Repost for Walk With Him Wednesdays: A Lesson in Priorities

This post was originally published in November 2009.

My generation of women is experiencing unprecedented freedom for our gender. But, as Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker of Spiderman fame, "With great power comes great responsibility." One of the tremendous responsibilities laying on the shoulders of women today is the responsibility to prioritize. At the banquet table of seemingly endless possibilities, how do we keep from overindulging? How do we ensure that we do not leave the table hungry or in some other way unsatisfied? How do we know what to choose?

In Matthew 11:29-30, Jesus tells us, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." This is how I have come to undertake my responsibility to pick and choose what the world has to offer me. The more I read the Bible, the more I learn of Jesus, and the more I come to submit to God's Will with a "gentle and humble heart," the easier I find it to prioritize, and the more at peace I am with the decisions that I make.

The first part of Jesus' yoke that I had to take on was the knowledge that "'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is beneficial. 'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others" (1 Corinthians 10:23-24). For today's modern woman, everything is permissable. We may strut about in the frilliest dresses or the most masculine pantsuits...or almost nothing at all. We can choose a life of virginity dedicated to the Lord or we may marry--perhaps more than once--or we may opt for "free love" or an "alternative relationship." We can be single working mothers, married working mothers, homemakers, work-from-home-moms, soccer moms, childless-by-choice, anything we choose. That is what the world tells us: we can have everything or nothing. We can have whatever we choose. Choice is the religion of the day, and we are worshippers at its altar.

However, there is one caveat that the world has conveniently forgotten to tell us young, ambitious, starry-eyed women: All this choice comes at a price. In her wonderful book, which I have quoted from before, Lilian Calles Barger poignantly observes, "Today, with much more freedom to choose our own way in the world, we are more likely to lose ourselves in the process. Industrialization and radical individualism have aided in this uprooting" (emphasis my own). Expounding on what she refers to as the "cult of individualism" predominant in our modern culture, Barger continues, "Instead of kinship and place, our identity is based on ‘lifestyle’ choices, from soccer moms to childfree. The move toward identities of choice, instead of those based on relationship and place, is threatening to turn even previously unthinkable practices into a lifestyle."

As a woman navigating a world structure largely designed by and for men, I am discovering that the key to survival is compromise. Not only is compromise key, it is unavoidable. The shoe will drop somewhere; our only real choice is to pick the spot where it falls.

Contrary to the feminist feel-good messages that abound in the media, we have not traded the "prison" of domesticity for freedom and a truer identity. We have simply traded one kind of cookie-cutter image for another. Where once women had to deny that they found any pleasure in activities outside the home lest they be thought "abnormal," modern women are pressured to deny that they find any pleasure in the home, for the same reason.

We may have cut the apron strings and donned a power suit, but was it worth it to cut the ties to our young children for a window office and a title, or more realistically, a meager paycheck that barely covers childcare expenses? More and more women are finding that corporate America is not conducive to being the "fuller" selves that they were seeking by entering the public sphere. The glass ceiling may have some serious cracks, but those left with the splinters are discovering that the typical work-a-day world is not the panacea they once imagined it to be. Meanwhile, those women who choose to opt out of pursuing paid employment continue to be viewed by many as second-class citizens, victims of male domination, or simply unitelligent women who don't know any better. All of this, whether the workforce hostile to women's needs or the destructive negativity aimed at stay-at-home wives and mothers, furthers the age-old attitude that "women's work" is inferior to "men's." To quote Barger again, more at length this time:

"Second-wave feminism encouraged women to leave the private sphere and enter the more significant and productive public sphere…But this reinforced the belief that the work occurring in the public sphere and associated with men was ultimately more important and took priority. By entering the public sphere at the expense of the private, woman legitimated the male world and rejected her own. The ‘elite’ women soon found out that the public world of work, as currently arranged, marginalizes human emotion and vulnerability, especially female reproductive life."

So, everything is permissable. In particular, virtually the entire public sector is open to me as a college-educated woman in the twenty-first century. The world is my oyster. But not everything is beneficial. Yes, I can have a job. Yes, I can even have a job and a family, but at what cost? There are only so many hours in a day, and I am only capable of so much in each twenty-four hour period. Where will the shoe drop? What will my prioritizing reveal about what I value? Fifty years from now, will the way that I prioritized have helped me or hindered me in achieving the life that I desire--the life that God has called me to live?

This is where 1 Corinthians 10:24 comes in: "Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others." This is not something we want to hear in our modern me-centric, hyper-individualistic culture. We'd rather hear "Be all that you can be" and "You've got to take control of your own destiny." This self-empowerment sort of thinking may be the Band-aid many of us would like to slap on the cultural wounds of low self-esteem and isolation from true community, but it's not going to solve what really ails us. The true healing we need can only come from the redemptive power and love of Jesus Christ (Matthew 13:15). Jesus never advised anyone to "live it up" or to live in pursuit of their every desire. No, quite the opposite. He said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?" (Luke 9:23-25). As a daughter of God, I am not called to pursue my own "destiny," my every desire, but rather to lay down my life in pursuit of Him who died for me and to seek "the good of others."

Not long ago, I felt I was being crushed by the burden of choice. Should I go to graduate school to teach? Should I demand that my husband uproot our family and leave his stable and much beloved job so that I could have a chance at success as an actress, the dream I had worked toward since childhood? Where would my children end in the fall-out of my pursuit of my own desires? What would the reprecussions to my marriage in a busy two-career household be? Would I lose myself remaining at home, wasting my life as the contemporary culture so graciously insinuated on a regular basis? Or, would I lose myself by abandoning my joyful domesticity, relinquishing my precious children to the daycare system, and sacrificing the complementary union of marital life I currently shared with my husband for a life lived in parallel, each of us pursuing our own separate paths?

After wrestling with these questions on my own for several weeks, I humbled myself and decided to ask my husband for advice. Flummoxed (his own words) as to how to advise me, he instead suggested that I look back in my diaries to see if I could discover what my frame of mind was when I decided I wanted to leave the domestic sphere and what might have caused me to question that decision. Thank goodness I keep very thorough journals. I highly recommend the practice to anyone, but particularly to those who, like me, are often driven by emotion and are prone to change.

I am going to make a very personal and humble confession to you all: What I found in the pages of my diary was not pretty. It all began last April with some rather vehement comments I received on this very blog about an article I had written on marriage. The biting remarks and patronizing insinuations should have rolled off my back, but they didn't. In fact, I shut the blog down and ran as fast and as far as I could from all the principles and convictions that had led me to start it in the first place. Satan knew how vulnerable I was to criticism such as I had received. He saw his chance, and he latched on quickly and cleverly. Within days of receiving those comments, my journal showed that I was suddenly dissatisfied with the life I had chosen.

I am not proud of what followed, but I'm going to share it because I doubt that I am the only woman who has gone through this journey, and I want to say to those of you out there who can relate: you are not alone!

I became jealous of my husband and resented him his career, even while I benefitted from it. I grew to nearly hate the place that I live, becoming disatisified with everything from my church community to my home to the state of Washington! I became frantic--yes, frantic--to move someplace else. I was desperate to start acting again. I started going for auditions that I knew I wouldn't be able to take due to the distance from my home and the insufficient salary which would not provide enough for decent childcare.

Before long I realized that being a self-sustaining full-time actress in the Seattle area was next to impossible (I checked with many local artists to discover that this was so), and none of my schemes to move to another more "actor-friendly" city panned out. Almost overnight, I turned to the idea of teaching. It was something else I had always considered. After all, only a few short months before, I was eager to homeschool my own children. I knew plenty of teachers who were also wives and mothers--my own mother among them. But, what I refused to see is that the time and energy it would take to obtain a Masters degree and then to spend many hours every day in a classroom and grading papers were in direct contrast with my vision of home and family. Another way to put it is that what I was pursuing was in conflict with the vision God had given me for my life.

Sadly, shamefully, I foolishly abandoned all the ideals I once held for being a sacrificially loving wife and mother. I still loved my daughter, but I decided that I didn't want any more children: they would hold me back and ruin my life. I grew terrified that I might become pregnant. I still loved my husband, but I was willing to stop investing so much in our relationship. After all, I told myself, what if something were to happen years from now? I don't want to be left without some resources of my own. I let my vanity get out of control and became obsessed with my body image, though I was perfectly healthy. I became lax in my pursuit of modesty. I spent money foolishly on new clothes and make-up, at times purposely trying to hide such transactions from my husband, something I had never done in our years of marriage. This period of months when I was single-mindedly pursuing my own "destiny" can be characterized by a lot of rather unpleasant terms: selfishness, desperation, anxiety, hard-heartedness, jealousy, discontent, ingratitude... It should have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't.

Worst of all, I had ceased actively pursuing God with my whole heart (Jeremiah 29:13). In the spirit of full disclosure, I am bound to admit that I stopped reading my Bible almost completely. Instead, I turned to theological literature that I chose on purpose (though not consciously) because it was targetted toward validating the rebellion I found myself in. I wallowed in this literary self-help mire, abandoning the life-giving words of Scripture for shadows and lies. I found four-letter words that I had not uttered in years popping up on my uncontrolled tongue. My infamous short temper, kept in check for many years by the power of the Spirit working in me, began to flare up more frequently as I grew lax in self-discipline and rejected accountability. I gossipped unrepentantly. My prayer life became cursory and shallow because I didn't really want to hear what God had to say. I was like a horse with blinders on: it was my way or the highway. The trouble was, I had already turned the wheel of my ship over to Jesus six years ago. Now I was grappling to get it back. But, the waters I was leading myself into were not life-sustaining (Jeremiah 17:8; John 4:14); they were poisonous (Jeremiah 23:15). Myopic in my pursuit of self, I couldn't even see what was right before my eyes.

Thank God that He did not let me wander too long in my own folly, but returned me to the paths He laid just for me, with His Word to guide me along the way. I am convinced now, more than ever, "that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39). I may have gone astray for a time, but He is my shepherd, and when He called--praise God!--I knew His voice, and I followed (John 10:27).

Long story short, it is with great joy and peace of mind and heart and soul that I can announce I will be forgoing the rigors of graduate school and a career in teaching for the present time. Instead, I will continue to remain at home, pursuing my Savior in the "realm of the mundane" as Simone de Beauvoir once sneeringly referred to domestic and family life. Thankfully, others have seen things somewhat differently throughout the ages:

"What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and the work flow." —Martin Luther

“The ordinary has been blessed. It is good. Faithfulness ‘in my small corner’ helps to redeem life. Thus we find ‘the glory of the usual.’ Here is true greatness.” ~Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, For the Family’s Sake

I do not wish to be a product of my times but the work of my Lord. I do not wish to seek self-fulfillment but rather to die to self that I might live more fully in Him. I do not seek this in pursuit of asceticism (self denial for its own sake), rather I do so because I believe I am relinquishing a yoke of my own fashioning, which is burdensome, in order to put on the yoke of Christ, which is light and which brings peace.


I do not wish to condemn anyone else's life decisions. We must all act as we feel called by God. As Thomas Aquinas once said, "Every judgment of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins." Each person must determine between herself and God what path to take. I feel blessed that I can say my Savior has set me on a path that led me home again.