A Very Good Place to Start

I am passionate about being a housewife. Yes, I have a college degree, have worn suits, and carried business cards, yet my personal experiences of being a stay-at-home-mom and growing up with one combined with my understanding of God's big picture for men and women have convinced me that there is no better place on earth to be than home.

I finished reading Passionate Housewives Desperate for God this weekend and was further challenged in my pursuit of success in this dream job of mine. The book is not a how-to manual but an encouraging look at the value God places on women at home. Jennie Chancey and Stacey McDonald do not come across as expert superwives but humble, intelligent, growing servants of Christ who have taken on the task of stripping away another layer of the "it's all about me" fallacy that has entrapped God's people since Eve contemplated the forbidden fruit. And if I'm truly going to examine the biblical evidence for the claims made in their book, with Eve is where I need to start. I need to know where I've come from and what my Creator's "big picture" purpose is for leaving me here in the first place.

Our church has been talking a lot about mission and purpose recently and our pastor introduced us to Two Ways to Live. It's a wonderful presentation of the gospel that takes its audience back to the beginning--which, as we know, is a very good place to start. The fact that God made us and has authority over us is crucial not only in our understanding of our need for salvation but in the way we choose to live our lives from day to day. In the very first chapter of Genesis God gives the man and the woman what is known as the dominion mandate:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and 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.” Genesis 1:28

We are God's image bearers in the world as we take it over, both by filling it and cultivating it, and as I see it, God fairly divided the labor and the laborers for the task. Together my husband and I have reproduced three little people--we are filling the earth. Now as my husband goes out into the world to develop it and bear God's image in it, I have the honorable task of training up the next generation of dominion takers and image bearers.

Well, I've gone on long enough. If what I've described intrigues you, enrages you, or encourages you, you might want to pick up Passionate Housewives and examine it for yourself. As for me, I found it a wonderful reminder of the great task God's set before me and the even greater grace He gives to accomplish it.