Conflicting voices

I missed last week because I have been struggling between competing views on motherhood. In one camp, the 60s feminists reject the patriarchy of the 50s that told them "Father knows best" and that women were only for the home. Instead women are men; in fact, better versions of men with breasts and wombs. Anything you can do I can do better. Birth control and nannies open up endless possibilities to climb to the top of anything. In the other camp, evangelical women reject the rejection of the 60s feminists and say, "Wait a minute, mothering matters! It matters more than you would know." Just as hired hands don't care for the sheep the way the shepherd does, no one is going to love your kid more than you do, so hop to it. If you love Jesus, you won't work outside the home. At 30, I feel just young enough to have missed all of this. None of these ideologies are mine. I have never lived in a world where women weren't allowed to try for any career they wanted and where women haven't significantly contributed to making the world a better place in public fora.

I'm posting not because I've come to any conclusions about this but I'm trying to nail down why it's been so hard to pull together thoughts. So here are some observations.

1. I think that in addition to a theology of motherhood or family, we need a theology of work particularly skilled work that takes training.
2. We carry a lot of cultural baggage that makes developing any theology difficult or makes developing an honest theology that isn't just us stuffing ourselves into what we want the Bible to say difficult.
   
3. Our cultural baggage includes the false dichotomy of either being a stay at home, home schooling mom OR being a secular, working woman.
4. Our cultural baggage also includes the sense that work endows us with our identity AND is meaningless.
   

Here are some small verses that have given me pause since I last posted:

¹⁰Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. ¹¹ He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots...He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
~I Samuel, chapter 8

¹After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, ²and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; ³Joanna the wife of Cuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
~The Gospel according to Luke, chapter 8

What I see here are women with publicly applied skills many of whom, given the culture they lived in, probably had husbands and children. What does this mean for us today? I don't know, but that's what I see.

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This post is part of an ongoing series I am writing along with the author of On Expecting