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Young Married Life

2 Posts tagged with the career tag
Motte_Brown
2

 

There was a time in my young career on Capitol Hill when I began stressing over my "earning potential." It was like I woke up one morning and noticed that everyone around me was either more credentialed or more accomplished, or had plans to become so. (Not so coincidentally, it was right around the time my wife of five months announced she was pregnant.) I thought, I'm going to get left behind if I don't do ... something.

 

So I decided I should either pursue more education or a different job -- surely God had something more substantial for me to do. I suppose if Joel Osteen had been popular then, these desires would have been affirmed because after all, "God wants to give you your own house. God has a big dream for your life." God, however, wanted to give me another message; a quite opposite one in fact.

 

On the evening of July 28th, 1997, after a particularly humbling day on the Hill, I picked up Oswald Chambers' devotion My Utmost for His Highest and read his exposition of Mark 6:45-52, where Jesus walks on water.

 

We are apt to imagine that if Jesus Christ constrains us, and we obey Him, He will lead us to great success. We must never put our dreams of success as God's purpose for us; His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have an idea that God is leading us to a particular end, a desired goal; He is not. The question of getting to a particular end is a mere incident. What we call the process, God calls the end.

 

What is my dream of God's purpose? His purpose is that I depend on Him and on His power now. If I can stay in the middle of the turmoil calm and unperplexed, that is the end of the purpose of God. God is not working towards a particular finish; His end is the process -- that I see Him walking on the waves, no shore in sight, no success, no goal, just the absolute certainty that it is all right because I see Him walking on the sea. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God.

 

Don't get me wrong. Ambition, sacrifice and hard work are good things. And God does bless us with success. But as John Piper writes in Don't Waste Your Life, the "world is not impressed when Christians get rich and say thanks to God. They are impressed when God is so satisfying that we give our riches away for Christ's sake and count it gain."

653 Views 2 Comments Permalink Tags: career, calling, success
Ted_Slater
13

Successful Women

Posted by Ted_Slater Nov 5, 2009

When you hear that term, what comes to mind?

 

A couple of days ago I was flipping through some old copies of my grad school alumni magazine. They featured current and former students who'd done well, who had gone on to write books, make waves in government, take on pastorates, receive teaching awards, produce prize-winning films, head up inner city missions, and so on.

 

And that was just the women.

 

The message is that "successful women," those whom we should honor for their leadership skills, are those who influence people on a large scale. The more people affected by the alumna, the more successful.

 

But what about those women who went on to influence a small group of people, and more deeply? What about those women who, with master's degrees in hand, chose to forgo acclaim and take on the humble responsibility of being mere mothers? Who exchanged the temporal significance of a sterile board room for the eternal significance of the family room?

 

It's enough that my alumni magazine promotes women pastors, a vocation with no biblical precedence. But by remaining silent about the influential role of full-time mother, they imply that such women may not be counted among the "successful."

 

I know it's a cliche, but perhaps it is so because it's so true: In their last moments, women will likely not regret having spent so few hours working for The Man. They'll regret not having spent as much time as they could with the ones they love. In the case of married women, that's likely to include their children.

 

It's fine to recognize the success of women outside the home. Let's also recognize the too-overlooked success of those who, as the saying goes, rock the cradle.

597 Views 13 Comments Permalink Tags: family, mother, children, motherhood, career, roles, work, calling, vocation


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