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Summary:
Maternity should be viewed by all as intellectually respectable and emotionally
rewarding as well a worthy profession in the marketplace of life. Highly skilled
labor is required to guide an ever-changing child. A mother needs patience and
inner strength of character, intelligence and a determination to learn, skills
and giftedness for creative pursuits, loving commitment to faithful care, and a
reservoir of wise and prudent counsel. She must work with her husband to build
their family; she must labor faithfully to manage her household; she must
nurture her own children.
Presentation:
Motherhood is losing popularity in our modern society. Being a mother is often
seen to be a thankless and joyless, as well as overwhelming, task. Many look at
rearing children as a hardship tour in the duties of life—burdens and
sacrifices, self-denial and boredom, an interruption and inconvenience.
Every woman, married or single, with or without children, has a
maternal instinct given to her by God Himself. Some try to bury this maternity
in pursuit of professional goals; others try to extract this nurturing
sensitivity under the guise of true freedom; still others simply seek to
minimize their feminine nature by reversing priorities and roles so that
maternal nurture is merely a job to be assigned to anyone willing to take it.
The biblical model has been honored by many generations. Husband and wife have
worked together to build the family; wives have labored faithfully to keep their
homes and manage their households; and mothers have nurtured their own
children—a model now considered by many to be obsolete. Instead of encouraging
adolescents to cut apron strings from their mothers and venture out into
society, now mothers are being begged not to cut the apron strings and catapult
their babies prematurely into a menacing world!
Women have been brainwashed to believe that the absence of a titled,
payroll occupation condemns a woman to failure, boredom, and imprisonment within
the confines of the home. Although feminism speaks of liberation,
self-fulfillment, personal rights, and breaking down barriers, in reality these
phrases inevitably mean the opposite. In fact, a salaried job and titled
position can inhibit a woman’s natural nesting instinct and maternity by
inverting her priorities so that failures almost inevitably come in the
fashioning of an earthly shelter for those she loves most and in the rearing of
her own children. The mundane accompanies every task, however high-paying or
prestigious the job, so that escape from boredom is not inevitable just because
the workplace is located away from home. In the quest to be all you are
meant to be, you must not forget what you are meant to be! The question
is not whether or not a woman wants the best for her husband and children and
even for herself. Rather the real question is this: Is being someone’s wife and
another’s mother really worth the investment of a life? Are the preparation of
skills, the concentration of energies, and the commitment of your primary focus
valuable to keeping a home? The secular presuppositions of the present age, as
well as your own assumptions and priorities, must continually be tested against
inherent values and priorities, which for me come from Holy Scripture.
Perhaps the modern challenge is not so much the sacrifices a mother is
challenged to make for her children as the overwhelming peer demands a mother
feels to do everything—work a professional job, help a husband, care for
children, prepare meals, keep her home, and maintain her own health. Her life
is all work, the pressure of mundane tasks, with no time for relaxation or play
or time to enjoy the fruit of her labor! Maternity should be viewed by all as
intellectually respectable and emotionally rewarding as well a worthy profession
in the marketplace of life.
Caring for your children in your own home is sometimes considered a
choice only open to privileged women, but mothers at all socioeconomic levels
should be encouraged to make choices on how much time they spend with their
children. Highly skilled labor is required to guide an ever-changing child. A
mother needs:
• patience and inner
strength of character,
• intelligence and a
determination to learn,
• skills and giftedness
for creative pursuits,
• loving commitment to
faithful care, and
• a reservoir of wise
and prudent counsel.
Over the long haul a career or professional pursuit requires training and
preparation as well as commitment and dedication; it demands consistent activity
and progressive advancement; it is a combination of training and preparation,
commitment and loyalty, energy and time, excellence and achievement. Finding an
efficient, capable person who is professionally adequate in many and varied
careers simultaneously is rare indeed. Women who choose to devote themselves to
home and family also need to commit time and energy to preparation for this
awesome task.
For example, would you want your postman to be your family physician? I doubt
it. Why? Because you want the physician to specialize and sharpen his
expertise in medicine. Yet your doctor dictates letters and reports. However,
within careers a diversity of opportunity is not meant to cause the neglect of
one’s priority responsibility. If the doctor gives the most productive part of
his day to reports and accordingly neglects updating his professional skills and
treats his patients haphazardly, the doctor will soon have no need to make
reports because his patient load will dwindle. In other words, in worthy
pursuits there is specialization in purpose and preparation but generalization
in service and opportunity.
Homemaking in this sense is a career. Most dictionaries define the homemaker as
“one who manages a household, especially a wife and mother.” There are reasons
why I believe this career is important enough to demand a woman’s diligent
preparation, foremost commitment, full energies, and greatest creativity. A
homemaker does her job without the enticement of a paycheck, but she cannot be
duplicated for any amount of money. Dorothy Morrison wrote, “Homemaking is not
employment for slothful unimaginative, incapable women. It has as much
challenge and opportunity, success and failure, growth and expansion, perks and
incentives, as any corporate career.” Homes and families are important. Families
and health are rated as more important than money, and polls have shown that an
overwhelmingly high percentage of people assign top priority to the importance
of family life.
Many people are surprised to discover how much time is actually required to run
a household and care for a family. For me personally, having a marketplace
career was far easier than being a homemaker! None of my former professional
positions required my being on the job twenty-four hours every day. None of my
varied career pursuits demanded the variety of skills and abilities I have
needed in my homemaking responsibilities. Automatic, labor-saving devices
eliminate much physical work, but increased mobility and multiplied outside
activities add to the overall time demands so that the preparation and care of
the family shelter require time and energies enough to demand the assignment of
someone’s focus and commitment to that responsibility.
Many affirm that being a housekeeper is acceptable as long as you are not caring
for your own home; working with a man is also alright as long as he is a
colleague in the office and not your husband; caring for children is even deemed
heroic service as long as the children are someone else’s and not your own.
Women must not be overcome by the surrogacy of this age, which offers government
and marketplace professionals and even a substitute womb for those so encumbered
by lofty pursuits that they cannot accept roles and assignments given by God
from creation.
If human abilities are the ultimate product and if those abilities can be either
nurtured or stunted in early years, mothers (or appointed caregivers) become the
most important producers for the world economy. Mothers (or their surrogates)
should not be undervalued and overworked and be expected to juggle jobs/careers
while attempting to oversee and maintain a household by depending on various
vendors ranging from housekeepers and food specialists to yard workers and
walkers for the dog. Someone needs to be committed wholeheartedly to the
necessary work of raising children and managing the family household without
enduring professional marginalization or losing the status of honorable work or
being saddled with the burden of increased poverty because of inappropriate
taxation and government interference.
The modern paradigm for motherhood does not sacrifice the non-negotiable
importance of commitment and excellence for the task of keeping the home and
nurturing children. Yet mothers of this generation have a myriad of ways to
enrich that experience. The woman in her home makes aesthetic choices, dispenses
love, and develops her children into individual members of society. Through this
awesome task of investing in the lives of her children, she is challenged to
become the instrument for transferring values via her offspring to an entire
nation and world. Mothers are the last bastion against the immorality and
amorality of a decadent society. The world in which a mother lives and moves
will largely reflect who she is and what her values are. The umbilical link from
a mother’s body to new life and her passionate sense of the value of and
potential for the life fashioned in her womb is where it all begins. For a woman
to refuse that procreative role or to expect society to assume her
responsibility in nurturing the life from her womb means that she is willing to
abdicate her highest calling and greatest usefulness not only to the Creator God
but also to His created order. Without question, women are called upon to make
sacrifices; they are challenged to live selflessly. Their sacrifices and the
selfless lives they commit to live are essential not only for the continuation
of the generations but also for the prosperity and success of the nations. Women
cannot shun this greatest responsibility of maternity without endangering all of
civilization.
The demands of motherhood include:
• Unconditional love.
Genuine love without bounds is not merely an emotional reaction but rather is
fashioned by determination—the unselfish outpouring of your life into the life
of another; doing what is best for your child even at your own personal
sacrifice.
• Never-ending
nurture—physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. You are
responsible for helping your child navigate the pitfalls and challenges of life,
moving from dependence on you, to maturity for himself, to embracing a
partnership with community and society. This whole-of-life instruction fashions
your child’s worldview and shapes his character and instructs him in an
intentional way, including the guiding discipline that sets boundaries and
protects.
• Ever-present
welcoming and comforting home, ensuring that the household functions well with a
primary responsibility for maintaining the setting and place in which love and
nurture will operate effectively and providing for the child a model for
marriage and an example of parenting. Show and tell is much more effective than
teaching on the run!
Every woman faces a battle concerning her design and purpose. As a woman, I must
agree with who I am, accept the qualifications that I have, and recognize the
limitations that are mine. I must learn anew in every phase of my life to
understand what happens in my body biologically and how my nurturing
sensitivities can be used and be willing to live in harmony with myself and my
responsibilities. I am equipped to carry and nurture in my body the most
precious beginning life—life in the image of God. I am related to my body
because of the intricacy of design and function necessary for me to fulfill my
maternity, which is an awesome responsibility! In the doing of my God-assigned
responsibilities, I find contentment with myself, joy in my task, and ultimately
peace with my Creator.
When I stand before God to give an account of my life and work, my most valuable
contribution will not be speaking to conferences or writing books or teaching
classes. The most precious treasures into which I am investing are my children
and grandchildren. They have been the reservoir into which I have poured my
energies and creativity—my life. The nurturing of my children has been an
awesome task and a precious privilege. It is my most important job! God give us
a host of women who will embrace with determination and creativity the task of
producing and nurturing the next generation. | 
