Light Duties

Much of the trouble with motherhood comes down to time. Either we don’t have enough, we’re trying to live three lifetimes at once; or we are adrift… bored…with too many vacant hours. We struggle with proportion and order and finding the right substance to fill the void. Urgency undermines a lot of good. We feel a heavy pressure to solve immediate problems at the expense of slower, apparently postponable priorities. Like motherhood.

Table of Contents here.

Perhaps Christmas would be more enjoyable if we didn’t feel we had to do so much? What a relief when we pause to consider that the only duties God calls us to at Christmas are those which hold true all year round.

A while ago, I mentioned the example of a church where it’s normal for the kids to be present in corporate worship. We were part of that church when our first baby arrived and I was terrified that my child would grow to be the exception. The process of how one could possibly get kids to sit in church was a mystery to me. This is what 16 years of having kids in church has taught us.

One reason we might keep children separate from what the adults do at church, is that we forget the grandeur of what’s going on. Most of what we see is pretty ordinary. The reality is actually far from boring. When we get a glimpse of the unseen, we're better positioned to help our children. 

I’m repenting of my neglect of the word, and with it the reality of, worship. Motherhood is ultimately about being a worshipper and raising worshippers, so it’s worth using the word, especially on Sunday, when we worship especially.

Some words on worship while you wait for the next articles to be released.

As we consider how to help our children have a meaningful relationship with the local church, it's helpful to hear stories of places that have done it well. This episode is about a church that has had decades of serving children well, without a typical Sunday School. 

Part of our role as Christian mums is to help our children into everyday love for Jesus’ people. It is much easier for our children to learn to love the church when the church loves them. When a church talks about, talks to, and treats children as a blessing, it isn’t such a stretch of the imagination to think that kids would learn to love it back. Our cultural baggage is against us in this. We often need the plain reminder to think highly of children. 

The question of “how do we be a family in a local church?” is bigger than finding a church with a kids program. We’re to help our children learn to love all God’s people, not just their peers. Meaningful relationships in church—relationships where we’re obeying Jesus’ command to love one another—are different from a playdate. When we give time to someone who is not like ourselves, our children learn that Jesus’ command to “love one another” is more than just being nice to the people you would have played with anyway.

When a young family is looking for a new church, a typical requirement is that it has “something for the kids”. If they don’t see a children’s program advertised on the church’s website, they might not bother visiting at all. It’s easy to assume that a church with no kids program thinks church is only for adults, that children only become a person once they are grown. There can be very bad reasons for a church not to have a kids’ program.

Just as some churches might reject children’s ministry for bad reasons, a kids' ministry can be done for faulty reasons. Or for good reasons, but in unhelpful ways.

It turns out the Seventeenth Century Westminister divines weren't just writing to pastors and theologians. Right at the beginning of their documents, they address fathers and mothers. In the great crisis they were facing, they appealed to parents. Mums, if you ever think what you're doing doesn't matter much, these men thought differently.

For references, see the article on the website. 

Most of us do not feel qualified to help our children come to know Jesus. We’re used to deferring to experts in other things, so we seek out the experts in this too. Sometimes we respect God’s word so much that we don’t want to mess it up. But we won’t protect the specialness of the gospel by staying silent until the kids are old enough to really appreciate it. In doing that, our silence would actually be teaching our kids that the gospel is not worth talking about. As G.K Chesterton famously wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”.

Suggestions for helping our children with Jesus' words.

Following on from last episode when we talked about how children are not a hindrance to abiding in Jesus, we consider how we can still feed on God's Word in the busy days of raising very young, very dependent children.

Our knee-high children are not a spiritual tripping hazard. Some thoughts on why we struggle, what might help and what doesn't.

Being joined with Jesus is our foundational duty in Christian motherhood, but it isn't something we do alone. It just so happens that the nature of motherhood makes loving Jesus' people a very easy thing to drift from. 

What is the one thing which makes all the difference in raising kids for God?

God's Bible is the only way we can know and give the good we owe in motherhood. But it's more like a hike in a National Park than checking off a shopping list...

Being seen doesn't make something more real or more important.

Our benchmark in motherhood is not just avoiding harm, but actively pursuing what is good.

We are powerless over time, but Jesus has given us one small dominion: how we use it. The young years of mothering demand a lot of time and never have women had more choices for how to fill it.