For parents in the trenches now, who grew up in or moved through pietistic Christian circles where the spiritual was pitted against the material, it can be difficult to orient yourself “spiritually” when you are cleaning up puke or peanut butter.
Parenting is so unrelenting, strenuous and messy that you’d think functional Gnosticism would generally be engineered out, but still it pulls at us and turns us against our children. We naturally want to minimise inconvenience and mess and maximise reflection and meditation. We struggle to understand how these things are to cohere, if at all.
Mothers especially can chase a fantasy where the house and children are “done and dusted” so that people can sit quietly in corners journaling in their Bibles for hours, while harp music plays. You know, #goals.
The other ditch is that we can allegorize our material struggles in order to legitimize them: breaking a peanut butter jar on the floor reminds us of the mess of sin blah blah blah… here I don’t mean recognizing real typology that God intends us to be able to decode, but rather trying to find an esoteric meaning in order to be able to tolerate the inconvenience at all.
It seems too obvious to need stating, (but in times like these we need to be obvious) the raising of children is synonymous with human perpetuity. Thus, any blood, sweat or tears generated by this work has to be significant in its own right.
Another way of saying this is that humanity ceases, if three year olds stop spilling milk.
If we are cleaning up a child, or a child's mess, and it is taking time away from what we consider a spiritual endeavor like bible reading or some elite ministry opportunity, we are defining terms like "spiritual" incorrectly.
The mess generating and mess cleaning is dominion-taking, whether it is Play-Doh at 3 years old, Lego at 13, or oil and gas engineering at 25, and we are to teach our children to do it for God's glory, not theirs. Dominion is the exertion of the human will on the created world, to order things according to God's will.
Life with kids should functionally discredit wrong theology about the priorities of everyday life. It certainly cannot be to think esoteric thoughts and wait to be air-lifted to heaven. Nothing will get done, no humans will survive. We'll be over in one generation.
The breathless pace of life with children means you are forced to act quickly without too much time to reflect on any existential motion sickness you may be experiencing, because people need to eat lunch. This is definitely God's grace to us! Perhaps God knows we might draw the wrong conclusions if we were permitted to take a break and journal.
Ideally, you would go into parenting with the right paradigm so that you do draw the right conclusions when you are permitted to stop and think. But for many of us, we're learning on the job as we course correct from antecedent failures and unfaithfulness. So it's vital to get into a church community where people are facing the same direction and there is critical mass, a slip stream, heft. Where the righteous convictions of your brothers and sisters fortify your own work.
Psalm 90: 17
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!