Laura Ellis - Packing Light: For the Journey of Motherhood

Packing
Light

For the Journey
of Motherhood

LAURA ELLIS

ONE MOMS TESTIMONY OF BEING SET FREE

FROM THE PRISON OF LEGALISM

Copyright 2017 Laura Ellis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Some content taken from TRANSFORMING GRACE, by Jerry Bridges. Copyright 1991, 2008. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7751-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7752-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7750-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017902973

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/30/2019

CONTENTS

To my husband, Mickey:

this book is really yours
minus twenty thousand words or so
(and the excessive use of parentheses
and exclamation points, of course!)

Thank you

for consistently pointing me
to Jesus.

And for my seven little (and not so little) blessings:

Elijah

Esther

Eva

Ezekiel (Zeke)

Eden

Elizabeth (Lulu)

& Ezra

It is the cry of my heart

that you choose to follow the Shepherd

all the days of your lives.

I apologized to Elijah (6) for being so grouchy one day.

He whispered in my ear,

Take it to the bottom of the o cean.

At my look of surprise, he then expla ined,

When you tell God you are s orry,

He will throw your sins to the bottom of the o cean.

You will cast all our sins

into the depths of the sea.

Micah 7:19

Whenever I read a book, I always want to know right away about the author, so Id like to start by sharing some things about myself: First and foremost, I am loved and redeemed by the Savior of the world nothing else even comes close to that kind of amazing! He is my exceedingly great reward (Genesis 15:1 NKJV), and my life is a testament to His amazing grace. Im married to a very patient man (as in, longsuffering, because the poor man has suffered long ). And I am also a perpetually-clad-in-dark-stretchy-pants mother of seven children, which means I have changed approximately 38,325 diapers. (I did the math and that number is on the conservative end!) Ive been carrying around babies for so long that sometimes when I go shopping, I find myself bouncing whatever is in my arms. Like a paper towel holder. Yes, I did. Once, I even dropped a glass in the sink while washing dishes and actually started to comfort it ! (Yeah, I didnt get out much for quite awhile )

I am so not Mom of the Year material. In fact, I major in meltdowns (not talking about my toddlers here), and have had to apologize to my kids more times than I care to admit. Parenting has often been for me what I like to refer to as a gauntlet of sanctification. But even though I have often struggled in this calling, I can say from the bottom of my heart that I am so very blessed to be a mama.

*Eva (3) asked, When am I going to be a mommy? Not for a while, I told her. She was definitely not happy about that, complaining that it was taking sooooooo long!

*Lulu (6) was playing that she was a mom and Ezra (4) was her child. He wasnt listening very well, and I overheard her lamenting to him that it is so hard to be a mother!

As I began my second decade of parenting, I realized the sweet older ladies in the grocery store were rightit does go by fast! (It is equally true, as my friend Page says, that though the years fly by, some days are long like those I-am-pretty-sure-an-entire-week-just-passed-by-and-it-isnt-even-naptime-yet kind of days.) When the younger generation of women in my church started having babies, I realized I am no longer one of the young moms on campus. It was also surprising when a couple new mamas started asking me for advice. Me? The woman who still doesnt know how to potty-train, can find herself arguing with preschoolers, and for the love of everything cant figure out how to get her children to use less bath towels each week?

I may not have much to offer in the way of practical child-training advice, but I do have something heavy on my heart to share with other momsbe a Berean (Acts 17:11), and check everything you read and hear against the plumb line of Gods Word. This message was stamped on my heart, so to speak, through some hard trials in my early mothering, and this book tells that story.

My one potty-training tipWhen kids start using sarcasm, they are most likely capable of going to the bathroom by themse lves:

I was putting Elijah (3) into his car seat and smelled something. I told him, Something stinks! and asked if he had a dirty diaper. He looked at me and said, Maybe you stink, Mom.

Disclaimers and Such

I tried to be real in this book, but when I read it, it just seems like a better me and cheerier home life is being presented. And since I dont want to add several chapters detailing all of my sins and struggles (because who wants to read that?), Im going to have to ask you to think of this book like a Christmas card photo: this is what my life looks like, it just isnt the whole picture. (When we are tempted to compare our lives with the limited knowledge we have about someone elses, we need to remember that Sunday mornings, blog posts, and books are only pieces of a persons reality. No ones life is free of difficulty, and all of us are works-in-progress in this Christian life, to one degree or another.)

I have not read all of the books I quoted from, so the citations are not endorsements (unless a recommendation is also given).

If you wonder why the pronouns for God are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not, it is because most of the Bible versions I used dont capitalize them while I prefer to do so.

This isnt exactly a light topic, so to add some humor to these pages, Ive included a bunch of quotes from my kids and several other children. For the times they were almost a certain age, like six and three quarters, or I hadnt recorded how old they were when they said something, I have given an approximate age, which is noted by the following symbol: ~