{"id":179,"date":"2026-05-19T01:07:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T01:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/?p=179"},"modified":"2026-05-19T01:10:46","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T01:10:46","slug":"not-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"Not Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIsaiah 65:17, 22c, 23 \u201cFor, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind....and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them.\u201d

Dear Mammas, one of the hard things we face in our every day is the unending checklist. As soon as something is done, it needs redone. We put away the laundry only to have the toddler dump out his drawer. We vacuum only to have someone decorate the living room with baby powder. We feed them breakfast and as soon as it's cleaned up, they're hungry again. We wash sticky faces only to find them covered in snot two minutes later. We may as well just hold them all day, squeegee in hand, when they go through the snot-nosed toddler stage. It's frustrating, discouraging, wearing, and exhausting. Really, truly, thoroughly exhausting. It feels endless.

I wonder if the feeling of pointlessness that overwhelms us is to remind us how fleeting our lives are. Everything here is just an empty echo of what is waiting for us. As empty as it feels sometimes, all of this matters. It isn't a waste. One day, your work will remain. What you do won't be undone. Your labor won't be in vain. One day, there will be a new home for us. Your children will be long blessed by your work. We are preparing for it now.

In the meantime, every time you sweep the floor and do it as an offering to God, it counts. He sees that. He knows that when you wipe a face, you aren't just saying to the smurf-colored child that ate the food coloring, \u201cI love you enough to serve you,\u201d you are saying it to Him as well. There is an end.

One day, in the ever closer realm of what lies beyond, God has promised to lift that burden of what seems empty, repetitious, thankless, endless work. So, tired mamma, take a deep breath, say a prayer, grab the broom for the thirty-fourth time in the past twelve minutes, and whisper to yourself, \u201cThis is not forever.\u201d \n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isaiah 65:17, 22c, 23 \u201cFor, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind….and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[42,43,19,45,40,11,46,39,44,41],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-calling","tag-discouragement","tag-encouragement","tag-exhaustion","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-lonely","tag-motherhood","tag-tired","tag-vocation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laughinginallthewrongplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}