gently begin changing them.

And I wonder how much of that work we miss when our greatest goal becomes preserving the life we had before children.

Christ remains the center of my life.

But in this season, one of the primary ways I follow Him is by wholeheartedly loving the little person He has entrusted to me.

I think that’s where this conversation often becomes confused. I think what many people mean when they say, “Don’t make your child the center of your life,” is to protect Christ’s rightful place. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. Jesus alone belongs at the center.

But faithfully following Him has always meant faithfully stewarding whatever He has entrusted to us.

For some seasons that may be caring for aging parents, serving a church, or walking through illness.

In this season, He has entrusted me with a little boy whose dependence is not an interruption to my discipleship—it is one of the primary places where my discipleship is being formed.

That doesn’t mean we disappear into motherhood. It doesn’t mean neglecting ourselves, our marriages, our health, or the people we love. In fact, I think caring for ourselves is one of the ways we faithfully care for our children.

A healthy mother is better able to love well, remain patient, and create a peaceful home. I just don’t believe health comes from insisting motherhood shouldn’t fundamentally change us.

I think health comes from accepting the season we’re actually living. From allowing our lives to look different. From surrendering to the reality that these years ask much of us because they are meant to.

Maybe that is where the joy is.

Not in desperately trying to preserve every part of the woman we were before children, but in trusting that the woman God is forming through motherhood is worth becoming.

So perhaps my advice to a new mother would simply be this:

Let motherhood change your life.

Lean into this season instead of resisting it.

Let it refine you.

Let it stretch you.

Let it expose what needs healing.

Let it deepen your capacity for love.

These years won’t last forever.

But the woman they shape you into just might.

The question my 26-year-old self, who is a wife and a mom and an entrepreneur who has walked through many trials and stages and phases in her short years on this earth, wishes someone would ask is: “What did you learn from moving around so much when you were younger?”

When the original question (did I like it?) is asked, my answer has always been the same. Well… growing up, no. I did not like it one bit. Being told out of the blue after a regular day at school, seeing my regular friends who I had just finally started to feel close to, and the regular McDonald's on the way to drop-off that my dad would take me to every Friday, and the regular lake in the backyard my crush had just caught a snapping turtle in the evening before, would all suddenly change because we were moving to none other than Japan, of all the places on this God-forsaken planet (I was a cynical nine-year-old), and I'm pretty sure that was the same as China anyways (I was also an extremely uneducated nine-year-old). No. I did not like it.

I vividly remember my mother telling me the news, in her typical unemotional way, and me running out of her bedroom crying. No, I did not enjoy moving every three years.

However, I continue to explain, without these tiny details, that I am thankful that it taught me to be very adaptable and become someone who makes friends very easily—since, of course, I had to over and over again, so often. Adapt or die. And oh boy did I sure learn to adapt. Up until the point that I swore once my mother got out of the military, I'd plant myself somewhere epic and never move again. Well… lo and behold. I went to college and then transferred to a new one hours away within two years. And then after college I moved across the country, well, just because. And even now, transparently, I sit in my beautiful home in my wonderful community that is everything younger me would have pined over, and I am constantly wondering… but is this it? Maybe if we just move somewhere else (lol). You can take the girl out of the military but… well, you know. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

But back to the second question, the one I wish people would ask, and the one I have taken the liberty of asking myself: “What did I learn from it?” Well, there's the canned, though very true, answer about adaptability that I do stand behind. But tonight, as I was lying next to my husband, full of bliss and joy and gratitude, another answer came to me.

I learned to be present, and to fully enjoy where I am. But please, if you've made it this far, let me explain, because that lesson did not come in the way you probably expect. You’ve likely seen travel vlogs of the wonders of Japan, or maybe you have that one friend who randomly took an absurdly priced plane ticket to Nippon and has since spent years telling you all about this wonderful country that feels so elusive and far away.

Or maybe you’re one of the cool nerds who already knows. The ones who dream of wandering Tokyo side streets, finding hidden hot springs tucked into the countryside, and who know entirely too much about anime. The ones who agree that $2,000 for a plane ticket is absurd, but also somehow understandable when you’re trying to preserve the magic of a truly magical place.

Japan tends to do that to people. It certainly did it to me.

A place I dream about returning to and showing my husband and my son one day.

But I did not always feel this way, and that is where this lesson comes in.

You see, when nine-year-old Lynda was told by her mother that they would be moving to Japan in the next few months, she cried. And then she moved. And then she lived, for nearly a year, in the most magical place she'd ever been and would possibly ever be, with misery in her spirit.

I hated it. I was mad at my mother for taking me from the sunny weather of Florida. Mad that I had to leave my friends. Mad that my neighborhood was no longer palm trees and lakes, but rather military houses stacked in rows. Mad that my bedroom was different, and the same as all the others in every other house on the base. Mad that I couldn't understand the words strangers spoke around me, and mad that I felt like every Japanese person around me was judging the small brown girl who hadn't grown into her face and who didn't know what to do with her hair. In my anger, and my discomfort in myself, I had a perpetual feeling of disdain and indifference for the world around me.

That is, until one day, when the metaphorical scales fell from my eyes. And I realized the splendor of the waterfalls we were swimming in, the hot springs we were finding tucked into mountainsides, the trains we rode to get to the beach by our house where we could make out the shadow of Mount Fuji towering in all her glory far into the hazy distance, and the beautiful people who always showed love to four strangers even without being able to speak the same language. I fell deeply and madly in love. And then, the orders came. Back to the U.S. we would go at the end of the year. And the heartbreak I felt upon hearing the news that we would be coming to this place, I felt even deeper at the knowing I would be leaving it. The feeling I had then is the same feeling I have had since then when I think of Japan, and that is the feeling that it is home. To a girl who has had a million places to call home, and none.

So the lesson? The biggest lesson that beautiful place taught me? I think it is to fully appreciate, embrace, breathe into the deepest depths that your lungs and your soul can manage, exactly where you are.

I mourn that any moment of time during that three-year deployment was spent in any heart posture other than joy and wonder and gratitude. I really lived up to military brat as I stood there on an ancient trail, stone-faced and indifferent.

And I think that returning back to the U.S. was a transitional period that truly shaped who I am at a soul level. Because never since then have I ever stood in any moment of time, any stage, any season, and not been able to genuinely look upon it with gratitude and to dig deep to get everything I can out of it.

Today, I am a stay-at-home mom to a 14-month-old. I do UGC loosely to bring in extra money for our family, but my husband is a phenomenal provider who makes sure I never have to go back to a 9-to-5 unless I want to. He is my best friend. Truly, he solidified my belief in soul mates, but that is a different story altogether. Today my days are filled with sticky hands touching my clothes and face, and diffusing tantrums, and reading the same book 15 times, and enunciating my words hoping, just hoping, my son is picking up on something and will grow into a well-rounded, decent human because I sacrificed my career to be with him and give him the best chance at, I don't know, emotional development so he isn't some weird dude who thinks Snapchat is an appropriate mode of communication.

I do not miss my life before becoming a mom. I rarely even think about it. I am so fully immersed in the beautiful chaos of my simple day-to-day with my son, and my evenings cooking a meal for my husband while we dance to country music and sip on sparkling water or wine, depending on how the day went, and putting our son to bed with the nighttime routine that fills our souls with joy, and then watching our show or playing a game of Scrabble and making love before bed.

I am so fully immersed and thankful and present in this moment, I dare not wish for ones that once were, or yearn for any that may be. I did that once, and all I gained was a wasted year I could have spent allowing magic into my soul.

And even in seasons where people have been confused by my metaphorical standing up to dance, considering my circumstances, I have always leaned in. Into the pain. Into the hurt. Into the chaos.

Not perfectly, not without wrestling at times, and not without correction from wise counsel. But I would say, in a general sense, that lesson has truly permeated to the depths of me.

Even in mourning, in pain, and in sorrow, there is something there to behold. It is easier to distract, disengage, and pull away, but what you lose in doing so is costly. The appreciation that only comes from loss. The strength that can only be forged through hardship. The empathy that grows from suffering. The deepening of your soul’s capacity to feel.

Presence. Gratitude. Here, now. Nothing else. Or else the magic of today that is accessible to you will slip past your fingertips. And the wonder you could find in your mundane will appear to be nothing other than misery.

Again, I do not do this perfectly. It is a lesson I remind myself of often. One I never want to fade into the background. I want to always remember the sorrow of realizing I had just missed such a beautiful season of life because I was yearning for another.

And on the days I do feel the drumming of that horrid habit trying to creep its way back up, telling me to mourn days past or wish for a new future, I remind myself of this: to hold the hardships and pains of a season alongside the beauty and feel gratitude, regardless of how the scale says those things are weighing. As a girl, I couldn't hold mourning my old life alongside the beauty of the new one, and it cost me. As a woman, I must hold the joy of seeing my son laugh, or learn something new for the very first time, the joy of feeling his hand against my face before he gives me one of his open-mouth kisses, all alongside the mourning of my old life, my old flexibility, the way I can't travel on a whim anymore, and the sleep deprivation that comes with raising babies.

I must see the beauty of what is before me now.

Lest I miss this tiny blip of time that, just like my home tucked in the forests of Japan, I will never be able to return to.