Light Duties

My experience as a mum started before it was normal to have a smart device on hand constantly, but I soon had to come to terms with the opportunities and follies of screens. These are some thoughts (complete with the soundtrack of my domestic life) about some principles that have come to shape what happens between kids and screens in our family. Note also  https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/...

Obedience doesn't bring about belonging, the belonging comes first. When we belong, we express our connectedness through obedience.  Obedience isn't about keeping ten thousand rules. In our own obedience as mums, and in helping our children learn to obey, rules cover only a fraction of the surface area. Rules aren't the entirety of obedience, they only define the edges. Rules are fences and gates;...

This is a think-aloud chat especially for my unexpected audience: the women who are still young enough to be dependent on parents; the women who are looking at a future full of unknowns--the not-yet-mums, the younger women who still have many choices waiting to be made. When we find ourselves married and with children, we realise we're riding on the back of choices we made ten, 15 or 20 years earl...

Once we're persuaded that it is good for us to train our children in obedience, a new set of potholes form in the road, some deeper than others. There are many ways we get things wrong. Our sin mangles and makes further obedience more complicated. But the complications don't nullify the command. The exceptions don't change what God has made plain for all of us. The fact that there are potholes don...

Teaching children to obey is a delicate, yet robust work. No relationship other than parent to child is designed to bear the weight of it. The trained childcare worker, the babysitter, the neighbour, the aunt, the uncle, the grandparent, the friends, the Sunday School teacher, the pastor, the school are not authorised by God to discipline and instruct children into mature godliness. Biblically, no...

So, how do we actually teach children to obey? Here's a bullet point list to start with.

This chat is about what has been helpful in different stages of my mothering years, as far as personal Bible reading goes. Resources I mention in the chat can be found on the webpage. https://biblereading.christkirk.com/women/#

Like me, were you ever the person at school who hated every subject you weren't intuitively good at? The need to save face meant avoiding the areas where one's incompetence could be exposed. Which meant it took me decades to realise there is more to enjoying something than being the best at it. It's possible to learn to do new things. There's much pleasure, when we're willing to be seen for the du...

A casual chat about both maternal boredom and bored kids. Is boredom really good for us? I used to think so. It's taken 17 years of being a mum to think otherwise. And, what can we do about it?  https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/whymotherhoodisboring

Bringing about belief in Jesus is God's, hidden, sovereign work. On the other hand, tending to behaviour (which can either help or hinder belief) is definitely on the rather visible parental job description. God starts and finishes the work of saving people, but he uses all manner of means in the middle. Christian parents are not meant to wait on belief before we get busy teaching our children to...

Should we expect children will learn to obey when we know they have a sinful nature? Is it even possible this side of Genesis 3 ? The fallen, sinful nature does not completely erase the divine likeness every human being bears. If our thinking about total depravity has us conclude that no child can ever learn to obey at all, that they are beyond instruction and correction, that their lack of obedie...

When it comes to fulfilling the great commission in our families (to teach our children to obey Jesus), sometimes our Christian conundrums paralyse us: Should we expect children will learn to obey when we know they have a sinful nature? Is it even possible this side of Genesis 3 ? Should we expect obedience (and give consequences for disobedience) when the Bible tells us that "no one is righteous,...

This is another audio-only free think about some aspects of teaching kids obedience, shared casually over my kitchen sink. These think-aloud chats are a bit of a birds-eye view from 17 years of parenting six kids (ie. lots of years not being able to ignore the realities of obedience!).  You can find the long train of thought (mostly in article form, all available in audio) at Light Duties.

This is another audio-only stream of consciousness. Cathy talks through some reflections on the changing relationships she's had with music for kids across her 17 years of mothering. Real-time, real sound (complete with the soothing sounds of dishwater). An exercise in trying to think behind the artifacts of Christian resources.

When I was younger, "obedience" was merely uncool. In the 90's and 00's, we didn't use the word because it was daggy, uptight and prudish. Obedience meant deprivation and legalism, the arbitrary spoiling of fun. Thoroughly unappealing. Now, it is counted among the evils of this world. In this episode, we consider a range of reasons why we don't teach our children to obey Jesus, from fear of stifli...

Jesus tells us to teach obedience to those for whom we have some sort of discipleship responsibility. The most profoundly connected disciples Christian parents have are their own children. We are obliged to teach our kids to obey Jesus. Every moment and task in our children's young lives is given by Jesus to be used for training them into obedience to Him. Whole body, whole heart, whole soul, whol...

This isn't the usual audio version of an article, but a bonus "thinking aloud" session, going back through our family history of reading the Bible together, over the past 17 years. It might illustrate many of the ideas I write about at Light Duties. Mostly, I hope it fortifies you! articles referred to: https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articles/mothers-abiding https://www.motherbiblelife.com/articl...

Here are some problematic assumptions about the Great Commission which end up stifling motherhood (and stifling the mission too): Wrong Idea 1: We're all meant to be constantly expanding our range of relationships to tell the gospel to new people . Wrong Idea 2: Our children don't qualify as people to be discipled. Wrong Idea 3: The Great Commission is  only  about evangelism . Wrong Idea 4: Missi...

Are home duties a rival to the Great Commission? Will building an overflowing home waste resources that could otherwise be spent telling the world about Jesus? This is the question that troubled me most as I fumbled around in the early years of motherhood. The word that evangelical Christians often focus on is "go". It's hard to know what to do with that when so much of raising children is not goi...

The golden law of our time is that whatever a woman is doing, she is Always Only Ever choosing the very best thing. Her holiness is indisputable. Her instincts are infallible. According to a poster on a wall near you, Women are Perfect. The trouble is, when we are struggling to know how to deal with a persistently contrary child, or we don't know how to fill the hours with a toddler, or we are ens...

Home is meant to be the central place from which we worship and train up worshipers. It is naturally the locus of our maternal responsibilities. It won't be the only place where responsibility and influence happens, but it is the basic place. We can't leap over it. This is a bland thought if we've not known what it's like to be in a home full of vitality; if we're still trying to grow out of our b...

It's not unusual to divide life into sacred and secular, bits God cares about and the bits he doesn't. Because gathered worship and the Bible and prayer and evangelism matter enormously, we think that everything else doesn't matter at all. But that is an unbiblical view, and a rather disheartening one. Most of our time as mums is given over to things which we would still do even if we weren't Chri...

We live in a time where home is seen as either a day spa you retreat to, or the site of heavy-duty, mind-numbing labour we're desperate to escape. For the mothers of young children, we long for the former but live with the latter. Both ways of thinking about home are pretty boring and neither help us mature in worship while we raise worshipers. Let's talk about boredom, because it is surprisingly...

What do we do if we're tying to help our children grow into worship, but our church situation isn't ideal? Well, none are ideal. This episode is about what you can do.

Much of the trouble with motherhood comes down to time. Either we don't have enough, we're trying to live three lifetimes at once; or we are adrift… bored…with too many vacant hours. We struggle with proportion and order and finding the right substance to fill the void. Urgency undermines a lot of good. We feel a heavy pressure to solve immediate problems at the expense of slower, apparently postp...