What I Learned About God From Being a Mom

By Crystal Virgin

"My children are not just teaching me about patience. They are teaching me about grace."

I am going to say something that I suspect I'm not alone in, even if it feels that way at the moment.

I yell more than I want to.

Not always. Not even most of the time. But more than I intend to, more than I planned when I imagined the kind of mother I would be. There are days when everything my children do seems to land on exactly the wrong nerve, and the gap between the response I want to give and the one that actually comes out feels impossibly wide. I'd put my kids to bed on those nights and lie there thinking — why is this so hard? Why can't I just respond with love?

I spent a long time assuming the answer was more patience. More sleep. More grace with myself. And while none of those are wrong, they weren't quite reaching the root of it.

The Question I Kept Asking

How do I respond with love when I don't feel loving in the moment? How do I stay connected to my children when frustration is the loudest thing in the room? How do I become the mother I actually want to be, not just the one who shows up on the hard days?

I had been circling these questions for a while when I came across Elder Dale G. Renlund's October 2021 General Conference address, The Peace of Christ Abolishes Enmity. I wasn't expecting it to answer the questions I'd been carrying about motherhood. But it did — quietly, completely, and in a way I'm still sitting with.

The answer, distilled to its clearest form, was this: place your discipleship of the Savior above all else.

What Discipleship Has to Do With Losing Your Temper

It sounds almost too simple. But the more I've turned it over, the more I've found in it.

When I am acting as a disciple first — when that is genuinely the lens I'm looking through — my responses to my children change. Not because I've mastered patience. Not because I've found a technique or a system. But because discipleship reorients the whole question. It moves me out of the center of the moment and puts something larger there instead.

Elder Renlund taught that the Savior's Atonement is what makes it possible to lay down the enmity we carry — toward others, toward circumstances, and yes, toward the small people in our homes who have an uncanny ability to find every unhealed place inside us. The peace of Christ isn't a feeling we manufacture. It's something we receive when we're turned toward Him.

That distinction changed something for me. I had been trying to be more patient through sheer willpower. What I actually needed was to be more converted.

What My Children Are Teaching Me About God

Here's what motherhood has shown me that I don't think I could have learned any other way:

God's love for us is not conditional on our behavior. He does not withdraw when we are difficult. He does not love us less on our worst days, our most frustrating days, the days when we seem determined to miss the point entirely.

I know this because I love my children exactly that way — imperfectly, yes, but it is constant that doesn't waver based on what kind of day they're having. And if I, with all my limitations, am capable of that kind of love, then what must His look like?

My children are not just teaching me about patience. They are teaching me about grace. About what it means to keep showing up for someone not because they've earned it but because they are yours. About the difference between love as a feeling and love as a daily, chosen act.

The Home as a Place of Practice

I've come to believe that the home is where discipleship is most honestly tested — and most deeply developed. Not in the moments when it's easy, but in the ordinary, friction-filled, beautiful mess of family life.

The things we place in our homes matter because they shape the environment where that practice happens. A temple on the shelf is a quiet reminder of the covenants we've made and the kind of people we are trying to become. A home that points toward Christ — in its rhythms, its conversations, its physical reminders — becomes a place where discipleship has room to grow, even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.

Still Learning

I haven't arrived. I still have nights where I put my kids to bed and wish I'd done better. But something has shifted in how I understand those nights. They're not evidence that I'm failing. They're invitations to turn back — to remember who I'm trying to follow, and to let that be enough to start again tomorrow.

Motherhood is not where I expected to learn the most about God. But it might be exactly where He intended to teach me.