Claim OwnershipLight Duties
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© Catherine McKay 2021
Description
We all want to be good mums and we want to like doing motherhood. The trouble is, it's hard to work out what's good and harder still to be happy about it. This podcast is a long meditation on what Jesus has to say about what's good when we're raising children. It so happens that joy sneaks up on us when we get on with doing it.
98 Episodes
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Welcome to the Light Duties podcast. This is where the audio version of the articles from the Light Duties website. It's a long thought on Christian motherhood, one article at a time.
A little of the back story behind the Light Duties project. This is the audio version of an article from the Light Duties site.
No one else can do our growing for us.
Defining our terms for Christian motherhood.
Like all good things, used the wrong way, duty devours us. In this episode, we're recalibrating our ideas about duty.
Doing what is good for our kids is not the same as giving them what they want.
How duty is actually a way God distributes love to particular people through their particular relationships. The asymmetry of motherhood needs a source outside ourselves.
Inadequacy comes in a few shapes and we are complex packages of them. Steps to making sense of our limitations.
Soothing our inadequacies the wrong way robs us of the very comfort we are trying to find.
Jesus saves us out of parental passivity, into optimistic courage.
Happiness sneaks up on us while we're getting on with what's good.
Jesus brings us into the very goodness and happiness we don't deserve. This changes how we approach motherhood.
Happiness and goodness belong together because they both come from God. Pursuing goodness is a far happier situation than avoiding it.
When we take Jesus' gospel seriously, we can end up talking as if goodness is a bad thing. This leads to a whole lot of weirdness in our mothering.
Desperation for happiness is driving most of what we do. And that's exactly as it should be.
Good motherhood loves and pursues what God says is good, in the situation a mother and her children are in. It can happen even when situations are not good.
Since we're not disembodied beings, marriage and mothering don't happen in a vacuum. Perhaps the Apostle Paul's outdated instruction to be "busy at home" has more in mind than we suppose?
Why are men and women given different instructions in passages like Titus 2? Let's think through the architecture which leads to the differences.
"Jesus changes husbands into men who lead well and he changes wives into women who help divinely. Helping is not a role we're rescued from, along with our sin. It's a role we're redeemed to mature into."
Whether they know it or not, fathers are responsible for raising their kids to know God.
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