and unseen.
When Heather enters your world, it gets brighter, funnier, and more exciting. Your heart is filled with the sure confidence and peace that you will not be abandoned on the side of the road. Heather is your roadside assistance plan, and she is darn good at it. She sees your heart and speaks with truth and grace. She encourages and uplifts while walking alongside you, holding you up when you cannot stand on your own. She is a woman of God on a mission to make sure you know that as woman, wife, sister, and mother, you are seen, known, and loved by a God who has drawn a very unique and special road map just for you to follow.
Heather is one heck of a travel buddy. Imagine those minivan windows rolled down, wind whipping your hair, hands in the air, while the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff accompany you down the highway of life.
Death by Minivan is a celebration of motherhood with all its twists and turns along those mountain roads you are terrified to navigate. Using the fruits of the Holy Spirit as a guide to celebrate seeing motherhood as God’s carefully considered gift to us for our sanctification, Heather shares the truth of God’s economy of embracing our cross to be free, dying to live, giving to receive.
Some of us love the ups and downs of hills and valleys, some prefer the winding mountain road, and others the straight and narrow surrounded by wheat fields as far as the eye can see. No matter your landscape preference, no matter your past driving record or how many speeding tickets or fender benders you have been involved in, every woman’s road map is unique to her and the passengers whom God has created to fill her minivan along the way.
This book you are holding is filled with inspiration and encouragement as Heather shares her heart, freely and fully, so that you might not feel alone on your own journey. Her experience is vast and varied. Her love for Christ, her husband, and their five blessings resonates throughout each page. They are her true north, her guiding lights. The stories shared within just might inspire you to step outside your comfort zone and trust a little more in the plan God has for you and your family.
No one travels the same road in the same way. There will be roadblocks—and many of them. But don’t be afraid of them or the occasional flat tire from the construction debris on the side of the road. Trust in the GPS that the Holy Spirit provides and listen closely for the sirens of the emergency vehicles that will arrive just in time to save the day.
Dig in, friends, and savor this book. Celebrate the sacrificial yet fruitful call to love and allow it to change your perspective on motherhood. Now crank up the radio, and let’s get this road trip started. Life is a highway, and all roads lead to heaven.
Mary Lenaburg
author, writer, and speaker www.marylenaburg.com
Mamas, Start Your Engines
(( and now an introductory word or two from our author ))
“Most of the time, I feel entirely unqualified to be a parent. I call these times being awake.”
— Jim Gaffigan
This whole written journey through the mother’hood began because I was up-to-my-eyeballs frustrated.
Mile after mile, hour after hour, day after seemingly endless day, I transported my beloved children in our beat-up minivan to destinations both hither and yon and back again. It was a thankless, mind-numbing task. And pretty numbing of other body parts, too, come to think of it.
I felt trapped in a ridiculously sensible vehicle with freakishly loud short people who neither appreciated my music playlist nor my air-conditioning needs. It was also only a matter of time before I completely lost my sense of hearing due to the sheer volume of noise assaulting my eardrums from the back seat.
Perhaps most telling about my pit-of-despair mindset was this: I just knew I had more important things to do with my time than lugging children around—even children I deeply and fiercely loved. Because, after all, I didn’t aspire to be a chauffeur (or a maid, or a short-order cook, or a nanny) when I grew up, so why was I relegated to all these tasks (and more) without so much as a paycheck to show for it?
My minivan had become a metaphor—a visible sign that I’d lost the last vestiges of my youth, my potential for cool, and my hard-fought independence. It represented everything I’d given up so my children could have what (and get to where) they needed.
The minivan represented eventual, total, and complete annihilation: death. And perhaps even scarier: carpooling.
Now, while I would much prefer death by chocolate, or spa day, or countless other pleasant things, that’s not where God has me.
In my heart of hearts, I know that family life is where God wants me, for better or worse. This is my vocation, my calling, my path to holiness. And so, I determined with a bullheaded willfulness known to my confessor alone that I would, with God’s grace and quite a bit of caffeine, endeavor to despise my minivan and the countless sacrifices it represented slightly less today than I had yesterday.
Besides, maybe if I tried harder to accept the road map I’d been given for this crazy adventure called life, I’d only be significantly wounded rather than outright killed by my minivan metaphor. Hey—a girl can dream, right?
Eventually, I conceded that death is inevitable; it doesn’t discriminate. As Sister Theresa Aletheia often reminds her Twitter followers: #mementomori (remember your death). Perhaps, though, my sacrifice—my dying to self—could accomplish something, like in John 12:24, where he wrote, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
I wondered: what sort of fruit could I bear by laying down my life for my husband and children? I remembered a choral piece I sang in church choir before we had kids. Its lyrics were based on Galatians 5:22-23: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If you walk in the Spirit, let your life reflect the fruit of God’s love.”
There. That! That was the sort of woman—the sort of mother—I wanted to be! I wanted to be more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, gentle, and all the rest. I wanted to walk by the Spirit!
But how? That was the million-dollar question.
I don’t know about you, but I figure things out by talking and writing about them, so I started doing just that.
I wrote about the realities of mom life—how we sacrifice brain cells, energy, clean clothes, and washed hair for our kids, but how, even with all of that, a plethora of good fruit can be harvested, up to and including eternity spent with God in heaven.
Answering God’s call to unconditionally love our spouse and our children—traveling the straight and narrow way—takes a lot of practice. It takes sacrifice. And it takes many, many acts of the will that are often contrary to our impulses and feelings. If we want to live by the Spirit, we have to intentionally and consistently choose to incorporate good, godly fruits into our busy lives.
We moms, I figured, often give of ourselves until there’s not much left to give. Basically, we’re dying to ourselves for the good of our families all the time already. Couldn’t we possibly enjoy some tantalizing fruit as partial payment for our efforts along the way?
Now,
