Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | The flight attendant recited the usual instructions as the plane was about to take off. “If loss of cabin pressure should occur, oxygen masks will drop down.” Then she added that if you are traveling with a child, secure your own mask before putting the mask on your child. Why? Because, of course, if you should black out from lack of oxygen, you would not be able to help your child. It makes sense.

Yet, when it comes to parenting, we mothers usually feel we must always tend to our children’s needs before our own. Everyone else needs good meals, adequate rest and sufficient exercise—everyone, that is, except Mom. Sometimes we’re pretty close to blacking out from exhaustion.

It sounds so loving to sacrifice yourself for your family. Yet for survival we must maintain a balance between meeting our family’s needs and adequately caring for our own. After all, every mom is first a woman, then a mom.

Especially when it comes to spiritual resources, moms often come up short. When I was mothering three young children, it seemed impossible to have a very deep spiritual life. There simply was no time for extensive Bible study or long periods of prayer. If I got up early to read my Bible, invariably one of the kids woke up earlier. If I resorted to locking myself in the bathroom to have some time to myself, that’s inevitably when one of the kids would holler, “Mom!” At times the best I could do was grab a few verses on the run and send up prayers of desperation, saying, “Lord, help me!”

So, my advice to moms is, don’t panic when a few days go by when you can’t read your Bible and your prayers are very short. Just know that you can’t go very long without spiritual oxygen. For, Jesus said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).