Growing With Your Newborn

In the months after I had all three of my babies I found that my Bible reading and prayer time dwindled away to next to nothing. I didn't do this intentionally, but my lack of foresight, planning, and desire to do so meant I got to the end of most days and neither had really happened.

Of course, it is hard to juggle everything with a newborn, but I discovered the hard way that if you let go of all your good intentions to do daily prayer and Bible reading - you will not get back into it even when you've got past the stage of still being in your pyjamas at 5 o'clock in the afternoon!

I was so encouraged to read that my friend Cathy has been doing this kind of thinking in the lead-up to the arrival of her third child. Cathy has shared how she's planning on growing in her love for Jesus even in the midst of the challenging newborn stage. Her posts are practical, with lots of suggestions and some great insights into the shape of the Christian life and practicalities of living. She writes in her introductory post:

In my short career of being a mother so far, I am amazed at the extremes my daily Christian experience can take. There are strong seasons of being able to study a lot of the Bible deeply, listen to excessive hours of sermons, sit down and pray for extended, regular periods of time, and then have time for doing all these things with other people too.

Then there are the other times. The times when waking up feels near impossible. The evening meal regularly resembles breakfast. I sit with an open Bible and stare blankly. Times when I don't realise how long it is since I prayed until I look at the distant date in my prayer diary. Times where I feel beyond repair and planted in dust far from the life water of God. These eras are full of burden and angst rather than joy.

The difference between these extremes is often that the conditions I am living in keep changing. What was working a few months ago in terms of reading the Bible and praying would be a bit unrealistic now. What works now may not work in six months time. With very young children, the demands and details of life keep morphing into something new. Morning sickness, one child, two children, night time wakefulness, lots of day sleeps, inquisitive toddlers, miscarriage, general rhythm of life...all these impact on my daily disciplines as a Christian. And my joy. And God's glory.

A lot of the time these changes happen unannounced and unexpectedly. I figure there is a change about to happen in our family that I have a bit of forewarning about, so I am trying to think ahead a little about how to make the most of it.

Here are the links to the rest of the series:

Preparing to grow with a newborn

The small, slow world of a newborn

Growing with a newborn: Prayer and Bible strategy

Logistics of growing with a newborn

The goal of growing with a newborn

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