You’re Probably Better Equipped Than You Realize

“You’re probably better equipped than you realize.”

Sometimes the Lord uses someone you don’t expect to speak the truth you need to hear. In this case, my children’s pediatrician.

It wasn’t the first time I felt out of my league in caring for a child. For context, 3 of our 5 children were diagnosed with a rare genetic condition in 2013. Since then, 2 were also diagnosed with celiac disease, one with hypoglycemia, and our family has faced our share of unusual food allergies and “normal” stuff like broken bones.

In my 15 years of mom life, I’ve faced my fears for my children as well as my own inadequacy, insufficiency, and limitations. They’re all real. Powerful. Humbling. And sometimes debilitating.

But over these same fifteen years, God has used multiple voices to remind me that he chose me to be the mother of my children. That he chose these children to be born into our family. That what sometimes feels so perplexing—the medical conditions, the grief, my dependency on God and others—and the situations that I feel so ill-equipped for, weren’t an accident but part of his grand purpose and design.

It was part of God’s purpose for my children to grow up in a home where they would learn about him. “He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27).

In choosing these children for me, God is working out his purpose to conform me more to the image of his Son. “For those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose…to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:28-29).

In God’s kindness, I’m grateful that he used a pediatrician to remind me that I am perfectly positioned and better equipped than I realize.

And so are you, moms and dads.

The one whose “divine power has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:3) has equipped us far better than we often remember.