Welcome, dear reader! I’ve been blogging here since November 2013. I trust that here you will find encouragement to spur you on, whether you’re a parent or not. Over the years I’ve had loads of positive feedback about this blog and I’m really grateful that the Lord has used my feeble efforts to encourage people. Despite this, Mum in Zone One has remained a very well kept secret, so well done for finding it! And if you do enjoy reading my posts, please do share it with others who may also find some refreshment here.
Below is my original ‘welcome message’ from 2013. Nothing much has changed, although I think I’ve learnt to be more succinct! If you have time, do read on. Otherwise, have a browse through the blog itself and remember you can use the ‘categories’ to help search for certain topics. (Please excuse the general appearance of my blog. I don’t have time or skills to make it look more professional!) Enjoy!
I’ve got a ‘to do’ list as long as my arm; my daughter wants to help me bake; my son is running the bathroom taps for no legitimate reason; my baby needs a bath and probably some calpol; the dinner’s not ready and I need to ring my mum.
So why am I writing on a blog?
I don’t know if you do this, but after all the stuff on the news about vitamin D deficiency and, despite the surprisingly painful cost, I started buying multivitamin tablets for my 3-yr-old. As soon as she started taking them, I felt relieved. She will not eat vegetables, and my kids do get the pleasure of eating stick-it-on-a-baking-tray-straight-from-the-freezer easy dinners more often than I’d like to admit. But now she has a little orange tablet once a day, and I don’t have to worry about where her vitamins are coming from. (Now, as an aside, let me just say that I know I still need to feed my kids healthy food, but this isn’t a post on healthy eating so please just stay with me!)
Wouldn’t it be much easier to bring up our children in the ‘training and discipline of the Lord’ if there were some kind of spiritual vitamin tablet equivalent? You read your kids a Bible story just before bed, and then the rest of the time you know that they’ve had their spiritual nutrition and it’s doing its work inside their hearts, and one day you can send them off to work or university or marriage, knowing that they’re spiritually healthy and well-rounded. Job done!
Hang on a minute. Hold your Pharisee-horses.
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
God says we should teach our children about him, both formally and informally, both at ‘Bible story time’ and during the all-day chaos of life. And not just that, but we need to live it out too! There’s no use saying ‘And that’s why, children, we should be thankful for all of our toys,’ and then spend the rest of the afternoon complaining that the hoover isn’t good enough/the car is old (or non-existent!)/there’s too much washing to do. We can’t say to our children, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, so you must share with your brother,’ and then never invite anyone into your home to share food or time or your tumble dryer with them. Walk the talk, Mum!
This is wonderful (and difficult), and liberating (and overwhelming), and by far the best way to live! So in short, to recap in a slightly clearer version… ‘Help!’
I need God’s gracious help to do this and I’m just trying to figure stuff out by reading the Bible, praying, asking really wise and wonderful people, and then processing it all by jabbering away to my husband, or writing it down like this. And I thought the written down version might help somebody else – hopefully you.
That is why I am writing this blog. I really hope it encourages you, even if it just reminds you that there is another mum in the world who’s asking the same questions and praying the same prayers as you.
Mum in Zone One 
Hey there.
I couldn’t see any other way of doing this but I just stumbled across your Sons Not Dogs post of 2016.
I worked their stall at soul survivor a couple years and so thought I’d share what they were about.
It was focussing on her response mommy I Jesus more than Jesus comment To her.
“Even a loving master gives their dog the scraps from the table”
The point of the T-shirt’s were to remind us that this is true but though we have a master, we are not dogs, we are sons and essentially that we will get the value of that sonship, not the mere scraps.
Interestingly each T-shirt had a bible verse on the sleeve. It was encoded to symbols and hieroglyphs that you had to try to decipher. Usually the verse was pointing to our kingdom heritage as an additional reminder of the promise we have.
Hope that helps.
Hi, thank you so much for this! I’m so sorry that I’ve only just seen this comment – I wasn’t ignoring you! With every blessing, Cat.