Ep. 150 || Pay Your Dues Now: Living for Another Life Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura: Welcome to another episode of Risen Motherhood. I'm Laura Wifler and I have my sister-in-law, Emily, here with me.
Emily: Hello!
Laura: Before we get too far into the show, we want to remind you guys that we are actually a crowdfunded nonprofit, which means that we run on donations from listeners just like you. If you would like to join them, we encourage you to head over to risenmotherhood.com/give. You can learn more there about options for giving. We even have a really neat thing where you can donate in honor of someone else and we will send a handwritten note to that person to let them know that you made a donation in their name. A fun thing to do! Now, let's pop into the show.
Emily: Laura and I have been talking about this topic over the past several months.
Laura: Yes, we've been talking about it a lot.
Emily: We've been working through it and processing what it means when we say it, and how we receive it from others. We want to have this discussion today because we think that the advice that we're going to talk about is something that a lot of us have received as moms who have children who are still young. We think that a lot of us probably need to pause, Laura and I included, and really process through what's being said and how our hearts are responding.
Laura: The phrase may be said in various ways, but the phrase we want to talk about today goes something like this—typically from an older woman or influencer or popular teacher or even Emily and I or your friend—whoever it may be, lots of people say something along the lines of, "Hey, if you're faithful in these small things right now, then God is going to give big things to be faithful in later." Maybe it's, “the best thing you can do is be faithful where you're at right now. Do that unseen work now, and later there will be time for you to do those other things.”
Emily: Yes, I think, basically, it's this idea that what you're doing now, the unseen and the faithful, will eventually give way to this type of visible fruit. I think a lot of times when we hear this advice given or this word of encouragement, it's delivered to a mom, maybe she's got young children and she's just feeling a little discouraged. Maybe she feels like she's getting tired of making some of the sacrifices that she's making.
She's feeling like, "I'm having to say no to a lot of opportunities or advancement so that I can care for my children." Maybe feeling she's reached her limits. Again, the older woman or the influencer or the friend (we've done this) comes in and shares her own story and can maybe look back and say, "You know when I was a mom of young children, I wasn't able to do all that I wanted to do, but then later, when my kids grew up, I did end up getting opportunities to do some of those things. I just needed to be patient, and then as I was faithful in those little years and I was willing to do unseen things, those were great practice for what I have and where I'm at today."
Laura: Yes. We think there's definitely a kernel of truth to all of this and that women who say this are coming from a really good place. Again, we want to be the first to say—we’ve probably said a version of this ourselves. We have had dear friends say this to us. We see it online. It's just very popular and very prevalent.
Emily: I was going to say even as somebody who now has five kids. I'm so far along now, [laughs] but I can even imagine myself sitting next to a mom that has a toddler and a baby and going, "Yes, in a few years, there probably are going to be—
Laura: Things change.
Emily: It’s going to change and there's going to be less demands and you may have more time to do other things. I can imagine saying that. [laughs]
Laura: It's probably on record on one of our shows! The point is that it is true. There is a lot of truth to that. It comes from a good heart where I think that we're trying to remind one another to be focused on the right things. Older women have to teach younger women to work hard, to love their husbands and children, to live for Christ and so they're trying to encourage us to be faithful.
Emily: Yes, live according to your design.
Laura: Yes, we're doing a lot of unseen work as moms of young children—just as moms period. That's an encouragement to stay focused on those “right” things.
Emily: Right. I think another heart behind it is this reminder like, "Following Christ requires laying down your life. It requires sacrifice." We see that, "Keep going. You life is not your own. Keep following Christ."
Laura: Share that monastic-- Am I saying that word right?
Emily: Yes!
Laura: Share the monastic bell thing. I thought that was really good!
Emily: I don't even know where I got that example.
Laura: Just the short version.
Emily: In monasteries—go do your own fact-checking—but in monasteries I think they have bells that ring throughout the day. Some monasteries would maybe have seven bells that ring throughout the day. The point is every time the bell rings, the monks stop and pray. The bell is this constant reminder that no matter what they're doing when the bell rings, their time is not their own, their time belongs to God. It's almost like this forced interruption into what they’re doing so that they can continually turn their hearts toward the Lord.
I heard this saying that children are like the monastic bell for moms. Every time they come and interrupt us, it's this reminder that our time is not our own, it's meant to be sacrificed. I think that’s some of what women mean as they're saying this to maybe moms of young kids. It’s like, "Hey, this is the season where the children are that bell that reminds you to follow Christ."
Laura: Yes. I love that! I thought that was so good. Another thing, it encourages us that, "Hey, we actually don't know what God's going to do with our lives." There are seasons in life that do bring different opportunities and limitations just like we were talking about.
Emily: Right, they want to cheer us up.
Laura: Exactly! They want to remind us that, "Hey, in all of this, God is working for our good and His glory and there is greatness that comes with that."
Emily: I think another thing that is often expressed is this desire with maybe decades of life experience of following Christ to say, "Look, there's a true connection between what you're spending your time on and what comes of that later in life." God is working in these things that he's going to use later. I think it's encouraging to us to say, "There's eternal things happening. Just hang on because God is preparing you for something later." That's a true thing, reaping and sowing what we invest—
Laura: Yes, it's a biblical thing.
Emily: —what we invest our time in.
Laura: With all of this encouragement, what we think people really mean if you were to pin them down and ask, "What do you mean by that?" They're just trying to say, "Hey, keep following Christ. Keep giving him everything. Trust him with your life. Know that it won't always look the same way it does today." Some people might mean this in a prosperity gospel type of way. Like, "You do X then you're going to get Y," but we're not talking about those people. We are talking about women who are sharing this in an effort to just encourage you to do all the things we just said.
Emily: As Laura and I were processing through this, we're realizing that sometimes when we hear this, it falls on our hearts and it falls on our ears in such a way that it maybe tempts us to respond in a way that's inconsistent with what they mean.
Laura: Yes. I think for me personally, when I would hear this especially years ago when I was in the thick of really young children, I would think, "I'm just putting my time in now. I'm going to sacrifice. I'm going to do the hard thing. I have no recognition. That's okay because someday that's coming. These kids are going to grow and I'm going to do the bigger, better thing. I've just got to be faithful. I've got to prove that I can be faithful in these small things right now."
When you're tired and maybe you're feeling disappointed about the stuff you're sacrificing or just discontent or you're starting to think, "Hey, life will be better when kids get older," like I was, I think that often this message can fall on us in a way that we cling to it, kind of like the prosperity gospel. We take it that way.
Emily: Yes, exactly. I think that this can tempt us to undervalue our work today. We start to rank what we're doing now as like, "Well, this is small. This feels a little bit boring," or like you're saying, Laura, like, "This is my paying my dues," because the later work, the work I'm going to get to do in 5 years or 10 years or when my kids go off to school, when I'm an empty nester or whatever it is, then life is going to be more fun and more satisfying and I'm going to get some of the things that I'm giving up now. Then I think we also start to potentially think of our work for the Lord as a bargaining tool, like, "Okay, God, I'm going to give you this now, but I'm expecting you to pay me back later. Give me my desires later in life."
We can talk about what some of those things are, but one of the things we shift backwards in our mind is this idea that what we're doing in the unseen is small and what's going to happen later that feels more tangible is big. We'll get to that later, but I think that we don't always really understand what's big and what's small.
Laura: True. In the kingdom economy, things are always backwards. We want to just be careful, and Emily and I have to remind ourselves of this all the time, is just to not live for another season. We start to tell ourselves, "If we can just hang on, if we can put in the effort now, be faithful, limp along in our passion, then someday we're going to get what we really want."
I think part of that is because often, these messages are offered from people who maybe they did get the freedom that they were hoping for. They got the bigger business, the bigger book deal, the lifestyle, or even the type of ministry that they wanted, and so then when we receive that advice, we think that's what they mean, because they're coming from a place of what seems to be like abundant fruit in our eyes, or what seems be worldly bigness.
Emily: One thing to keep in mind is always this reality of someone describing what God did in their life versus giving a prescription for the way He's going to work in all of our lives. I think sometimes when a friend or someone that we love and trust is like, "Hey, I hung on and then this is what God did in and through my life and here's where I'm at now," that doesn't mean that that's the way that God is going to work in our lives.
There's some of those principles that are consistent, like he's going to make us more into the image of Christ. He's going to hopefully use our lives as gain for our good and his glory, but that can look a lot of different ways, and it may not be the financial success that we were hoping for, or the influential position in our church that we really wanted, or a certain job or a certain career advancement that we were hoping for, a certain number of followers. It may not look like that.
Laura: I think that that's where, as we've heard and talked with more and more women who are in later seasons, we find that sometimes they have their own hidden season of sacrifice or the way that faithfulness looks for them ends up being, "Hey, I'm staying up late a lot with teenagers and young adults and disciple-ing them," or "I have to care for my aging parents," or "I have a child with a disability." That care lasts far longer than some other regularly developing kiddos, or a husband who loses a job or is unfaithful or a health problem.
The list goes on and on, and we don't know what the future brings. This isn't a formula. Life is not a formula where if we do X, we receive Y. We have to know how to strengthen and gird ourselves, I think, for that reality.
Emily: Another episode that we're going to have in the spring season we did with Kristy Anyabwile.
Laura: Kristy, we hope we got that right.
Emily: Kristy Anyabwile, she did this thing on prayer, and I thought it was such a good picture of this, that Betty Scott Stam, who was a missionary in China, when she's younger, she prays this really bold and chilling prayer for God's will in her life. She's doing these unseen things and she's hoping that God will prepare her and use her life for something bigger and important and bold for the kingdom. The thing that God uses her life for, is that she is a martyred Christian as a 28 year old mom of an infant. That was the bigger thing that God was preparing her for.
A lot of times, we're not thinking in those terms like, "I'm sacrificing now, and God may be preparing me in that sacrifice for greater sacrifice later and a bolder life of following him." It goes back to that idea of we just don't know what life holds and the "bigger thing," he may be preparing us for, is actually more unseen work.
Laura: That's what Emily was hinting at or talking about earlier of, big may be small and small may be big. I think we are very poor judges of what big, flashy, amazing, applause-worthy work is, especially in the Christian life. I think we will find at the end of our days that it is probably the opposite of what the world tells us.
Emily: I was just reading this morning. I think it's in Luke. I think I was in chapter 9, but where the disciples are arguing about who is the greatest and Jesus brings a child to his side and he's like, "Look, I'm just letting you know that whoever welcomes this child in my name, welcomes me, and whoever is the least among you is actually the greatest," and that's true. We don't understand that. We think greatest is most influential, most important, most visibly successful. Jesus is like, "Look, come see this child, least is great."
Laura: That's so good! I think one other thing Emily and I've been talking about a lot lately is layers of desire, and how we often at first feel like, "Okay, what do I want? I want to be this amazing interior designer. I want to be this amazing photographer. I want to have success or I want to have financial influence or money's not an issue," but then if you were to pause and ask that person to go a little bit deeper, they may say, "No, I want to follow Jesus."
For me, I have all these aspirations, dreams and goals, but a deeper desire, a more central core desire for me is to follow Jesus, but it's so easy to lose track of that, I think, in the world. It's not wrong to say, "I want to be successful at the work the Lord has given me," but I think if we lose that core, if we forget what that central hub is, then we'd get really off track. I think it's important to pause and say, "What do I really want and why should I be faithful in my life?" I think that's the big question, and it's simply because our life belongs to God and He commands us to follow him.
Emily: Boom, boom. The starting point reason is God is our Lord, and he is the Creator and we are the creation. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Our lives are not our own. He's the master, we're the servant. I think this heart posture, like you're saying Laura, it reminds us that we want the life that he has for us, not the life that we envisioned for ourselves. Galatians 2:20, "I've been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." It's like saying, "All the life that I live now is for Christ. I'm going to count it all as loss for the sake of following Him. He's the one we follow. God's way is the best way."
Laura: Happy is the man, and this is Psalm 1, and then skip down to verse two, "Who's delight is in the law of the Lord, his mind is on his law day and night, he will be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, which gives its fruit at the right time." I love that. That's the way of happiness, of joy, is following God's ways. We sacrifice in these little years not because of what we're going to get from God down the road, but because it's simply a better way of life. Because we're the created, and he is the Creator. Because he is God and we are not. He's holy and perfect and we are sinful and riddled with wrongdoing.
Emily: I had a friend remind me of this and then I've heard this several times in the last six months, this part in Luke where Jesus sends out people to do things in His name, and they come back and they're all proud and excited about, "Look at all this visible success that we had." Jesus is like, "Don't rejoice in that, rejoice that your name is written in heaven." Essentially, he's saying, "Look, the thing that we rejoice in is the fact that we have Christ and the fact that we get to follow Him." That's the really exciting thing. Yes, there may be visible success but we're not rejoicing primarily in the visible success.
Laura: Another reason why we want to remain faithful no matter what, is just because we believe and trust that God has not held the best thing back from us.
Emily: I think we need to go back to the garden for this one, Laura.
Laura: All the way back, all the way to the beginning. Truly, this is the lie that Eve believed. She thought she was going to be more happy if she had the one thing that God had not given her yet. There's a song from CityAlight, “Yet Not I but Christ in Me.” We will link this in the show notes so you have all the lyrics.
Emily: It's so good.
Laura: So good. Go listen to it. First line goes, "What gift of grace is Jesus my Redeemer, there is no more for heaven now to give." Just pause. The question is, do you really believe that?
Emily: Yes, that God has not withheld the good thing from us. I think that's one of the things that stirs up in our hearts and we're in the little years, and we're feeling tired, and we feel like we are having to give up a lot to care for these children.
I was just the other day, I was feeling sad. I was going off to bed and I was thinking, "God, I want to read some more books and listen to more music," and just thinking about all those things in life that I don't get to taste and enjoy here and now. But do I really believe God has not withheld the best thing from me? He has already given us good, and that is his Son. He's already given us all there is to give. Yes, there are these other good things, but we're not necessarily promised to be able to experience those here and now, and Christ is enough.
Laura: There's this, I think it's a hymn by Anna L. Waring from 1850 and Abigail Dodds, one of our friends shared it with us. She has this little stanza. I don't know what you call it. She says, "I asked for the daily strength to none that asked denied, a mind to bend with outward life while keeping at thy side. Content to fill a little space if thou be glorified." That was just so powerful to me whenever I heard that, because I'm like, "Man, I am not very content to fill a little space. I want to be master, lord, goddess." Lord sounded weird to say, but I meant that in an old school way. I feel like I want big, and am I content to fill a little space? That's very humble. That's recognizing that God is God and you're not.
Emily: Yes. Amen. I think the last thing we wanted to reorient our hearts towards is this reality that we put our hope in Christ as we hope for other things. What this essentially means, well, I think the CityAlight song if you just keep listening to it, it says it. It says, "To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus. For my life is wholly bound to his. Oh How strange and divine. I can sing all is mine, yet not I but through Christ in me."
What this means is, we're not hoping in the thing that we're going to get later. We're not hoping in that career advancement that we might get when our kids go off to school and we have more hours that we can put in. We're not hoping in becoming an empty nester and being able to travel more, and being able to pursue more hobbies, and being able to spend more time with our husband or whatever it is.
We're not hoping in those things. We're hoping in Christ and when we have our hope fully in Christ, he never changes. This promise is never going to go away. He's sure all the time. He's the one we follow for the rest of our days. We can hope for things and we can hope that things happen and we can bring those things to Him and submit them to his Lordship.
Laura: Amen. Okay. Where does this leave us? What's the next step?I think that was a great summary because we don't want to bash on desires and dreams. We feel those are very real and valid. We're just trying to give that other side of the coin right now, but we want to leave you guys with maybe some questions to think on. Some people say “noodle on,” that's always been kind of a weird word.
Emily: What does that mean? [laughter]
Laura: Noodle. I don't know, just like wiggle it around their brain. I don't know. I just imagine my brain full of noodles. [laughter]
Emily: That sounds like motherhood. My brain is full of noodle mush. [laughter] Just gonna slosh around in there.
Laura: Noodle on this—that's just a weird saying. We'll start here. What is something that maybe you are tired of giving up and you're hoping God is going to give back to you when your kids are older? Can you say, “Christ is enough for me?” This might be something you need to go and confess to the Lord and repent and ask for his forgiveness.
Emily: I think another thing I've been thinking on lately is, what does it look like for me to serve the Lord with a glad heart in today's season? Because there's that reality that if I cannot be content with where God has me today, I will struggle to be content if and when I'm ever in another season later. I will always want something more. So just asking that, how can I cast aside self-pity and believe that God gave me something good to do for him today? And I can serve him with great joy.
Laura: Yes, that's a good one. I think just to go back and reiterate the phrase that we hear at times that “the best thing you can do right now is to be faithful where you're at.” Not, “do that unseen work and then God's going to give you some bigger things to be faithful in later.” We want to remind you not to tear anybody down for saying this, this is again a really common thing and we know women's hearts behind this. But also to just remind yourself of truth as you hear statements like that.
That this isn't about what you're going to earn someday in the future or what God owes you, but we just want to encourage you to remember to be faithful in these moments today simply for the fact that that's what God calls you to. That is the way of happiness, the way of joy, and Christ is always going to be enough. He has given you everything. He has given you eternity, life with him, the Holy Spirit to help you accomplish and do those things today, and you have everything you need in you to continue to be faithful until the end.
Emily: Amen. We will have some show notes with some of these quotes that we shared and links and resources to definitely check out. We have a whole faithful motherhood series that talks about this, how to stay the course because we do want to think more on what does that mean when we stay the course. So definitely go check that out. You can also find us on social media @risenmotherhood Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Don't forget to visit risenmotherhood/give if you would like to donate and support our ministry. Thanks, guys.
