When you’re carrying motherhood without a partner

But before I do that, I just wanna encourage you, I started our new, you know, women's Bible study, just started up at our church, and we are studying through the Book of Philippians, and we were going around our new table, you know- It's fall season, so it's a bunch of new people.

And it was such a blessing.

I've got a 91-year-old at my table, longtime believer.

She's super brilliant.

She became a believer, like, in college, and she was sharing that she didn't know the Bible very well, so she got a master's degree in it.

She's 91 years old, so full of wisdom, so grateful.

But anyway, we were just going around the table, and several of the women that I'm doing this with every week now talked about just the light bulb that went off when they started studying scripture as a whole, rather than just cherry-picking verses out.

I know a lot of you have this story, or maybe you are in a phase of your spiritual life where you have a couple verses on a couple coffee mugs and you haven't studied the Bible much.

No shame.

That's okay.

Like, you can start this new practice today.

I think even if you grow up in the Church where you're learning the importance of studying scripture, like, nobody arrives at that automatically.

You're not born having read the whole Bible, okay? [laughs] And you don't really see the beauty of studying the Bible in context and fully until you've done it.

It was super rewarding hearing from some of these people in my group this week about how God changed their lives and their perspectives when they learned, like, oh man, like, not only do I get to know the voice of God, but, like, it's-- there's just nothing like it.

Like, I think of it this way, like, God, the, the Bible is living and active, and God uses it to communicate with us.

How can we know God? How can we know the character of God, the comfort of God? How can we, you know, follow his will for our lives if we don't actually know what his word says? And, you know, if we just pull a verse here and there, like, I am gonna pull some Psalms and read them over you.

It's not bad to memorize scripture, little bits at a time.

It's not bad to focus on a verse or say, "This is my verse for the week or my verse for the year." These are good things.

But if that's all you're doing, not only are you missing out huge, but you are-- there's such a big danger of misinterpreting what the Bible is actually saying.

If we just have a verse we pull out and we don't know the context or the culture or who wrote it or who it was written to, um, if we don't know those things, we are definitely in danger of misreading it, misinterpreting it.

And man, here's what I've learned, just the more I study scripture, the more I see that God is so good.

He's more good, and he's more loving, and he's more faithful than I ever even imagined he could be before I had learned to study scripture differently.

So my scripture focus for you moms who are alone or moms who feel alone would be to dive into the Bible as like a, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna read this book of the Bible, and I'm going to learn about the context, and I'm going to, you know, get some Bible study tools out and figure out what the original language, what did this word mean? Like, really get into it in that way because, man, sometimes people will say-- will ask me, like, "Which verses has comforted you in this season?" Or, you know, "What's your life verse?" And I've always struggled with that.

God definitely gives me verses for times and seasons, but the most transformative, most powerful thing about God's Word in my life has just been simply reading, reading, digesting it in long form and not giving up on it or just gravitating toward the easier to understand parts, but actually, like, going to God's Word to know God, especially those of you who are making all the decisions and carrying all the weight by yourselves.

Like, it is so important to have that firm foundation.