Sarah D. Shearer

In December of this year, I will begin a new career. This career will have lifetime benefits, great pay, and long hours. This career will be being a wife. I feel like a lot has changed over the past fifty years. Most of our mothers and most all my friends grew up with moms who were devoted to the home and family. Cookbooks detailed ways you could please your man with a home cooked meal and books talked of keeping a clean and peaceful home. Somewhere along the way, with the sexual revolution, we decided this was not enough.

I have studied extensively the works of Betty Friedan and the movement to convince women there was a great big world outside the confines of the home. Soon, women were abandoning with fervor their responsibilities to their families and homes. Now, it is much more common to work, rather than to stay home and keep home.

I hear many reasons for this, and many of them are valid, but I find it humorous that in an age of female empowerment, we exalt a woman for pursuing a career, but turn our noses at homemakers, assuming they must not have aspirations or else they would flee far from their homes.

I propose that you can live freely as a homemaker while also pursuing your own dreams and passions. As I prepare to move into a home lovingly cared for my fiancé’s grandmother for fifty plus years, I am in awe. She was a homemaker for nearly their entire marriage. She devoted herself to hosting, cooking, cleaning, encouraging, ministering, sewing, gardening, and a host of other details. It seems she was anything but lazy or bored.

Lucas and I have talked extensively, and we are going to make the sacrifices necessary by living more simply, so I will have the distinct honor and high privilege of creating a home for us, managing our schedule, cooking healthy meals, caring for and homeschooling our children, and serving him. He in turn will work hard for us. It’s a partnership.

I will also be focusing on my writing and teaching Spanish and translating, which are my absolute passions.

Something in me is stirring though. I feel a strong calling to live counter culturally, to prioritize differently, and to invest my greatest energies in something eternal. I’m an incredibly active person and I’m looking forward to having time to minister to younger women and host people in our home and prepare really good food. 🙂

If you are young and looking to be married, I encourage you not to feel sheepish if “all you want to be is a wife and mom.” As you seek the Lord, you will find that you can pursue your dreams and have the bandwidth to love your people. I feel it is very important to remember that before we are anything, we are daughters of God, and no identity we adopt will fulfill us like that role.

So this is where I am and where we are headed. I’ll keep you posted. Seek the Lord about what he wants for your family, rather than assuming. He may have a different plan.

My disclaimer is to say I love, honor and respect women who do all sorts things, working in a variety of positions. We are all called to different paths, and this is the path I feel I am called to. As a side note, I believe as followers of Jesus, we are all called to live counter culturally, in ways that may not necessarily be comfortable. I recognize single moms, moms who have bread winning careers, families who need extra income, etc.

If you feel condemned reading this, that didn’t come from me. Let’s celebrate where God has placed each one of us in his perfect timing.