Heart Shift and Motherhood: Finding God's Extra in the Ordinary

By Rebekah M. Barrett

Six months after the birth of her second son, author Rebekah M. Barrett was exhausted, broken, and circling the drain of postpartum depression. During one sleepless yet fateful night, she experienced the lowest point in her life: she was unable to care for her baby and was completely humbled physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In desperation she cried out to God, and He responded.

Now, two years later, she shares the miraculous ways that God transformed her life and created a heart shift in that season of hardship. Heart Shift and Motherhood offers a raw and relatable narrative in which Rebekah reveals insights about surrender, humility, gratitude, obedience, faith, unity, and love in the context of the nitty gritty of daily life with young kids. With humor and hope, she seeks to empower your faith to believe that God can show His extra in your ordinary.

This personal story presents one mother’s struggle and transformation, showing how God can create miracles even amid monotony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664243255

Rebekah M. Barrett

Rebekah M. Barrett is a wife, a mom to two fantastic boys, and a nurse practitioner in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Rebekah is deeply inspired by the strength and resilience she encounters daily in her work with marginalized clients in a diverse inner city community. When she’s not doing laundry, she loves reading, baking, riding her bike, and watching renovation shows with her husband.

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Copyright © 2021 Rebekah M. Barrett.

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-4316-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4325-5 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/21/2021

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Contents

Preface

Crushed

Surrender

God Has Heard. God Will Add.

Inches

Humility

Sippy Cups and Clay

Stride

Good, Bek

What A Friend We Have

Unity

Just Do It

Breakthrough

Acknowledgements

Notes

For Steph

Steph is my cousin, best friend, and has always been one of my biggest fans. On several occasions she told me I should write a book one day. She gave me the book Big Magic¹ a few years ago with the thought in mind to encourage me. And I can’t believe how inspiring and confirming it was. There were so many themes about hard work, gratitude, stewardship, comparison, and discipline that totally lined up with the principles in God’s Word that I have been learning and to which I am trying to align my life. Steph has always supported my writing, and encouraged me to believe that putting pen to paper to express myself is a gift God has given me. So here I am, writing – for you, Steph. May these words pour out of my heart and into yours.

Preface

I had no intention to write a book last year while working as a full-time Nurse Practitioner during a global pandemic, but I felt God calling me to start writing. I’d wake up early in the morning with sentences flowing through my mind like a ticker tape and felt compelled to get up and write them down. As the months and pages went on, I received the vision to compile it into this book.

I’m not a career author or theologian, or an expert on parenting or marriage. I’m not an extraordinary person. I live an ordinary life: I’m a nurse, wife and mom. Yet through these everyday roles, I have learned (often the hard way) that when God tells me to do something, I should surrender and obey. That’s what I’m doing today. I’ve sat down with my laptop to start telling the incredible story of transformation that my husband and I, and our family have experienced in the last two years.

In the fall of 2018, I was on maternity leave at home with my second son, who was about six months old. I felt low – physically and mentally exhausted and strung out from my new role as a mother of two. Despondent and disappointed, although I didn’t recognize or articulate it at the time, I was desperate – ripe and ready for a life-altering encounter with God.

Like a ripe grape, I was held together by a thin, fragile skin that appeared to be strong from the outside. At that time – a divinely perfect time – God, the Master Vintner picked me. Then He crushed me. Only then could the reality inside me be revealed and refined, and after time and process, be transformed into a new, more valuable and lasting substance for His purpose.² I’m certain that I would have rotted and fallen off the vine deep into depression and despair, but for this journey. Looking back, I’m so grateful God allowed me to ripen and be crushed at that right time, in His unfailing grace, to save me from an ignoble end.

At that time, my husband Rob and I were believers–Christians–and we would have told you that God was a central part of our life and relationship. It would have been the truth. We were both raised in God-centered homes, but in very different ways.

Rob is a first generation Italian Canadian, and his family follows the Italian tradition of Catholic faith. His parents, grandmother (Nonna), and uncles and aunts (Zios and Zias), are all strong Catholics. They attend mass weekly (even during cottage weekends), observe Lent, complete the Stations of the Cross, and pray the Rosary. His dad is a lector and Eucharistic minister at their local neighborhood parish where they have been members for more than thirty years, and where Rob and his two brothers were altar boys.

The formality in their faith was foreign to me (I was even raised to be critical of it), but I detected a genuineness and authenticity in the way they loved and behaved toward one another and toward others. It impacted me primarily in the way they accepted me with openness and without judgment. I could swear that the light of Jesus shone through the kindness in Nonna’s eyes, and when she hugged me I felt more than her love; I felt God’s love.

Everyone knows Italians take family and tradition seriously, but it was more than just formality, or ritual, Rob explained when he shared the importance of his Catholic faith with me in our early years together: It’s how I’m connected to my family. It’s where I come from, he said. His connection to family and Church was the bedrock for his connection to God, and that was something he took seriously – something he would not give up. Anyone who meets them will tell you my husband’s family is uniquely different. To me they were living breathing examples of God’s love and accepting nature.

While Rob’s faith developed in what I saw as the stable, unshakable, predictable formality of the Catholic Church, my upbringing in a Christian home was the opposite.

I grew up Evangelical and Pentecostal. We prayed in tongues, laid hands on people, pleaded the Blood of Jesus, fervently engaged in spiritual warfare, and were slain in the Spirit.

In a recent Yoga class, I was trying to quiet my mind during the final vinyasa, and was not meditating, when a thought came to me: This is so weird! When else would you lie around on the floor with a bunch of other people? Oh right – at least once every weekend during my entire childhood!

I attended about five churches during the course of my upbringing, in which my parents grew in faith through messages of God’s abounding Grace, the Father’s heart, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the Toronto Blessing of the 1990s. They made lifelong friends and became interconnected with other families in relationships that lasted for decades.

My father was an ordained minister, and my parents were children’s