Light Duties

Since we're not disembodied beings, marriage and mothering don't happen in a vacuum. Perhaps the Apostle Paul's outdated instruction to be "busy at home" has more in mind than we suppose?

Good motherhood loves and pursues what God says is good, in the situation a mother and her children are in. It can happen even when situations are not good.

Desperation for happiness is driving most of what we do. And that's exactly as it should be.

When we take Jesus' gospel seriously, we can end up talking as if goodness is a bad thing. This leads to a whole lot of weirdness in our mothering.

Happiness and goodness belong together because they both come from God. Pursuing goodness is a far happier situation than avoiding it. 

Jesus brings us into the very goodness and happiness we don't deserve. This changes how we approach motherhood.

Happiness sneaks up on us while we're getting on with what's good.

Jesus saves us out of parental passivity, into optimistic courage.

Soothing our inadequacies the wrong way robs us of the very comfort we are trying to find. 

Inadequacy comes in a few shapes and we are complex packages of them. Steps to making sense of our limitations.

How duty is actually a way God distributes love to particular people through their particular relationships. The asymmetry of motherhood needs a source outside ourselves.

Doing what is good for our kids is not the same as giving them what they want. 

Like all good things, used the wrong way, duty devours us. In this episode, we're recalibrating our ideas about duty.

Defining our terms for Christian motherhood.

No one else can do our growing for us.

A little of the back story behind the Light Duties project. This is the audio version of an article from the Light Duties site.

Welcome to the Light Duties podcast. This is where the audio version of the articles from the Light Duties website. It's a long thought on Christian motherhood, one article at a time.