Book Review: God's Whisper In a Mother's Chaos by Keri Wyatt Kent

Someone recently recommended this book to me as a new mom. Wow. I'm going to give this to every new mom I know from now on... I guess you could say it really spoke to me. What I love is that Kent wrote the book while she had two small, toddler-age, children, so she was writing from a place of current experience, not wisdom from afar. There is much to the book, but her basic premise is that we can continue to hear God in the midst of raising young children. We just need to learn how. Here are some good tidbits....

• As mothers, God uses the chaos of raising small kids to speak to us. And, although we should try to spend time alone in silence in order to hear God, we also need to learn to hear Him amidst the chaos.
• Our prayers of frustration, such as "God, please let her go to sleep," are indeed connections with God -- just not what we're used to.
• Let go of the guilt! She talks about the guilt we feel in our spiritual lives -- feeling compelled to have a "quiet time" every day, feeling like we don't pray enough, etc. -- and then suggests that we reevaluate the benchmarks by which we judge ourselves. Instead of judging ourselves by how much solitary contemplative time we spend with God, evaluate how we are doing as mothers and see this job as an act of service just as pleasing to Him.

Finally, her last chapter is about one's calling. Obviously, those of us with children are called to be mothers. But some of us are called to more. She writes:

"When I listen carefully to God's whisper, I hear him calling me to love my family and serve them. But when I go into solitude and get uncomfortably quiet with him, I also hear him telling me 'fan into flame the gift that is in you.' And one of the gifts he has put in me is the ability to use the written word to point people toward him. I'm not saying that to brag. My life would be simpler if I didn't feel compelled to write. But if I leave that gift unopened and undeveloped, I have been disobedient and, ironically, unfulfilled. If I ignore the other components of my calling, my family may get more of my time, but they get more time with a crabby person who is frustrated because she is not using some of the gifts God gave her and called her to use."

Wow. Okay, that is what I have been trying to say for months if not years about why I can't just stop being a lawyer. It took someone with the gift and "calling" to write to express it for me.