You don’t feel like you have it all together, do you? You struggle with messing up, feeding your kids frozen pizza, again, raising your voice at your toddler, and then dealing with the heap of mom guilt that comes with the whole package.

Here’s the thing: you really don’t have it all together. Yep, you stink. If you rock one thing, another ball drops. If you nail it for a little bit, someone gets sick, or the cat dies, or you have to move houses, again.

The truth is, you don’t have this mom thing all together, and you never will. Even if they didn’t change so rapidly or if each kid was exactly the same, you would still fail and fail again. Why? Because you are broken.

Yes, sister, you are broken and there is no fixing yourself. You were born with this inherent desire to be selfish, self-preserve, self-glorify. It takes effort–often of gargantuan proportions–to peel yourself out of bed and soothe the crying baby, smear the poopy butt, feed the whining toddler, or discipline the sassy preschooler.

All of this is not difficult by chance. Righteousness and self-sacrifice don’t come naturally, because we are naturally sinful. We are broken and we can’t fix ourselves.

But, there is One who can. The One who originally created us in perfect harmony and good. The One who saw us turn our own way and believe the lies of a serpent. The One who made a way to fix us through the blood of a perfect lamb: His own son, Jesus Christ.

Friends, we don’t have to keep mothering on the broken treadmill we’ve been running. We don’t have to rest our laurels and the fate of our children on our ability to bake homemade cookies or keep the sheets clean. Instead, we get to parent our littles to the best of our ability, resting in the grace that Jesus’ death covered it all. We are sinful, but He makes us perfect. We are broken, but He makes us whole. With faith, surrender your broken self and broken mothering to Him daily (or moment by frenetic moment!), and trust that He is working in the shortcomings, and His grace is enough. He is enough.

So, the next time you drop your phone in the bathtub, or you forget a dirty diaper in the car [in July], remember that Jesus already lived the perfect life and died to fix broken things… so you don’t have to.