Ep. 161 || Work and Motherhood: Finding God’s Faithfulness Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily: Welcome back to another episode of Risen Motherhood! I’m Emily and I’m excited to share a little about today’s special show. Today we’re talking about the many types of work that we do as moms—the everyday work of the home and caring for our families, the work we volunteer for ministry or community organizations, but specifically, this show has an emphasis on income-producing work. This is a highly-requested topic as moms want to know how to honor God and be faithful in their role amidst many responsibilities. We invited several of our friends to spend a few minutes sharing what they’ve learned about work and motherhood—the purpose of work and it’s many challenges, the way they’ve depended on and looked to the Lord, and the way he has been faithful and helped them persevere as they put Christ first. We hope this feels like dropping into a conversation with a group of women from different life stages who are sharing what they’ve learned from the word and personal experience.
Before we jump in, we’d like to introduce these women to you. We know this will go fast, so if you want to find anything here, we’ll list additional information on our show notes at risenmotherhood.com in the order each person shared.
Courtney Reissig lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her husband and their four sons. She’s a Bible teacher and is the author of three books: The Accidental Feminist, Glory in the Ordinary, and Teach Me to Feel: Worshiping Through the Psalms in Every Season of Life.
Jen Pollock Michel is the award-winning author of Teach Us to Want, Keeping Place, and Surprised by Paradox. Jen writes widely for print and digital publications and travels to speak at churches, conferences, and retreats. She resides in Canada with her husband and their five children.
Kim Cash Tate is an author, bible teacher, speaker, and singer/songwriter who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two adult children. She has written several books, including Cling: Choosing a Lifestyle of Intimacy with God and her fictional Promises of God series. Kim has an active YouTube channel with a scripted web series called, “Cling, The Series.”
Macy English is the owner and principal consultant of English Media, where she helps businesses with all things sales and marketing. Macy and her husband have two kids and live in Texas.
Okay, let’s get to the show…
Courtney Reissig:
Often we see our work as a product of living in a fallen world. Work is boring. Work is mundane. Work is hard. Work is unproductive. Work produces little joy in our lives. So it must be because sin entered the world, right?
This is a common understanding of our work.
But we can be helped to cope with the difficulty in our work if we remember why we work in the first place. God created work in the very beginning. When God created Adam and Eve, he gave them a world to work in—he gave them a garden to cultivate, a family mandate to fulfill (be fruitful and multiply), and a world to subdue and reign over. But the reason he did this is because he created them to bear his image. When they worked, they were working as his co-laborers to bring order out of chaos, to spread his glory all over the world he made, and to rule and to reign with him.
God is the very first worker—he worked in bringing forth creation. He works every single day to sustain his creation. And he is working personally in our lives to grow new life in us through his Son, Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. God is a worker, and he created us to work as his image bearers.
This infuses meaning into every single job we have—whether it is paid or unpaid—valued or not-valued—glamorous or downright dirty. The mom doing laundry brings glory to God because in it you are bringing order out of chaos. The teacher brings glory to God because she is teaching the beauty of knowledge, knowing that all truth belongs to our God. The frantic nights in the kitchen after a long day at the office or a long day at home alone, bring glory to God because you are loving the world that God has made by feeding hungry bellies.
But because sin entered the world, your work needs a rescuer to come and infuse meaning back into what God intended your work to always be.
Praise God, that rescuer has come! Jesus came doing his Father’s work, to redeem those living under the curse, including our work. So in Christ, our work can have tremendous meaning. In the Lord, every single act of work you do can be a form of worship back to the God who is making all things new by the work of the Christ. One day our work will be fully redeemed in the new heavens and the new earth. Until then, we work with purpose knowing that even in this broken world, our labors are never in vain.
Jen Pollock Michel:
We’ve just recently moved, and as you can imagine, I feel a little bit panic when I see the boxes that we’ve shoved in our storage room, the stacks of pictures we haven’t yet hung, the empty shelves that I’m probably not going to get around to decorating before my mother-in-law visits. I want to get to it all, I want to do it all, but I can’t. And you know why, right? I am a working mom with five children.
As a writer, I have a flexible schedule, which I’m grateful for. Most recently, I’ve written a book titled Surprised by Paradox, and truthfully, I think the life of a working mom is a lot of paradox. It’s a both/and life. It’s a lot of contradictions, a lot of head-scratching, a lot of wondering how exactly it’s supposed to work.
When the refrigerator is empty, when the laundry hampers are full, when I’m behind on a writing deadline, I start to think that an either/or life would be a lot easier than this both/and life that I’m attempting. Either I should just be a fulltime mom, making sure that everyone has clean sheets and a coat whose sleeves aren’t too short. Or, in a different life, I should have leaned further into my professional work, should have set more ambitious goals. An either/or life is really seductive for its simplicity, its tidiness. If I’m honest, one of the reasons I’m drawn to the promise of an either/or life is because I’d be better at managing it. Better at controlling it.
But as I’ve thought a lot about the nature of God and the nature of faith, I realize how often we find God in the both/and, not in the either/or. Jesus is, of course, both God and man. And he doesn’t invite us into a life that we can manage, but a life where we walk by faith. Faith isn’t formed when we think we’ve got it all together. It’s formed when we realize that we don’t. And I certainly don’t always know how to do this life well, this life where dinner and book deadlines matter.
It’s why I keep leaning into a both/and life: because this is where I’m practicing dependence on God, where I’m taking risks and trying things that feel way too big and impossible for me. I’m calling both parts of this life good: the writing and the dish-washing, the speaking and the scrubbing. I’m trying to release my need for control. Most of all, I’m just practicing being human. I’m naming my limits, asking for God’s help.
Kim Cash Tate:
I remember being distraught, wondering how I would meet the book deadline my publisher had given me while homeschooling my two kids. I had written my first novel on my own time. It had taken two years, writing primarily in the mornings, but by the grace of God, I’d gotten it done.
But now I was signed to a publisher, which I had thought was a blessing, but as the deadline loomed before me, challenges at home seemed to exponentially increase. There were days I hardly got to write at all, and I only grew more and more frustrated. If my kids took longer than expected to grasp a lesson or weren’t cooperative, I had little patience and I would hear myself snapping at them.
When our school time was over, I’d open my laptop, ready to roll with my story—and I’d hear, “Mom!” School time had ended; motherhood hadn’t. Inside I’d be complaining. I never get time to myself. Can I just get one hour?
The Holy Spirit convicted me and reminded me that motherhood was my primary ministry. This was still fairly new to me. I’d been raised to have a career and make lots of money. After giving my life to Jesus at 27, He gave me a desire to prioritize motherhood, and I left a career as an attorney.
I loved being home with my kids. But now that I had signed this book deal, at times I found myself resenting the demands of motherhood—which, with homeschooling, had become a round the clock job. But when the Holy Spirit convicted me, I repented of my attitude and spent time with the Lord and his word.
I knew he was saying to trust him. Jesus’ sermon on the mount gripped my heart. “Do not worry about what you will eat or drink or wear. Your Heavenly Father knows that you need these things.” So in my case—do not worry about your deadline; the Lord knows. “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
I knew I needed to prioritize motherhood and homeschooling with a glad heart and trust that He would give the grace I needed to meet my deadline. And he did. I still had little time to write, but he would multiply that time. The Lord was faithful to give grace to write and meet deadlines for years after that. My kids graduated from our homeschool, and I was able to cherish those years with them.
Macy English:
I was having coffee with a friend the other day and she asked me, “What has God taught you about work since you became a mom?” Immediately what came to mind were these three words: tend your garden. She looked at me a little puzzled, knowing we both currently work in corporate America and gardening is a hobby neither of us have. I honestly wasn't surprised by her response, because for most people, the word “work” and “garden” don’t go together. It didn’t for me either until a few years ago.
For the majority of my life, when I heard the word “work,” what I typically thought of was a job. Something I'd receive a W2 or 1099 for. But now, when I talk about or hear the word “work," I think about a garden.
Let me explain: the shift for me began by studying the book of Genesis. There we see that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in it. He creates a garden, breathes life into Adam and Eve, and gives them a specific assignment to cultivate a garden. But what happens shortly after that? A snake enters the garden and doesn’t bite them, doesn’t wrap tightly around them to kill them… but what does he do? He whispers a lie and tells them they can be limitless, they can be just like God in their assignment, and then the downward spiral begins.
The story continues and we quickly see that all of humanity needs to be saved from the lie that we can be all, do all, and accomplish whatever we believe or want to do. But God, who is rich in mercy, saves us from ourselves, and condescends to us in the form of a servant, Jesus Christ, puts on flesh and dwells among us. He suffers, dies, is buried, and on the third day he is raised from the grave and who is the first person to see him? Mary. And who does she mistake him for? A gardener.
What a beautiful and awesome picture. That as women, who are called to be like Christ, in him, have a perfect picture of what it looks like to tend a garden. To be fruitful, multiply, and make disciples.
You might be single, you might be married, you might have biological or adopted children, have experienced multiple miscarriages, or maybe you're providing safe refuge to foster kids… sister, what gospel truth I encouraged my friend with over coffee is the same one I’d say to you if we were sitting over coffee: God has called you to a specific task. He has given one to you on a very specific plot of land… a garden. And it’s not the same plot of land as your sister on your left or on your right, but you know what? We’re all called to cultivate and steward where God has placed our feet.
And what else is true about a garden? There are limits… boundaries. Praise God! Contrary to what culture tells you, you cannot be all, you cannot do it all, and accomplish whatever you dream. Praise be to God that he is limitless and we are not. So imagine this... a limitless God has given you limits for your good and for your flourishing. He has called you to work and give it everything you’ve got. Your work is not defined by a W2 or 1099, but by a God who has called you to a very specific assignment. The question is, what is that?
No matter how you find yourself answering that question, my gospel encouragement to you would be this: cultivate your garden. Steward what God has given you, and may all your labors, no matter what your “work” is, resemble the perfect gardener who is our peace and fully embodies what it looks like to tend a garden.