Hold On to Your Crown

In my daily devotional today the title was "Hold on to Your Crown". The author is continuing to encourage us as mothers to stay the course. Society as a whole oozes with attitude that what moms do is not valuable, that someone else out there with a degree in children can do a much better job than we can, that we need to find our value in some sort of career outside the home or we are wasting our talents. I pray, as the author does, that we would stay the course of motherhood. That we would use the many gifts and abilities that the Lord has blessed us with in the God-given job of mothering our children. Staying home with our children, teaching them, discipling them is a huge responsibility that we should not take lightly, nor should we turn it over to someone else lightly. My girls all have some idea of what they would like to do when they "grow up" and I think that it is fine to use the gifts and abilities that God has given them in finding ways to serve others even for pay but my prayer for them is that when and if the Lord blesses them with children that they will not give up the blessing of raising them and staying home with them. I believe that there is nothing materially that we can give our children that could ever take the place of raising them and being there for them. They grow us so fast. So as for me...I am going to Hold on to my crown, my crown of motherhood. And I am purposing to delight in it and not let society steal my joy.

Here is the prayer for the day from the devotional:
    "Lord, I thank you that you have given me the crown of mothering. Help me to remember each day that it is a crown of which I can be proud. When I wear this crown I am walking in Your perfect will. Amen."

And a poem:
                                           What is in Thine Hand?
                             
                                 What is that, oh Christian Mother
                                    God hath 'trusted to thy care?
                                 In thine hand to love and nurture,
                                     Sweetly innocent and fair!
                                 What a high and noble priviledge!
                                Bring them up to know God's Word;
                                  They in turn will call thee blessed
                                When they've learned to trust the Lord!

                                               Mary A. Haydon