#11. It’s Good to be Busy at Home
We often use the idiosyncrasies of our own family and home to dismiss whatever the Bible is telling us to do. As I said in article #10.
Good motherhood loves and pursues what God says is good
in the situation the mother and her children are in.
There are two parts to this. Firstly, understanding the good (even if it seems a world away from what is possible in our own home). Secondly, interpreting and maturing towards that good, in our particular situation. We won’t discern what’s good if we start by looking at our own lives. “What God says is good” is soaked into the whole story of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. This broad, background colour of goodness matters. But on top of the general good, there are particulars. There are relationships which have specific responsibilities. Duties. Good owed. Good defined by God.
Being attentive to what Scripture makes plain is important, even if the plain words make us twitch. One of the plainest, most basic “goods” entrusted to a mum is summed up in Titus (make sure you’ve read this article).
In Titus 2, Paul speaks about women,
“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.” (Titus 2:3-5)
Paul tells us what “devotion to doing good” will look like for a Christian woman who is married with children. It has an awful lot to do with her husband, her children and her home.
It makes sense that these relationships and the home are a big deal. I mentioned in the last article that there are no other people in the world with whom we are so physically bound. We have unmatched opportunity to help or hinder them. Marriage and motherhood bring duties which can’t be done without time spent in a shared place. After all, we are not disembodied beings. Marriage and mothering are full of full-bodied love to other persons who have bodies. To love a husband and children well takes a whole lot of pure, self-controlled, kind, home-work. It can’t be done remotely.
At some point, coming to terms with our God-given duties as wives and mums means coming to terms with the primary space where those good things originate and are expressed: our homes.
Before I had kids, I was eager to serve Jesus. My Bible was open and I wanted to study it with anyone I could find. The best way I saw of doing good was to lead Bible studies and sign up to whichever activity my church needed helpers for. In university Christian groups, whenever leaders (rarely) spoke about marriage, homemaking, and raising children, these things were on the list of things to be laid aside, or postponed, “for the sake of the gospel”. Perhaps I misunderstood the message, but that’s the meaning I internalised. The only category I had for giving time and attention to home was idolatry. Like any vocation which didn’t involve studying and teaching the Bible full-time, these things were dangerous, threatening to absorb time and energy; quenching zeal for the gospel and availability for “ministry”.
Putting effort into my husband, children and home were the things I thought would distract me from serving Jesus. Yet, here in Titus, that’s exactly what God is telling me to do. Paul is telling Titus
to teach the older women
to teach the younger women
to love (and be subject to) their husbands, to love their children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be kind and to be busy at home.
Only once have I been to a women’s conference in Australia where women were taught these things. Mostly, it’s either too troublesome to talk about, or considered irrelevant. But, for Christian women who are married and have kids, home is the main place their obedience—or disobedience—to Jesus will be on display. It isn’t a distraction from serving Jesus, it’s the good service he’s given us to do. {more below}
Why Don’t We? As usual, there’s more than one post needed to work through that question. It’s worth talking about what we loathe. (Did you see my thoughts on who to talk to on the about page?)
Our culture, even our governments, call it a waste for a woman with tertiary education to be at home. Why would you spend years establishing a career only to sit and read picture books? Professional qualifications often need to be maintained with continuing education and minimum work hours between babies. The more you’ve invested, the more there is to juggle and lose. Some fields of work can telescope, easily adjusting to a handful of hours a week. Other specialties can be done in nothing less than 80 hour working weeks. To some women, it feels like poor stewardship to let a rich education sit (seemingly) dormant for the sake of loving a husband, raising children and being busy at home. {It’s worth helping young women think about how their teenage and young adult choices will make future obedience as women easier or harder. More than worth doing, it’s unloving to them, the future husbands, the future children and the future church not to have these conversations now. We’re also being negligent “older women”, according to Titus 2, if we don’t.}.
But back to us Christian women who are mothers now. Even if we’re not bonded to an inflexible profession, an enthusiastic Christian woman can feel there is wastefulness in spending most of her time busy at home. It’s a narrow and hidden space. There are gifts she has been given which seem to lie fallow when she’s devoted to doing good to so few people in such a focused way. The nature of the work often doesn’t tap the depths of our intellect; we could easily do much of it with less smartness (or we imagine this is the case until we try to do it well, then keep tripping off the back of the domestic treadmill). The work is so varied that it is never completely matched with our strengths. And since we live in a society where we can survive without a strong home base, the instruction to be busy at home sounds redundant. If Paul had known this (and known about labour saving appliances), surely he would not have wasted ink urging younger women to merely be busy at home.
We can feel the urgency of all the work to be done for Jesus’ fame out there, and we might feel the burden of not being in the thick of all that action. Especially when we see a need in the church or community which others are not filling. Before I was a mum, one ‘justification’ I could see for staying home was that it would give me more time for serving with my church. I imagined I’d be available in the week in ways a working woman isn’t. It’s easy to come to that conclusion when the children you will be raising don’t exist yet. My first couple of years of being a mum were spent fiercely trying to prove how indispensable to my church I was. There came a time though, when my body rebelled. Frantic involvement in church activity was done at the cost of training my own children in godliness, of loving my husband, of our home being a good place.
As I faced what it meant to raise very young children to maturity, I realised I couldn’t continue as if the children weren’t there. There was a clash between the good things I was eager to do. By ignoring what God says in Titus 2, I was making things more complicated (and distressing) than they needed to be.
In that tension, the Bible made plain the good I was to choose. Loving my husband and children and being busy at home weren’t merely an option for women who like home. Whatever felt natural to me, Titus 2 meant I needed to be home more. I couldn’t be busy at home if I was busy everywhere else. I had to start saying no to good things, so I could work out how to love my husband and children better, so I could learn how to have a productive home. I didn’t have much imagination for what ‘being busy at home’ could mean, but I figured there was more to find.
Paul is accused of being misogynistic or just culturally naive, assuming that women could never do anything beyond home. It’s not unusual to glance over the top of Paul’s words, assuming that if he had seen what was possible for women in a society like ours, if his patriarchy could’ve been corrected, he would have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to write a different instruction for women.
Paul’s ministry relied on the productive lives of many women in different cities where he stayed. He knew women who exemplified the pattern he gave in Titus 2 and he knew women who were idle at home, or busy gossips going from one house to the next (and those behaviours are rebuked in his other letters). Instead of dismissing Paul as wrong, let’s pause and consider that maybe it’s our imagination for home which is limited. I’ve found C.R Wiley’s book, “The Household and the War For the Cosmos” very instructive in reimagining some of the social fixtures Paul wrote about. Paul had a vital experience of many remarkable women’s homes—different from the desiccated homes many of us have known. I reckon Paul had more in mind for women, not less. And through these women and their families and their homes, more in mind for everyone.
Maybe we worry that being busy at home would cause us to be less effective for Jesus. Paul says that we need to do these things so that the Word of God will not be maligned. All this domestic stuff has something to do with the primacy of God’s word. It has a lot to do with bearing witness to Jesus in this world. We mightn’t yet be able to see how it might matter, but the first step is to trust that because God says so, it does.
For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. Titus 2:11-14
