Fresh water in a feminist culture

This is delightful to read. As God has given me short term residence in a post modern society, it is like drinking a refreshing cup of water. Thank you for sending it to me. . . .I had prayed that I might be able to find some worthy words written by such a saint as this one, yet, I knew I had no time to search for such a thing. I hope I can reach [her] soon to thank her for writing it and to thank her for her service to her family and our Lord.

--from a friend about the following piece written by another friend for a young lady doing a paper contrasting the stay-at-home mom with the working mom

Dear G,
I’m very excited about you doing this paper and interviewing homemakers. As I told you earlier, this has been very much in the front of my mind lately. I have been greatly inspired and influenced by women who live by God's priorities, and not the culture's. They have a godly beauty that sets them, and their homes, apart. Since I was already reading up on this subject, I am including some thoughts that I came across, hoping they will be of help for your paper. These thoughts are just a preface to answering the specific questions that you asked, and I apologize that this is so long. As I said, the Lord has really had my mind percolating over this very issue, and this is the first time I’ve tried to set it all out on paper. Hope it makes sense and helps:

I believe the biblical model of marriage calls for a woman to be her husband’s helpmeet, to be fruitful and multiply and to train children in God’s commands. So the following quote addresses the real question behind the work issue:

“Every woman will be a homemaker. The question is, what will she make her home to be? If she is also an engineer or a lawyer, or holds down some other full-time job outside the home, home will be a place to sleep and catch a few hasty meals, a place to refuel for the real race that is occurring somewhere else.” -- Robert Andrews

(This can be true even for women who are overly involved even in good things outside of the home, such as sports, Christian ministries or serving.)

A working woman, or an over-committed woman, has a very hard time conducting her home and her marriage in a biblical manner.

Titus 2 shows what should be going on in the home by outlining what the older women are to be teaching younger women to do. Women are “to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands so that the word of God may not be reviled.” (Titus 2:5)

So the Bible says that women should be working at home. Another version of this passage words it “keepers of the home.” Proverbs 31 expounds on the breadth of duties that this includes. When you read this chapter of Proverbs, you see a woman who is going about specifically centered on her household and on her husband’s business, while he sits at the city gate. This is not a woman pursuing an independent career or even her own ministry.

In addition, this passage says that a woman’s job is to love her husband and her children. Her life is to be centered on home and children. In Deuteronomy 6, parents are told: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” God ordains the parents to teach God’s covenant of love to the next generation and to do it as they go about their business. A woman who chooses to work outside of the home is giving up a lot of “sitting” and “walking” time, when she could be training her child. If we are to give God our best, this duty of training our children can’t be squeezed in around another vocation.
Those are the very basics, and those are verses with which most Christians are very familiar. The trouble is our culture is so saturated with feminism and individualism (“me-ism”), that even I, as a Christian, for a long time took those verses and assumed that they don’t mean precisely what they say. Identifying the false philosophies of our age, ideas that are so commonly accepted in our culture that we don’t even question them, is vital to seeing what the Bible really means.
As Jeremiah said: “Thus says the LORD, ‘Stand by the roads, and look and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it and find rest for your souls.’ ” (Jeremiah 6:16)
So making a godly home takes more than just staying at home. This idea is fleshed out beautifully in an excerpt from a book by two homemakers: “Being a keeper at home is a holy mission; it is a rewarding duty that we as women are to passionately undertake. As part of our sacred call, we are [to honor and uphold our husband’s calling] and to wisely build a godly spiritual dynasty. (Prov. 14:1)”
Doug Phillips summarizes: “The household is the God-ordained seat of education. It is the first place where we are to develop and communicate a distinctively Christian aesthetic for culture. The home is not to be relegated to a mere place for consumption, but transformed into a powerful tool for industry and production. In the household, we find God’s true pattern for multi-generational covenantal care. The home, not even the temple or the church meeting house, has always been the God-ordained primary locus for daily worship. Our homes not only provide us with a platform to honor God’s non-optional commands for one-anothering and hospitality, but they were designed to be the most powerful forums for evangelism and discipleship in the Christian’s arsenal.”

Now THAT’S a vision I can get excited about!
Now onto your questions:

Was there a period of time when you were working with kids at home?
For the first 18 months after we had [our son], I was working nights at the newspaper.
If so, did you have a baby-sitter, or daycare? My husband cared for our baby while I was at work on weekday nights. Even though I was leaving him with his Daddy, I was still miserable to be away from my son. On Saturday mornings I used to work a shift with no one else in the office, so I brought baby . . . in with me. I brought all of his paraphernalia, a swing chair, a walker, toys and a blanket for him to sit on and play. It was a blast. I just talked and sang to him the whole time I worked. He was very good and very easy when he was with me. There is such strong “glue”, as your dad says, between babies and their moms. We know what instinctively what our babies need – better than anyone else does.

Did you find that many nights you went out for dinner because of a lack of energy to make it?
I worked a late shift and did not get home until 2 or 3 in the morning. My husband stayed up for me and we had time together alone in the wee hours. I woke up with the baby in the morning and napped when he napped. I was always exhausted, and I ate no real meals that I can remember. All that mattered to me at that time was my baby (you will see how this happens when you have a baby), and I nursed him and played with him and cuddled him and read to him as much as I could when I was home. My husband and I ate takeout most of the time. You will be shocked to hear that we ate lots of Lucky Charms and Taco Bell, in particular. My husband never complained about this, not even once. The baby ate baby food, which I bought pre-made at the store and heated up at home.
When did you switch over to staying at home?
When I had [our daughter], I took 6 months unpaid maternity leave (not knowing how we would make ends meet even during that time), and I prayed that God would work things out so that I would never have to go back. The fact that I even prayed that prayer is astounding because I had been an overachiever all through college, intent on a newspaper career. I had already lived in three states, each time taking better jobs at bigger newspapers, and was making good money for that time and that occupation. I say that only to show that my willingness to leave my job was a total change of heart. None of that had any appeal for me because God had ingrained being a mother so deeply in my heart. From the minute that I saw [my first] baby, all I wanted was to take care of him and be there for him. The Lord really built our faith with the way He answered that prayer. Right before my maternity leave, we got a huge income tax refund ($3,000) that we lived on during the leave. Then [my husband]'s grandma died and left us a chunk of money that we were able to put into a house so that our house payment was much lower than rent (just $200 a month). Then [myhusband] got his first radio job. His pay was small ($11,000 a year), but it was just enough to live on and we were able to have health insurance. He supported my desire to leave work completely. At the end of the six months, I told the newspaper that I was never coming back. My boss said I was nuts (in a nice way), and kindly offered to have me work just one day a week, which would have still brought in a substantial amount of money. But I did not want to leave my babies at all. I did not want to feel that I had to leave them if they were sick or if they just wanted me. I loved being a mom and being so needed by these little ones. I knew I was made to be a mom -- to nurture these children, to lay down my life to make them great for the Lord. God gave me the desire of my heart by giving me children and in an amazing way providing for us so that I could stay home with them. I knew that I could trust Him to keep providing and that I didn't need the "safety net" of working even just one day a week.

Did you notice a difference in your budget?
Yes, we had significantly less. There was no room for luxury at all. It was a wartime budget. But God continued to build our faith by providing. We never wanted for anything during that time, and we did not go into debt, not even a little. We never bought anything extra, though, either. I remember my mom coming to visit and suggesting that we buy a little rug that we could get for about $5. I remember thinking: "We don't have $5 for a little rug." I spent $60 a week on groceries (including diapers) at a discount grocery store, and we never ate out.
What are your typical duties during the day?
My duties are to make sure that this home keeps running smoothly, in a way that honors God and delights and enables my husband to fulfill his calling. The task of running a home has become very satisfying for me, although I still do it very imperfectly and have many goals that I’m still working toward.
My duties are to be an encourager, starting at the breakfast table (not always a place spirits are running the most high). (My own encouragement comes from getting up before the others to go to the gym to listen to a John Piper CD and work out.) We normally pray as a family before [my husband] leaves the house.
Another duty is to delegate. My God-ordained role is to train the children my husband has trusted me with in the way that they should go. That means I have to decide what jobs should be theirs around the house. I also must teach them how to do these jobs and then make sure that they are actually doing them and doing them well and with godly attitudes. (Another of my duties is praise -- and chastisement. Enough said.)
I also must educate my children to have a Christian worldview, emphasizing the Truths that my husband holds most dear. I choose curriculum, but I choose what I know will please my husband, even if he hasn't expressly approved it. I know him well enough by now to know what he wants. (There was a time when I thought I knew better than him on this. I didn't.)
Again, it is my job to keep the children accountable for doing their schoolwork as well as their chores, and I must be available throughout the day to answer any questions. In certain subjects, I do need to work closely with them. I also still try to read aloud to them for about an hour during the day.
My duties also include regularly driving them to the homes of other families where older men/boys and women/girls are mentors for all of us, and (I hope) younger boys and girls are mentored to by our family as well.
In between helping kids with schoolwork, I do my other duties. I try to make good use the little nooks and crannies of time I get. Daily, I monitor the budget and match the checkbook to the online bank account. I have many repair, cleaning and/or organizing jobs, and occasional errands that need done, and I do a little each day. When my focus is pleasing my husband, as a picture to the world of the bride pleasing Christ, even my cleaning chores are satisfying. I try to do a load of wash each day and to have one day a week where the kids do the same. My kids follow a list and clean the house one day a week, while I mop the floors or do small parts of larger jobs, usually cleaning out closets, clothes or the garage. I try to correspond by e-mail regularly as a form of encouragement and keep a blog for this same reason. I try to be on the lookout through these correspondences for ways for my children to serve others in a natural way, as an extension of our home. I reserve one day a week in the afternoon to have one-on-one time with someone as a form of hospitality and encouragement. We sometimes have families over for dinner and include them in our family devotions.

I plan out the menu for each week on Saturday and usually grocery shop on that day. I try to decide what we are having for dinner the night before so that I can thaw it out. I will often put our evening meal in the crock pot in the morning. Training [my daughter] to do these duties joyfully is one of my goals.
Welcoming my husband is a VERY important duty. When my husband comes home, I stop what I am doing (most of the time) and greet him. The night does not go well when I fail to do this. We normally spend time in the living room catching up on the day, and the kids either linger just near enough to hear what we are saying or else they sit down and join in.
It is also my job to make sure that we do family devotions most nights. [My husband] wants us to worship God as a family regularly. He leads the devotion time and decides what we will do, but my task is just to make sure it happens. I do this simply by having the kids put out the chairs and hymnals. This reminds him and when he is ready, we do devotions.
In fact, a lot of my job now that my kids are getting older is simply to make sure that we are actually carrying out my husband's vision. There is a constant need to re-evaluate what we are doing and make sure we are actually achieving our goal of glorifying God, teaching discernment, building integrity. This does not mean that my husband tells me every little thing to do. It means that I know him so well that I try to do things that I know will further his vision and please him. (I think this is a picture of how we are to please the Lord, as well.) For example, my husband has a vision to do some kind of Bible teaching from our home. We haven’t figure out yet how to do that, but making it possible, clearing out schedules, preparing my home, being in prayer about it and not forgetting about it, is part of my duty.
And it is my most serious job to pray for this home when I wake up at 4 in the morning, wondering if any of it is working. (I have learned that 4 a.m. is a good time to pray and praise, but not a good time to be evaluating your homemaking or mothering skills.)

If your kids go to school, do you find you have a lot of time to get things done?
My kids have never gone to school, but I do find that now that they are older, I am able to go for longer periods of time uninterrupted (working on the answers to these questions, for instance.) But being a mom means that at any moment I have to be willing to set aside what I am doing when it is necessary.
Have you ever had a maid of some sort?
When I was working, we had a cleaning lady come in once a week to the apartment. This is because when I was growing up, I used to listen to this children's record by Marlo Thomas, called "Free to Be You and Me." She was a feminist, and this record influenced me more than I knew. There was one poem that said, "Mommies hate housework, Daddies hate housework and when you grow up, you'll hate housework, too." I still can hear that ringing in my head, all these years later. I did not see housework as a sweet service to my family. I did not see that an orderly home was a way to worship God. When I left my job, of course, there was no money for the housekeeper, although I would have still liked to have had her. It is only recently that I have actually come to find housework satisfying. Not only is there a joy in making order out of chaos or filling my cupboards with good food, but I actually get excited knowing that I get to enjoy the fruit of this work, watch my family enjoy it and offer it to others. I have even recently discovered that I enjoy cutting vegetables. All of this is deeply gratifying. (And very much to my surprise!)

In your opinion, what are some of the pros and cons of staying at home vs. working?
The gigantic "pro" of staying at home, the one that overshadows all other reasons for leaving the work world, is that it is the biblical model for marriage and motherhood. The account in Genesis 2 of God’s purpose for making the woman makes this so clear. “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.’” And He makes the woman, not by creating her from the dust of the earth, someone separate and independent from Adam with her own unique calling, but by taking her from Adam’s own body. When Adam sees her, he calls her “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” And verse 24 says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The woman is part of the man, she completes him. She helps him to take dominion over the earth and to do what God has called him to do. Her entire being is tied up in his calling. The woman was created for the man. (I Corinthians 11:8-9) Her husband is her head, and the one man to whom she submits everything. (Ephesians 5:23)
In Ephesians 5, the marriage union is compared to the union of Christ and the church. That means that marriage is intended to display to the world the correct picture of the Gospel. Christ, the bridegroom, loves His bride (the church) and makes her beautiful with his sacrificial love. His bride honors Him (Eph. 5:33) and exalts Him. Christ is the only one for the church. There is no other Savior. That means that the bridegroom is to be the only one for the bride. There is no other.
When a woman works, she divides her loyalties with another. Any woman who works will tell you that there are times when she must choose whom she will serve: her husband/family or her employer. As Glory can quote from memory, “No one can serve two masters.”
To live marriage disobediently is to blur the picture we are displaying to the world.

Raising children calls for training them as you go about the day-to-day business of life, as already referenced in Deuteronomy 6. Children have to see us living it out to understand what we are talking about. We cannot do this when we are away from them all day and our mind is occupied with the affairs of running a stranger’s business.

OTHER PROS OF STAYING HOME:

*As you honor and serve your husband in a biblical manner, your love and respect for him grows. I know this firsthand. And as you love your own “lord” more, you really do love the Lord more. My heart overflows with gratitude for giving me the husband He did. I know that my husband can do things that NO ONE else could ever do for the Kingdom. I am honored to do the things at home that enable him to go out and give his unique gifts to the body.

*As you serve and train your children, your love for them grows. When you invest in your children, you cannot help but love them more. And again, your love for God grows as you realize His goodness in trusting you to shape these incredible people that He made.

*You can create a refuge for others, limiting the wrong thinking of the day by immersing your home in the Truth through books and conversation. This refuge can show unbelievers (and even other Christians) more about what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Telling is good, but showing is better. I know homes that do this – yours is one of them.

*When you stay at home, you know you are being sanctified, being shaped (slowly and imperfectly) into someone who interacts patiently with sinners (your own family), humbly and cheerfully does jobs that often only God notices, works hard without being told to, keeps the best interest of others foremost in her mind, keeps the vision of glorifying God burning brightly in hearts and minds around her.

CONS OF STAYING HOME:
*We can be stay-at-home moms and not at all be following a biblical model for marriage and motherhood. If we involve ourselves in all sorts of activities outside of the home and make them our life’s work instead of our husband and home, I think we are buying into a white-washed “Christian” version of feminism, where the wife has her own separate calling. If we stay at home but rely on others to be the primary teachers of biblical truth for our children, rather than supplements, I believe that we still are abdicating our God-ordained duty to train those children and are buying into cultural ideas that counteract biblical Truths.
*As with anything, we can turn our husbands, children or homes into idols, allowing them to take the place of Christ as first in our affections.

PROS (WITH ACCOMPANYING CONS) FOR WORKING:

*A woman certainly can improve a family’s financial situation by working, particularly if she has training as a professional. But I think biblical principles make it clear that if we do that, we are neglecting the duty that God has ordained for us: to be helpmeet to our husbands by centering our lives on their calling, to be fruitful and multiply and to teach our children God’s covenant of love.

*Again, working women may improve their own families’ financial situations, but in the long-run they can hurt other women who are seeking to follow these biblical principles. The law of supply and demand says that the more workers in the workforce, the lower the salary per worker. Husbands make lower salaries when more women are working. This increases the pressure for their own wives to work.

*A woman who improves her family’s financial situation by becoming a significant earner can also stir up a temptation to rule over your husband (already a tendency we women have).

*A woman also may find that work outside the home brings praise from others and a feeling of affirmation. It feels good and right to be affirmed, but this can lead a woman to neglect her God-given duties and crave this affirmation. She can become discontented with her God-ordained role of making someone else look great (her husband) and spanking children (who do not normally appreciate this as an act of love.) This temptation can even creep into good Christian works.

*A woman may say that she is benefiting her children by bringing in more money. But, again, she has chosen the less important thing. She has taken away some of the God-given means of grace in her children’s lives – her presence. She has chosen to limit the influence she has on her children.

*A woman may say she is serving her husband by relieving him of his burden of providing for the family. In my opinion, she is dishonoring him and saying to the world that she does not find him capable. Timothy 5:8 says men are to provide for their families. That means God will enable our husbands to provide.

What is the biggest benefits of staying at home?
I’m not sure which of the benefits are the biggest. Staying home is obeying God. So just knowing that I’m obeying Him gives me joy. In addition, we have gotten to see God provide for us financially in amazing ways. Our marriage has been richly blessed. I truly am head over heels in love with my husband, more in love with him than the day we got married. I believe that is because we are trying to live Ephesians 5. But it is the grace of God that He would even give us that desire or understanding. The whole thing is very humbling.

Raising my children has been such a blessing. I have always loved children, and to have my very own that I could be with, read to, teach the Bible, discover things with -- all the time -- has brought me so much joy. I remember looking at them when they were little and thinking that I could not even believe that God had done such an amazing thing. Every minute I have had with them is precious – even the hard times and having to spank them and discipline myself to be firm or patient, as each occasion demanded. Now I get to see them grown so strong and straight, with a toughness and fortitude that I never imagined they would have. We’re not done parenting, but I am richly blessed to see them so certain and confident in the things that we have taught them and to see that they are not taken in by the lies of this age. They have discernment. They have learned best what their father excels at. That delights me.
I get to be surrounded by an environment of books and beauty and abundance and order that I get to “create” and maintain for the glory of God and to serve the people I love most. “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.”

I’ve also been sanctified in so many ways as a result of being at home. I see how I have been forced to think ahead instead of just in the moment, to extend grace when loved ones are unlovely, to love my children enough to do what’s right even if they don’t like me for it, and to learn not to manipulate or be manipulated by them but to show them how to follow God’s principles instead of their own desires or half-formed gut feelings.
The Lord’s ways are always best!

What was the biggest benefit working with kids?
I assume you mean here “working outside of the home while being a mother?” There was no benefit to that except that it showed me the desire of my heart, a desire wisely placed in me by my Creator.

Good books on this:
The Family: God’s Weapon for Victory by Robert Andrews
Passionate Housewives Desperate for God (terrible title, but a great book) by Jennie Chancey and Stacey McDonald
Family-Driven Faith by Voddie Baucham Jr.
The Return of the Daughters (DVD) produced by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin