Because I Came Home, Part 3

art: "Home" by Amber Ellis Eldredge,https://thecoloramber.me/

I will forever be in awe of a loving Father in Heaven who tailors personal curriculum for each of His children. As a former private teacher, the thought exhausts me and fills me with awe.

Everyone gets his or her own private lessons, and I once heard someone say Father, in His great wisdom, is able to factor human stupidity into the lessons. Glib though that may be, it underscores that Father is able to turn not just our dimness, but even our outright naughtiness and rebellion into "beauty for ashes" (see Isaiah 61:3).

I've taken the time to explain some of my sordid past in order to connect dots to the things I've learned because of my choice to stay home with my children and not return to work.

Because the sweet sister in the reel that sparked this whole discussion spoke of the strengths and talents she developed because she went back to work, I need to talk about the strengths and talents I gained by staying home.

These contrasts must be discussed for anyone honestly searching for their own individual, custom-made path according to the Lord's will. The contrasts aren't about a right or a wrong way to do life. I've learned that if you choose to do motherhood with a spiritual focus there's a higher and a holier way to do it. Ironically, this road is SO MUCH MESSIER along the way before you get to holy.

From choosing, doing, watching, and speaking to other mothers over nearly five decades, I've learned there's a spiritual way and a temporal way to approach this. And there are huge problems with attempting to do a spiritual thing with a temporal focus. You will never do anything harder.

Both are hard - make no mistake. But those who did without to stay home can assert - with all the kindness and love we possess: this celestial thing we must do in a temporal world can be done with a spiritual focus. It's a different kind of hard. It'll wreck you. It'll break you.

By design.

I really need to reiterate with added emphasis: trying to do a spiritual thing with a temporal focus is THE. HARDEST. I could not be sorrier that that will ever feel like judgment. You must believe me: it isn't. It's simply a reality that can't be warm-fuzzied away.

We are practicing celestial living here in a telestial sphere - practicing it in the far less than ideal circumstances of opposition and resistance. That resistance is necessary, just like it is in weight resistance training, because those are the very circumstances that train and condition us to learn to love parenting. Even as we hate it.

On my road, I was invited to make a legitimately painful sacrifice to be obedient to prophetic counsel. I often hated it. There was often very little joy involved. I'm pretty sure I lost much of myself along the way. And I still firmly maintain: there was no other way for me to learn what I learned.

I've learned that it was worth it. I've learned it CAN be done if you're willing to do without what most view as essentials nowadays. We had newspaper at our windows in our new homes longer than everyone else in the neighborhood. We drove cars longer. I've dressed like a beggar most of my life. We didn't take vacations.

I told myself my sacrifice was going to make my children's faith stronger, and I write this currently as the mother of two prodigals, learning their private lessons somewhere else. So, what was the sacrifice for?

It was for me.

In choosing this lifestyle: the lack in it, the difficulty of it because of my own weaknesses, the depression, the loss of identity - all of it - hollowed out a place in my broken heart. It's hollowed out and feeling quite empty without the promised fulness right now. But it's been hollowed out to hallow it. As empty and grief-stricken as it still so often is, this side of glory, it is bigger and has a greater capacity for the fulness that is coming. It's been promised in the covenant, and I trust the Maker and Keeper of the Covenant - the Promiser. And, He's the one who makes up the difference for my imperfect keeping of the covenant if I keep trying.

I became someone I would never have become if I'd stayed in the swirling current of the world. It was vitally important to my children, lost as they currently are, for me to have stepped out of the current of the culture river that moves with the speed of rapids.

It matters in a family to have one parent moving in more still waters - I DIDN'T STAY STILL! - I ONLY SAID MORE STILL! As chaotic as those baby years are, and the toddler years, the school years, the teenage years - as chaotic as all of it is - there is something centering and grounding for a family to have one parent at home who isn't moving in that current the same way. This is a different kind of stillness which can't be replicated any other way.

Who did I become? A daughter of God who knows how to take hurts and questions to her Father and have frank conversations with Him. I became a more earnest student as I searched for answers.

Any "strengths" I've developed in homemaking have come from decades of pee-poor practice. I wish I could have given a more orderly home to my little children, but if C.S. Lewis is right, and heaven and hell are both, indeed, retroactive, that means I'm becoming the mother they would have had all along (see The Great Divorce).

I've wryly quipped that if I had continued working, I'd weigh a good 50 pounds more than this, be a strident activist liberal, almost certainly be divorced and very possibly a far less committed member of the church - if I were still a member. But hey. That's just what MY Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come showed ME.

This choice was part of my tailor-made curriculum, and Father has used it well to teach me what I needed to learn to steady my walk back home, and secure that I really wanted to walk it.

I'm so grateful that 29-year-old-girl - 40 years ago - with her finger SO far up her nose - put her dream career on the altar of her God and tearfully told Him - "You can have it. I want what You want more than what I want."

And then as clumsily as it could possibly be done, spent the next 40 years trying to live like she meant it. Because now she does.

Along the way, she had an epiphany similar to Robin Williams being bonked in the head by a baseball as Peter Pan in Hook, a flood of memories rushing in to remind him of who he really was, and that becoming a father was the reason he had decided to leave Neverland.

It turns out, I've learned that while I thought I was born to teach, what I was really born to do is be a mother. And I learned it the very best way I could learn it - by coming home.