Lately I've had conversations with a few of you about the 'drudgery' or seeming "smallness" of our work at home. Yet God calls us, next to loving our husbands and children to be "busy at home". (Titus 2:3-5) What are we doing at home? We're providing order and food and cleanliness and joy - making home a place that people like to come back to after a hard day at work or school. It is the hardest work of all, because it is volunteer work that is often taken for granted or criticized and not always appreciated.
If you work hard at your job, generally you will have something to show for it. You will get a paycheck. Sometimes, if you've done a particularly good job, you will receive recognition from your boss. As a Christian, with a good work ethic, you would most likely reap these benefits in the workplace.
If you volunteer for some organization, you will get the good feeling of having helped people in need. You will often work with others who share your passion. And together you enact change. You have the camaraderie of your fellow activists, and a sense of purpose. Again, you will often be recognized or appreciated.
But mothering and homemaking are different. No one gives a round of applause at the end of the meal (but write me about Amy Denning's ABC's on table manners and open up your kids' minds to the possibility!) No one gives a review every quarter about what a good job we're doing. How many of us have a live-in assistant who encourages us to keep at it during the day? So many times we do what we do because we're supposed to, and not always with a sense of overwhelming joy. I've never met a woman whose husband paid her hourly for the work she did around the house. You rarely hear of husbands or children holding banquets for a faithful wife or mother, complete with the commemorative plaque. You might hear a few words of appreciation at a 50th Anniversary celebration or at a funeral, but mothers don't get written up in the paper for their tireless labor, sleepless nights, or entire lives devoted to the well-being of their husbands and children.
Yet, the call as wife, mother, and homemaker is from God. As we invest in obedience to God's call on our lives, we must remind ourselves Who our boss really is, and that the payoff is certain. The market may be "down" early on, and the price of shares high, but in the end the Lord tells us that He will "not forget our labors of love." Where are labors of love more consistent, more self-sacrificing, or more heart felt than in our homes?
So, as you go about your tasks today, whether it be loving and caring for your husband, or shopping or cooking or cleaning (or training your own kids to do these things) or instructing your children- in the Word or just about "life", or drying tears, or disciplining bad behavior, or hugging the little and big people there, or listening to them, or reading to them, or PRAYING for them, be reminded of His promises.
"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
"Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also and he praises her."
"A woman who fears the Lord - she shall be praised."
"Blessed be the Lord. There has not failed one word of all His good promises."
This past summer my dear friend, Elaine Lambach - a wife and mother - was suddenly called home to heaven. She leaves behind five children and a devoted husband. Just a few days before her death she related to her husband that often she felt her contribution to the world was so insignificant. I hope she can see now from heaven how valuable her life really was, just doing the things that wives and mothers do, as she sees the hole her departure has left in the lives of those who loved her. Her husband is determined to write a book about her life and testimony as a legacy for her children. I want to encourage you to live your life today in your home in such a way that if your husband were to write your biography it would testify to your faithfulness to that God-given directive.
Let me close with an excellent quote about the greatness of our task. Be blessed and affirmed by this challenge, written by GK Chesterton years ago:
"[Woman is surrounded] with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't...."
"[W]hen people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge [at his work]. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean…. I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children [arithmetic], and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."
Mothers, you are doing a very big thing. To God be the glory.
