One of my favorite Elisabeth Elliot quotes has always been this:
“To be meek is to have a sane and proper estimate of one’s place in the scheme of things. It is a sense of proportion.”
Elisabeth Elliot has been something of a spiritual mother to me. I have read her words in many different seasons, and depending on where I was in life, they have felt like correction, a lecture, encouragement, or sometimes simply a soft place to land. There were times I read her words and felt as though I were being lovingly disciplined by an older woman who had walked through suffering and knew something I desperately needed to learn.
One of the things she helped me understand was that meekness is not weakness. It is strength under control. It is having a right understanding of who I am in relation to God: I am the created, and He is the Creator. I am not sovereign, I am not in control of everything, and I don’t have to be.
That realization changed the way I looked at my life, particularly motherhood.
When my son was very young, during the isolation of COVID and the months surrounding his autism diagnosis, his needs and behaviors were becoming increasingly difficult to understand. He was nonverbal at the time, and sleep became almost nonexistent. There were months when I was getting less than ten hours of sleep in an entire week.
Looking back, it is remarkable to me that I was still functioning. I was caring for my son, tending to our home, continuing to work, and trying to learn everything I could about autism while running on almost nothing.
But I know now that it wasn’t because I was strong enough. God was sustaining me.
I remember one particular night, around three in the morning, after two days without sleep. My son woke me by slapping me in the face. He wasn’t being aggressive or disobedient. He was nonverbal and simply trying to wake Mommy because Mommy wasn’t waking up.
For the first few seconds after waking, I had an overwhelming urge to hit him back.
I was angry. I was exhausted. I was completely at the end of myself.
And as painful as it is to admit that, I am grateful for what God showed me in that moment. I saw my flesh in a way I don’t think I ever had before. I saw how quickly my exhaustion could expose the sinfulness of my heart. I saw how desperately I needed a Savior.
Being at the end of myself became an invitation to stop pretending that I could be sufficient for myself.
I began learning to pursue the Lord even when I didn’t feel like pursuing Him. Sometimes all I had to offer was five minutes of Scripture or ten minutes of prayer. Then five minutes became ten, ten became twenty, and eventually those small pieces of time became hours.
Some of my sweetest times with the Lord happened in the middle of the night while my son paced back and forth or watched the same short documentaries over and over again. I would sit with my Bible and pray, asking God to change me and make me the mother my son needed.
And then there were the bathtubs.
For a long time, water was one of the few things that helped my son regulate and feel safe in his body. So I spent a lot of time sitting beside the bathtub. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes more than once a day. Because of the safety concerns, I couldn’t simply leave him there. I had to stay.
I remember lying beside that bathtub and thinking about all the things I was missing out on. Motherhood was supposed to look so different. I had imagined something quieter and more predictable.
But somewhere in those long hours of forced stillness, I began to realize that maybe motherhood hadn’t gone wrong. Maybe this was simply what motherhood needed to look like in that particular season.
And I remember what felt like the quietest conviction from the Lord:
If you cannot be still before your son, how will you ever learn to be still before Me?
Those moments of stillness, along with the long nights of being completely dependent upon God’s grace, eventually became the beginning of The Meek Momma.
I didn’t start this blog because I had figured motherhood out. I started it because I hadn’t.
I needed somewhere to put the honest emotions, the questions, the Scripture I was wrestling through, and the things God was teaching me. I hoped that perhaps another woman could read those words and find encouragement before she reached the same place of exhaustion and desperation.
Because the Lord gives us opportunities every day to turn toward Him. His mercies are new every morning.
And I think that is part of what meekness has come to mean to me.
It is recognizing that I am not enough, but also recognizing that I was never meant to be.
It is learning to live within the boundaries of my created place rather than constantly fighting to take God’s place. It has changed the way I think about my marriage, my motherhood, my work, my leadership, my finances, my service to others, and even the way I respond when I believe I know what should happen next.
It has also changed the way I understand submission.
I believe submission to a husband, rightly understood through Scripture, is a beautiful thing. It does not require a woman to become voiceless, passive, or insignificant. It is not an erasure of strength. Rather, it is one of the places where strength can be brought under control and entrusted to God.
There is something beautiful about a woman who doesn’t have to dominate every room, win every argument, control every outcome, or prove that she is the strongest person present.
There is strength in knowing when to speak and when to be quiet. There is strength in yielding. There is strength in serving. There is strength in trusting God’s order when our flesh would rather insist on our own.
That is why I love this definition of meekness so much.
A sane and proper estimate of my place in the scheme of things.
Not thinking too highly of myself, but not thinking too little of myself either. Simply understanding that I am God’s creation, He is my Creator, and my life makes the most sense when I live within that reality.
I am still learning this.
I am learning it in my home, in my marriage, in my work, in the courtroom, in leadership, and in the way I serve families and volunteers. I still wrestle with my desire to control. I still have moments when my flesh gets the better of me. But now I know where to take those things.
Back to Him.
Elisabeth Elliot taught me that suffering is never for nothing. She helped me understand that all things stand in the shadow of the cross, and that when I keep my eyes there, I can begin to count even the hardest things as joy—not because suffering is enjoyable, but because God is faithful to use even what I would never have chosen.
This is why I chose the name The Meek Momma all those years ago.
Not because I had mastered meekness.
Because I needed to learn it.
And, by God’s grace, I am still learning.
The Meek Momma 
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