Why a God of Order Would Ask Us to Take on the Chaos of Motherhood

If it feels like no matter what you do, you can't keep up with the demands of your kids, your household, your commitments, your life. You are definitely not alone. I just finished cleaning up the pile of laundry next to my bed and suddenly the pile reappeared. I vacuum and as I vacuum, I see taps of dog hair floating away that I truly cannot completely make disappear. I change a diaper and another diaper needs to be changed just hours later. Sometimes even minutes later. I break a bone in my left arm and the difference between the muscles after only a few days of atrophy is visible. I clean up the toys, they are a mess two seconds later. I put my baby socks on her and in a blink they are off again. I pull out weeds in the front bed and within a week, it looks like I didn't weed at all. I washed every dish and as I close the dishwasher, there is already another dish waiting in the sink. Just builds up, bodies wear down, clothes wear out, houses settle, rocks erode. No matter how diligently you work to organize your house, create a perfect system, teach every one of your children to follow through on their chores, we live in a world that is always falling apart. It is literally a natural law of this world that we live in. Let's explore this natural unraveling of everything we do a little bit deeper because it might actually teach you how to read the scriptures and view yourself and the savior in a new way. Welcome to measure of her creation. I asked a few mom friends what moments of chaos stand out to them in their mothering experiences. Here are a few. One friend said, "We are driving home from Pennsylvania and I wanted to stop and see Gettysburg on the way, but we had gotten off at a bad time, so we were going to get there right at nap time." So the whole last half hour of driving, I'm doing that screaming singing thing, trying to keep the boys awake, and then we get there, and I know I have limited time to see it before they're too cranky, so I'm rushing at max speed to get them out of the car and in the stroller and they're both crying, and Theo wet his pants, so I strip him down and go to open our suitcase and get him more clothes, but right then Quentin dumps his bottle all over himself. So I run over to take it away and try to dry him off, and I just shove sandwiches in their hands as I'm strapping them in the stroller and sprint into the museum to try and make the next movie showing. We make it into the theater with 30 seconds till it starts only for me to look down and realize Theo is still panceless, and I forgot the diaper bag with all our snacks and entertainment stuff, so I'm like trying to entertain them through this historical movie with only a receipt in my keys, and Theo went through the entire museum without pants. At this young stage of motherhood, I feel like chaos is often incited by bodily functions and conveniently coinciding with the fight against time to be somewhere or do something. I remember the first time I ventured to take my baby to the movies I was with family, but not with my husband, and between trying to breastfeed to keep her happy and distracting her from hating the headphones over her ears too much, she blew out all over my new outfit. I spent a good portion of the movie in the bathroom cleaning us both up. I attempt to chat with a couple next to me on the plane and a blowout all over me again. We head out on our first family road trip, and three minutes into the drive, another blowout. When I asked another friend about the chaos in her motherhood journey, she said, "I remember a particular trip to the grocery store where I had decided that my being so stressed taking the kids to the grocery store was just a mindset thing, so I decided to try and just chill out my mind and let the boys have a little more influence on where we go and the pace and everything." A great plan. Until the first thing they did was run to the produce section and start throwing cantaloupes. Of course, then I had that recent grocery store trip where I got bit by someone's service dog and Aiden got a black eye, but I stayed very calm throughout the whole thing and felt like it was real progress in motherhood. So maybe it really is a matter of calmness. Not that the calm changes the actual drama of the circumstances, but the drama in yourself. End quote. This really struck me. Some days everything can go wrong and you have this fortitude that allows you to shrug it off or better you get laugh about it. And sometimes you already feel such a storm inside that any little thing could send you over the edge. Chaos around you is hard to handle, but what is infinitely more crippling is the chaos or the disorganized inside. It's messy to look at, it's dark and deep and painful. It feels untethered and morded, ready to swallow you whole at times. But it can also be settled. It can feel like something is not quite right or something is off inside and you can't put your finger on it. Things are going well, but you still don't feel settled. You are doing all the things as you should and you still aren't feeling it. There's something out of place that you can't seem to fix all on your own. Perhaps a law of thermodynamics can explain this. Hear me out, I am no scientist, but the law of entropy has recently fascinated me because it seems to explain all that I've already mentioned. Entropy is this. It is the law that energy and a system is always running down. The universe naturally is moving to higher entropy or more messiness and chaos because there are far more ways or a system to be disorganized than to be organized. This explains why hot water gets cold over time without an outside energy source and never the opposite. But this also explains why the cupboards stay open unless you shut them, why toys accumulate unless you put them away regularly or without immense effort. You are more likely than not to have piles of laundry in one room or another. There are more ways to be messy than organized. Energy is always dissipating. I think this is why they always say that if you are not progressing in the gospel, then you are digressing. Literally if you are not putting forth energy into a system to organize or send it in a specific direction, the default is always decay. I'll never forget when I was 12 and we took a family history trip to the UK. My grandma came along for part of the journey and in Liverpool we had plans to go see an old music call where every member of the early 12 apostles of the restoration had preached. My parents had visited this location before and the music call had been transformed into a beautiful library. But this time as we climbed the six stories to get to the historic room, we found that the sacred restoration site had been lit up with neon lights and turned into a bar. After a few minutes of looking around, we exited the building and my then 88 year old grandmother began to sing Change and Decay in all around I see. Oh, thou who changed his knot abide with me. Even this sacred site had decayed into something worldly without intentional preservation or upkeep. Do you see how chaos, decay and entropy are part of your life experience? I personally see that without a concerted effort to make time for the Lord, I feel this distance in my relationship with him. I see that without making deliberate time and effort in my marriage, we can drift to parallel play and remain working in our own lands without having meaningful overlap or connection. I see that without continued education and exercising in my therapy skills, my skills can become dull and important details of therapy modalities can be forgotten. Even Elder Uggdorf in this last general conference reminded us of the same thing. He said, quote, "You might spend years acquiring a skill or developing a talent. You might work so hard that it becomes second nature to you. But if you think that means you can stop practicing and studying, you'll gradually lose the knowledge and abilities you once acquired at great cost." I've seen many times firsthand how knowledge is forgotten without the active exercise of it. I remember as a student at the BYU Jerusalem Center staying up in the wee hours of the night and working harder than I had ever worked in college to learn material that was just out of my normal scope of learning. I knew so much about the history of the area I never knew before and I even captioned one of my social media posts of me at the Dome of the Rock with, quote, "Tests on Tiglath Plazer III and Cyrus the Great don't quite compare to this," end quote. Could I explain much about Cyrus the Great now? Do I even know who Tiglath Plazer III is now? Or if I'm pronouncing that right? Yeah, no. Which is kind of sad and frustrating when I genuinely am interested in that history and I work so hard to understand. to learn it at the time, and now it's just gone. One thing I do remember though from that semester in the Near East is a symbol that changed how I read the scriptures, see God, and see myself. Water represents chaos in the ancient world. And when I say chaos, chaos can mean decay, destruction, and uncreation. So if you are seeing yourself at all in a space of chaos, or something in your life feels like it is destroyed or unraveled, or not how you thought it would be, or you feel like you are up against something so big and scary, you have no idea how to surround it, then the symbol might give you some light on your situation. So I'm going to do a deep dive into the symbol. But as we do that, I want you to keep your own chaos, your own decay, your own entropy on your mind. To see if any of these scripture stories mean something new to you personally as we look at them through the framework of water representing this chaos in your life. And again, chaos can be when your life feels like a tornado, but it can also be subtle loss of energy or momentum that often leads to internal disorganization. First, let's look at ancient Egypt. An Egyptian tradition before the world was, there was noon. The endless, dark waters associated with non-being and instability. The kings and the gods come to create, but they also come into establish and preserve order. Order in Egypt is represented by Ma'at, the personification of truth, law, and morality. So in order to create order and tame noon, the endless, dark waters, the gods needed Ma'at, truth, law, and morality. This made the annual flooding of the Nile an interesting symbol for those ancient people because the flooding was an act of water coming out of its bounds and having the potential to destroy, but it also held the duality of offering life to their fields and livelihoods. This duality we will continue to explore. In our own creation story as Christians and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we read that in the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The water was disorganized, the water was chaos. And through the creation, God divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament, and where there was only waters under the heaven he caused the dry land to appear. Where water had no form or boundary or limit, he organized, he divided, he separated. Restored scripture reveals that the creation did not come out of nothing. God was an organizer of matter. After the creation, water or chaos still existed, but it was put into bounds that were clearly controlled by the Creator Himself. We are studying Noah this week in the Old Testament, and he has one of the most iconic experiences with water in the scriptures. It's interesting to have the story of Noah so close to the creation story because they juxtapose each other so perfectly. In Genesis 6 we read, "Behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh. Wherein is the breath of life from under heaven, and everything that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant." And then in Genesis 7 it goes on to say, "And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth." This is the uncreation, and every living substance was destroyed, which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fall of the heaven, and they were destroyed from the earth, and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. So while the creation brought something new to the earth each day, this cosmic uncreation that the flood ensued destroyed every single one of those things, saved the people and animals on the ark. The people at the time had become so wicked that only an unleashing of chaos and destruction could purify the earth. Notice in this story that Noah was not spared from facing the flood. He and his family were not plucked, and sent off to live an ignorant bliss while the rest of the earth was destroyed. He was prepared for the water, or chaos, and destruction and carried through it, learning very vividly the power of God to destroy and to save. God had covenanted with Noah, and that covenant protected him against destruction and chaos. A few years ago, my husband and his friends started a business that became wildly successful very quickly. The company was adding employees and seeing incredible growth it felt like we were on the way to kind of our big break. Like this was the way we would build our own house and fund our fertility treatments and go on cool trips. And it honestly seems like the ideal scenario. He had struggled to find his way in his career, and he was finally loving what he was doing and building and felt like he was building something meaningful. But then one day after an executive meeting it started to become clear that another one of their partners had been dishonest. Long story short, a ton of money had been embezzled and gambled away, and the business basically dissolved before our eyes. Our hopes for our lives were destroyed. It felt like a cosmic uncreation. Instead of buying the lot and building the house, we moved into my parents' basement, and honestly the last three years we have still been rebuilding and figuring out our lives. I didn't witness the destruction of the Earth like Noah, but even the destruction of a life dream or a future you anticipated can feel like chaos has taken over your life. Where a clear plan was laid out, now there's no control or vision. I don't even have a full circle solution to share with you because after a prompting to go back to school for my husband's MBA, we are still trying to figure out next steps in his career. But I do have to say that amidst what has felt like chaos and destruction, God has carried us through the waters and handed us all of branch after all of branch, even if we hadn't made it to land yet. I too have felt the power of covenants as he has provided what we need through the unknown and given us gifts of knowledge along the way. Pervinance with Jesus Christ are the ultimate antidote to chaos and destruction in our lives. Again, not necessarily preventing everything hard from happening, but carrying us through. Moses is another prophet whose experience with water is symbolic and iconic. We all know how history goes. He grows up as an elite in Egypt after he's taken in by Pharaoh's daughter, but his eyes begin to open to the burdens of his people, the Israelites, who are under Egyptian bondage and God calls him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery. You'd think that after years of slavery and ten different plagues that enough chaos had been experienced by both the Israelites and the Egyptians, but the moment where Moses leads his people to the edge of the Red Sea is like the last ultimate test. The Israelites are stuck between tyranny and destruction, bondage and death as they look out over the Red Sea. They either turn back and face the Egyptians and most certainly live lives of bondage still and die facing their spears or they somehow face the Red Sea. And just for context, the narrowest part of the Red Sea is 16 miles wide and at its widest, it is 220 miles wide. I'm not exactly sure where they were trying to cross, but either way, the crossing was an endeavor with people of all ages. But God had prepared Moses as the one to lead them out of bondage and Moses knew the God of creation. Moses had literally seen a vision of the creation and knew without a doubt God's power to divide the waters from the dry land. So this impossible situation with faith became yet another showing forth of God's power. And honestly, after dividing the water from the dry lands and the creation, parting the Red Sea was small stuff for God. Not only did he part the sea, but the Israelites walked through on dry ground. Almost every reference to this miracle includes that detail. This symbolizes to me that God didn't leave a little sprinkling of destruction or chaos in their way. He removed it all. The path was not easy, but they were spared and redeemed and saved thoroughly and completely. What is interesting in this story too is that the same waters that part and save the Israelites are the same waters that destroy the Egyptians. So there is duality in this symbol. Water represents chaos, but it also represents life. Even Christ is called the living water. We partake of the water in the sacrament representing his saving blood. So what I'm seeing here here is that the same challenges, the same trials, the same laws of entropy always dragging us toward messiness and disorganization have both the potential to destroy and the potential to save. The difference is leaning on and into our covenants with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is life, but he is also a distraction. If there's too much decay, we see that come up even more in the Old Testament. So I can't say that the sea of laundry will part for you, or that the choices of others will change, or that the natural decay of mortality will cease. But what I can say is that clinging to your covenants with Christ will change you, which begins to change what all of the hard means for you. Where destruction and chaos is nice, you are carried over, you are carried through, or like the brother of Jared, the waters and storms literally push you in the direction of the promised land. These challenges have the potential to take you down, but they also have the potential to raise you higher with the savior on your side. That is why baptism is so cool too. We are buried with him by baptism into death, that like us Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. That's Romans 6.4. Salvation happens through the water, not without it. I hope you're starting to see something powerful here for you personally. You will spend all of your life doing what gets undone, fighting against the natural love, chaos and disorder in our world, feeling the reality of mortality. And that is why Jesus Christ is so life-changing to accept and know and believe in. No matter how desperately you fight against chaos or disorganization, the deepest order of the soul and peace of the mind comes from God's infinite power. He is the one who divides the chaos from order inside of you. He is the one that tames the untamable inside of you. No matter how strict or disciplined you are, our world is dragging you towards entropy. The atonement of Jesus Christ defies that natural law, taking us out of the entropy rat race and forming us into new creatures. Fueled by the endless light of God, never to let entropy pull us backward again. When things feel like they are crashing around you, he knows how to take you safely through. When you are caught up against impossible odds, he can split the sea for you, completely and fully. He can use the chaos of life to actually push you toward the promised land. In the midst of your stormy sea, he can calm you, even if that seems inextricable, impossible. What feels unorganized and really messy, irredeemable, and you is literally his specialty to calm, organize, and then exalt. So let every sock under the couch, every flat tire, every smear of applesauce on your shoulder, every surface covered in dust, be a reminder to you that while we live in a mortality of chaos and decay, we worship a savior whose power and gift transforms and makes way for a life in the eternities where decay will never be our reality. Entropy is not our constant fate, and chaos is put into its place. Invite him to do that work of eternity and you, even now, that his power and peace might prevail even in the darkest, deepest waters of life. If this episode was meaningful to you, will you take a moment to share it with a friend? Every review, every comment, every follow helps this message get to more people. Reach out on my Instagram @_measuregofhercreation if you have any feedback or topics you want me to cover. All my love till next time. (gentle music)