It is Okay to Feel Weak

I’m guessing I am not the only mom who has ever felt weak—weak beyond description. After I had my first baby, I’ll never forget the overwhelming amount of weakness I felt. I wondered what was wrong with me. Why do I feel so incapable? Why am I having such a hard time with this? For years my dream was to be a mom, and I was certain of how beautiful and wonderful it would be. However, “weakness,” was never a part of that dream.

Even now (with 8 years of motherhood under my belt), I have many moments when I feel weak. In fact, it is a very familiar feeling! But guess what I have discovered? IT IS OKAY TO FEEL WEAK. It is okay to feel like I can’t keep up. It is okay to feel exhausted. It is okay to feel stretched thin. Why is it okay? Because it turns me to my Lord, my God. It shows me that I cannot do it alone. It brings me to my knees in prayer. Weakness reminds me just how much I need God’s strength in my life.

So many moments of my motherhood have consisted of tearful pleas for help from Heaven above. I’m sure many of you could say the same. And if we take a moment, to think back on those moments, we remember how desperate and weak we felt. Yet at the same time, we humbly remember how the Lord enabled us, through His loving grace, to be strengthened in our weakness. The weakness itself might not have been removed, but we felt a strength beyond our own.

In Jacob 4:7, Jacob shares an important truth about weakness—a truth that has special significance for mothers. He wrote, 

“Nevertheless, the Lord God showeth us our weakness that we may know that it is by his grace, and his great condescensions unto the children of men, that we have power to do these things.”

Our moments of weakness are opportunities develop faith in our Savior, Jesus Christ. We realize that through Him, we can always be enabled to “rise to the occasion” as mothers. We see that we have power to be good moms because of the Lord, not only because of ourselves.

In contrast, if we never felt moments of weakness, I daresay we would gradually forget our need for Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. If motherhood was “easy-peasy,” it would be easy to give ourselves all the credit, and forget the goodness of God. We would tragically begin to trust in our own limited power, separating ourselves from God’s unlimited power.

I love this reminder from Elder David A. Bednar,

“[Christ] has perfect empathy and can extend to us His arm of mercy in so many phases of our life. He can reach out, touch, succor—literally run to us—and strengthen us to be more than we could ever be and help us to do that which we could never do through relying upon only our own power.”

Feeling weak no longer scares or alarms me. I am so grateful for how motherhood is a continual reminder of my absolute need for Christ. I’m grateful for the times of weakness that have given me some of my sweetest experiences with the Lord. I bear my unwavering witness that as we turn to Christ in our weak moments, we WILL find His enabling and empowering strength (Ether 12:27).