A young woman recently commented to a friend, “I feel like once you have kids, your life is just done.” So, despite pressure from her mom, she was in no rush to settle down. “I’ve got too much living to do. I want to wait a while before I’m finished.”
It’s not uncommon to hear people suggest that things like marriage and family and parenting are, at best, distractions from what life is really about (like a career or amusement or travel), or at worst, a sort of death sentence that marks the end of all of our fun. Despite the research showing otherwise, there’s a clear message in sitcoms and romcoms that the quickest way to become miserable and end a good sex life is to get married. Single means free and unencumbered, the story goes, especially for women.
Similarly, in our recent conversation about the Dobbs case currently before the Supreme Court, Dr. Ryan Anderson described how the pro-abortion movement advances the claim that women “need” abortion in order to fully participate in society. As he put it, “If that statement is true, that is a condemnation of our society.” If we’re only fully human when we’re “free” from loving and caring for those closest to us, then we have a puny vision of humanity.
But how much of the American dream centers on pleasures and possessions, career paths and vacations, seeing the dirty work of diapers, tending to a sick spouse, or making a meal for a neighbor as something between a necessary and avoidable evil? Even Christians are tempted to imagine that in “real” Christian life and ministry, a big platform is preferable over caring for actual people. Or that those involved in “full-time Christian ministry,” serving the “people,” are doing the real work of God, while those of us caught up in ordinary life comprise the B-Team?
If anything, this way of seeing things has it all backward. Christians in the “ministry” do play a vital and important role in God’s plan, but that role is to support those faithfully living everyday life in obedience to Christ.
Marriage and family and children, or loving our neighbors and caring for our elders, really is “the end of life,” just not in the sense those two young women thought. Those things are among the ends – the intended purposes – for which God created and called us.
Families and communities are the real work, and through them, God works on us, and in us, and through us. What if the ordinary tasks of life were the front lines of the kingdom of God? What if it’s in the relationships that seem to be mundane that we are most fully serving God? Many in the Church are ready to die for the Faith, but are far less willing to live for it.
It’s important to remember that in Genesis, God didn’t say that it is not good for man to be lonely. Rather, He said it’s not good for man to be alone. Our chief end is to glorify God, but most of our time and effort in glorifying God is spent loving and caring for others, and that’s what he intended, particularly to members of the human race who make up our families and communities. To love, marry, raise children, and live the lives God intended for us; it’s in these endeavors that the true radical lives, and it’s by them that true change will come to the world.
In 1955, C. S. Lewis wrote to a woman struggling to find meaning in her work as “just” a housewife. The great writer challenged her to turn the entire perspective around. Instead of being a nonessential worker in the economy of God’s work on Earth, hers was the center. Here’s how Lewis said it:
“We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist.”
Now, he was talking specifically to what we call “stay-at-home-moms,” but the principle applies across areas of life that the world and the Church are too quick to pass over as being insignificant or getting in the way of our true selves.
Caring for one another, particularly when few see what we are doing, isn’t God’s back-up or second-best plan for human life; it’s what He designed for us to do from the beginning. This is the end of life.
BreakPoint