Moms + Work 01: Let’s Get to Work! Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura Wifler: Over the years, you and I have really changed what our motherhood looks like and what work looks like. I think, for a lot of moms, it can become this area of, "Hey, you are faithful, or you are not faithful to your womanhood or your motherhood as to whether or not you work." I feel like you and I have said, "Oh, we can see all the sides because we've experienced the gamut of things."
Emily Jensen: Yes. Like you're saying, I think in Christian circles, particularly, this can be an even more confusing topic because we do have convictions about faithfulness in motherhood and what an important responsibility it is, but we also see biblically that God has given all of us work to do. I think one thing that you and I have both learned, no matter what we're doing with volunteering or income-producing work, or we’re full-time stay-at-home moms, is that work matters and that every single mom works. When we're thinking about it from that perspective, we don't have to be scared to talk about the topic of work because this is something that God has given for every mom to do in its broadest sense.
Laura: Yes, I think it's so funny when we do get really hung up on, "Hey, was that work paid or not, or did you receive income for that?" I think—I don't know—as moms, I think there's been a good pendulum swing in the past—I would even say 5-10 years—where people have said, "Hey, all moms work." I do think that message is starting to come out.
That's something we want to really push harder on here—to recognize that it doesn't matter if you're a full-time stay-at-home mom or you are the CEO of a company. At some level, we are all working. There is similar work that we all do even. Then there's distinct work that we do. I feel like this thing where we get really, really caught up about "What is work?" and if you say the word "work," that means you're making money—we want to expand that term and talk about it in a much broader and more biblical sense.
Emily: Amen. This series is for every single mom, so do not turn this off if you don't have an income-producing job outside of the home. We really think that this is a great series for every single one of us to think about. We want to just start by defining the word "work." As we're going to talk about it throughout the series, we're going to do our best to differentiate what types of work we're talking about as we go along. For this initial episode, we're talking about work in general. What do we mean, Laura?
Laura: Another Google. Work is "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." That is pretty much all the work that we're all doing. When we're talking about work, like Emily said, we're talking about that ordinary work that every mom's going to do. We're going to wash dishes. We're going to sweep the floor. We're going to pick up after our kids. We're going to go to doctor's appointments, all that stuff. We're talking about that service-oriented work, the humble work of motherhood, the vomit that we're cleaning up. I always vomit when I clean up vomit. [Laughter] Side note, my husband doesn't allow me to clean up vomit anymore, because he will have more to clean up.
Emily: Hey, that's awesome. That's a hot tip for a new mom.
Laura: I know.
Emily: You just puke right away when your kid pukes, and then you don't have to do that work anymore.
Laura: I have the queasiest stomach. I will clean it up. I'm like, "Babe, I'm going to do it." Anyway, I won't make any more vomiting noises on the podcast, but just so everybody knows, it is a good way to go about it. Do it once and your husband will forever clean it up.
Emily: But we're also talking about work that we enjoy doing. Maybe it's things you're passionate about at home. Maybe you love to bake, or you have things that fit your interest, but we're also talking about work that we don't love to do. We all have chores around the house. I don't like answering emails—personal emails.
Laura: Oh, personal emails.
Emily: Well, all emails.
Laura: I love work email.
Emily: All emails, but I see—yes. I just avoid that task, but we all have types of work that we just don't really love to do. There is work that people notice that we do, and they compliment us for—
Laura: Homemade bread!
Emily: Oh yes, like I love bringing out that hot loaf and like, "Look what mommy made."
Laura: Your cinnamon rolls. I will compliment you all day on those.
Emily: I love those. Thank you! I'll receive that. Or just like, the work that we do that no one notices. That is frankly in motherhood—
Laura: —most of our work.
Emily: And in life, that's most of it.
Laura: We have work that keeps us in the home—all the stuff that Emily mostly has been talking about: mowing the lawn, washing the pants or washing the floors, keeping the fridge stocked, all that stuff—and then work that can take us away from the house. This might be a job that you are going off and going to during the day. It might be volunteering for the PTO, shopping for clothes—I don't know. Some of that stuff's done online now, but you know what we're saying. Then we have all the types of work that are part-time, full-time, income-producing, not income-producing but you hope they will be someday.
Emily: I feel like, in 2022, there's every combination of everything that you want.
Laura: I think that's so exciting for moms, and for everyone, but I do think it almost makes this topic more complicated. But we'll get into that later. Let's pop into the gospel. Let's walk through that with work. Emily, do you wanna just kick us off with that?
Emily: Oh, sure. Well, I think what's great—what we mentioned earlier—is that work is a really broad topic. It’s not just limited to income-producing, and the Bible actually presents work as a really good thing that we were all created to do. Work existed before the fall. In fact, if we look at God and who he is, we see that he works.
In creation, he takes six days to make the earth and fill it. He speaks things into existence, and then on the seventh day, God finishes his work and he rests—which we're going to get to that—a little teaser. Throughout Scripture, we see all kinds of things that God does. Psalm 104 goes through a lot of work that the Lord does. Verse 31 says, "May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord rejoice in His works." Again, we're seeing that God is the first and primary worker, and that's really exciting.
Laura: Yes. I think one thing that I always think is interesting from the creation story is that God works for six days, and he rests for one. I know often we talk about that one day of rest, but let's consider for a moment that he worked for six days. The vast majority of his time was spent working, and I do think that's an interesting note—just to be able to even say, like, it's something that we, as humans—as we image him, we have a very high capacity to do, like—we can do a lot of work in large quantities before we need a break. If you're even just looking at that ratio.
Anyway, just a tidbit there, and then another thing to note: I always like looking at the life of Jesus and seeing how he worked. He worked as a carpenter, and then he did the work of ministry, he traveled, he healed, he shared the gospel, and ultimately, the work of redemption on our behalf, which we'll get to when we get further down the gospel.
Looking more at creation, what else do we see? We see that God created us to work, and that work is good. He put Adam in the garden to work it and keep it. God said that it wasn't good for Adam to be alone, so he created Eve to be a helper, and he charged them to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. With this—this is the cultural mandate that he's given, both to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it. That means not just procreation, but it also means that you're taking these raw elements that are here in the garden and you are going to create something out of it.
Emily: Right. Cultivate—see that fruitfulness. And then I think we see that carried out through Scripture in the New Testament and see that now we're doing this in the context of the Kingdom of God. We're making disciples, we're doing the work of evangelism, and we are doing all the things that go along with that, but we still have this ordinary, daily work just to make things happen, make the world run.
I know the Proverbs 31 woman is famous in the Bible, but if you look at all the different types of work that she does, it's pretty amazing. It runs the gamut—everything from taking care of her children and her husband and her household to things in the marketplace, and she's opening her home to the poor and she's being hospitable. Again, she's making money, she's selling land, so there, in that, we see all these types of work to do and that is part of our lives as believers.
Laura: It's something that—Emily, you drew out at one point—is just thinking about how there is no work too small or meaningless when it comes to service of God. Emily was pointing out the idea of somebody carrying pegs, with the covenant and the—
Emily: Oh, yes, I love that part.
Laura: The Ark of the Covenant.
Emily: I love this part.
Laura: Yes. Somebody was carrying pegs with the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, and it probably wasn't the coolest job. It was one of those things—
Emily: They're handing out jobs and they're like, "You carry the pegs."
Laura: Sweet. That was important. It was something that was recorded in Scripture. It was something that was delegated. I think it's just remembering, especially in our lives as mothers when we feel like there are a lot of meaningless jobs—you carry the diapers, you carry the wipes, you carry the 55 bowls that your kid just handed you. None of those jobs are too small, too meaningless, too mundane, or too beneath you when they're done in service to the glory of God.
Emily: We know that Jesus did work that was beneath him. He did work that was reserved for servants. The example that people always use is: he was washing feet. We have to remember if our Savior humbles himself to serve in that way, then that is probably what a good bit of our work is going to look like as well as we serve God.
The last note here just in the creation section is God coupled our work with rest. We talked about how God rested on that seventh day. We are not meant to work, work, work forever, which is sort of my mentality. I like work with no rest. But we see that we can actually obey God, image him in the way that we rest and take a break from work. While we can do a ton of work and we're designed to do a lot of work, we're also designed to rest and not do it endlessly without any break.
Emily: Yes. I even like thinking about the way that God designed our bodies to sleep every 24 hours. I heard recently that you will die of sleep deprivation before you die of starvation. That actually like your body just begins to shut down a lot faster. You literally have to rest and sleep, or you will die.
Laura: Oh my goodness. I was just thinking about how horrible it is to feel really tired.
Emily: It is horrible.
Laura: I know. To get to a point where you might die—what does that feel like? Oh my goodness. Okay. Cringing.
Emily: We digress. The point was God created us to rest and this isn't a function of the fall, or this isn't a defect in his plan. This was actually part of it from the beginning.
Laura: Yep. But you mentioned the fall there, Emily, so we'll segue into that because, even though work is a good thing, there is a lot of error, and our work is really riddled with difficulties and hard things. We have the curse, and you have sin. I think it's important somewhat when we talk about work to separate those. I think it's always important to understand the difference, but I think for a long time, perhaps even prior to starting Risen Motherhood, I didn't always know how to separate those very well.
I would often just think: the fall. Everything was sin-filled, but just thinking through— there's sin in our hearts. We might be workaholics. We might be lazy. We might have pride. Most of us have some sort of idolatry around work. But then you also have the curse on the earth to where it's actually very hard to maintain—it's actually impossible to maintain—what is in front of us and the work that we have to do.
We will never be able to say, "Oh, I've gotten all the work accomplished that I wanted to do, or I was able to do that project exactly how I wanted to do that, or I was able to create that exactly how I wanted to create that." Because things are in disorder because of the fall—because of the curse on the earth—things don't go the way we want them to. You have these two coupled together that really make work difficult.
Emily: Sometimes when we're thinking about the things that make work difficult, there's also just circumstances in our lives that are out of our control. Maybe we are a mom who is experiencing chronic illness, or we are on bedrest or dealing with postpartum depression or dealing with a season of deep grief. Things like that absolutely impact our ability to do different kinds of work. It impacts our capacity.
There are distortions that we all probably have from our upbringing about what type of work we should do or not do. There are cultural norms and standards and expectations that impact our ability to have a biblical view of work. I think there's just so many factors. When you bring in the curse and then you bring in sin and then you bring in the different circumstances that God has given us in our lives, there are absolutely barriers to doing all different types of work to the glory of God.
Laura: The question is, when you work—which you will work—how are you going to do it? How are we going to face it? What attitude should we have when we approach it? Just so you guys know, we're going to get into a lot of the nitty-gritty of, hey, how do you decide with income-producing work? How do you juggle the work? We're going to talk about a lot of those things.
Right now, we want to pull a bird's eye view to say, no matter what work that you're engaging in, what are some high-level principles that we can think about as we go throughout our days? Like asking ourselves, "Hey, is this a mentality that I take with myself no matter if I'm in the boardroom, I'm on a Zoom call, or I'm at home and I'm vacuuming the living room floor?" All of these things—there are these biblical principles that do apply with whatever work we're doing.
Emily: If we actually want to fly the theology drone a little higher.
Laura: Oh, yes, please.
Emily: Did you ever think I would say theology drone?
Laura: No, but I like it very much. [Laughter]
Emily: I'm trying to find a funny term that's a reverse of unpacking. Down on the ground, you're unpacking, and we're putting our theology drone into the sky.
Laura: Very 2021 of you or '22 of you. New year. [Laughter]
Emily: If we are going to do whatever work we're doing to the glory of God and some of the principles, we have to first settle that question in our heart of, what makes me good before the Lord? Is it my works? Is it the goodness of what I do? Is it the accomplishments that I get done each day? Is it the health of my body and the amount of energy that I have?
We have to settle that, and I know you guys know this answer, but we really want to say it again because it matters that we remember this: that it is only through Christ that we have righteousness before God. It is through Christ that God sees us as good, that he approves of us, and we don't have to wrestle through that question over and over and over again when we are followers of Christ, and we are redeemed by him.
I think what that means is that we can enter all of our work from a heart that is at rest and not a heart that is striving to prove ourselves and to feel like we're good enough. We don't have to beat ourselves up, but we can have that question of our soul settled, and then we're free to go about whatever work God has given us with an attitude of service.
Laura: I love that, Emily, and I do think that that plays right into this, thinking through, okay, whatever work we're doing as moms, we want to be hard workers. We want to do it to the best of our abilities. We want to do it knowing that we're leaning on God's strength and not our own. Each of us have different capacities, different gifts, different skill sets, different life circumstances—like we talked about earlier—and different sin tendencies, but no matter what those things are, whatever that unique DNA of your life is, you can still be a hard worker in it.
You can still be someone that doesn't fall prey to the idols in your life. You can still think through, "Hey, what does it mean to serve the Lord, to have a servant heart in this instance? How can I be humble? How can I image Christ in this? How can I be somebody who recognizes that my reward isn't necessarily tied to this work?" It might be at some level, but eternally, it's not. In the kingdom economy, all of your works will be seen by the Lord, and he will repay. We can recognize that, whether or not we're paid for our work, whether or not that payment is even in a compliment or it's in dollars, that someday, we are working towards a much greater thing where we will receive an eternal reward for the work that we've done here.
Emily: It's such a great thing to keep in mind. It's a totally different perspective.
Laura: It's a totally different perspective.
Emily: I think it allows us to take the long view. It allows us, like you're saying, to be able to do very quiet, hidden, humble work because we know that the Lord sees. I think the other thing that redemption does, as it changes our hearts, is it allows us to do all of our work with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. Did I get it?
Laura: Yes.
Emily: You're lucky I didn't sing a little kid song for you guys. Anyways, I think that those are things that, no matter what work we're doing, like Laura's saying, whether it's something in the home or it's something outside of the home, we are Christian women who are working, and we're going to be doing that with a different attitude and a different heart and a different posture than the world.
Laura: I often think of us at Risen Motherhood—one of the things that we talk about is everyone's a floor sweeper, and basically, what that means is that no one is above any task at the end of the day; we can all sweep the floor. Just like with motherhood, it doesn't matter if you're the president of a company or you're a stay-at-home mom—you're probably sweeping a floor somewhere.
I think that that's something—that we can see value in that work and say, "I'm going to sweep this floor to the best of my ability because this is the work that's before me right now." We know that leading the boardroom meeting or performing surgery is no more important or valuable in the kingdom economy than sweeping that floor is.
Emily: Oh, it's so true, and I think to spin off that, there's an attitude that we carry that recognizes we're not just trying to do the bare minimum. We're not just, "Ooh, I'm just going to barely eke out whatever I can do to just get by." We are meant to cultivate and create and actually make things more beautiful, more enjoyable, more orderly. The example that I sometimes think of with this is the property that we live on. When we first got it, it was full of trash, and the plants were overgrown. There were a lot of dead trees, things that were no longer useful. The ground was polluted with nasty cans and all this stuff. Over the course of years, this got cleaned off, it all got graded, the plants got—we just tore down all the nasty dead ones and left the healthiest trees.
Laura: Okay. You pruned them, kind of.
Emily: Pruned. Okay, pruned back all the plants and we built our house there, and then even as we've had our house there, it's taken over the course of years to do some landscaping. Then just last summer, we had this corn-crib foundation that was still in our yard, just this big, nasty piece of concrete—it's an eyesore—and we turned it into a garden. I think that's not to say like, "Oh, our house looks so amazing," but just this idea that over the course of time, we're taking this plot of whatever God has given us in life, and we are continually doing things to make it more orderly, more beautiful, and more fruitful to bless the world.
Laura: Yes, that's really good, Emily. It reminds me of what I was trying to hint at the beginning about Adam and Eve and how they were really to cultivate the garden, which means not just leave it as is and maintain it, but to also build society and civilization and the arts and culture and really create a life there. That's what we're doing here on earth still; that charge is the same for us.
Just as we think about the series, you guys, and as we wrap up this show, we want to let you know that our goal on this show isn't to convince you of, "Hey, this is exactly how many hours you should work, or this is what you shouldn't," but to really see that, like—it's to broaden your vision of what work is, to see that we are all working almost all the time—a very significant portion of our lives—and all of that work is incredibly valuable. It's incredibly meaningful and so we want to talk through this series about just what kind of workers we should be, reminding you, too, of who we're ultimately working for.
