#53. Ruined, Recycled, Restored
Motherhood is suffocating, both for us and our children, when it is reduced to a list of chores we do for (or to) children. If the duties of motherhood could be summarised in a job description that paid help could do in our place (supervising, feeding, cleaning, entertaining), then we’ve missed the spark and the air stales quickly. I suspect that one reason women find motherhood difficult—and try to take shortcuts around it, though around is never shorter—is because we don’t know what it means to build a house. We’re big on utility and small on creativity. Absorbed with the present and seen, lacking imagination for the future yet to be seen. House-building is a work of imagination for something that isn’t yet.
The Bible casts the raising of children as one component in the broader work of building a house. The idea (and the actuality) of house-building aerates the work of motherhood. It gives us space and it gives our children space and, when built well, provides sustenance for all members of the household to keep doing whatever they’re meant to be doing—mum included. A house that is being built well (founded on and instructed by wisdom) lubricates what would otherwise excoriate.
“The wisest of women builds her house,
but folly with her own hands tears it down.”
Proverbs 14:1
It’s not surprising that we struggle to build a house. House-building is a product of God-fearing wisdom and we’ve been formed by a culture that isn’t wise. We’ve inherited cultural norms that despise God, his word and his ways, resulting in despised homes. This means we’re good at tearing houses down and not wise to build them. If you read through Proverbs you’ll see the connection between despising God and disordering his good gifts.
The God who made his own home among us, who owns the great household, his church; who is preparing a home for his people, created, redeems, resurrects and conforms us into his house-building likeness. The Bible is the long story of God’s home with his people created, lost and redeemed. Redemption history tells how God is building his House, through and under Jesus (Hebrews 3: 1-6). The God of redeeming, recycling and restoring, the God of House-building, saved us to be part of his house. As we grow in the fear of the Lord, as we grow in wisdom, he trains us to make little houses from ruins. For women, a significant fruit of Christian maturity is growing in house-building.
I will not insult your intelligence by labouring the point that this is something much more grand (and more universally accessible) than building the physical house of your dreams. It will take a new season of writing to explore the breadth of house-building, because it really is broader and deeper and more interesting than a single article can bear. For now, let’s be content to notice that the Bible talks about it and the wisest of women do it. We have permission to take time to figure out what house-building is, but wise women take that time and do it.
Building a house rather than building children
In article #52, I wrote about a couple of kinds of folly that ruin the work of motherhood. How we can make things worse than they otherwise might be, through doing too little or by doing too much. Both the too little and too much are focused on the children themselves, as mechanisms for, or barriers to, realising our own vision of how we want life to be. Our children can’t bear that weight.
Too much and too little are tempered into something more natural when the focus of effort isn’t on doing things to the children, or getting the children out of the way of the things we’d rather do, but on building our “house”. Building something for them which they (among others) benefit from and building something with them. The focus is on building the house rather than building them.
Charlotte Mason wrote (in many places) that education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life. Not a work done to the child, but the fostering of conditions, habits, and relations with the living God and his world. Education happens not when we focus on the children, tricking them into learning, but when we make ample provision for them to eat their fill. The work of raising children to maturity (isn’t that what education is?) is done not on them, but around them, with them. What we provide, if it is living, will be ingested by the child and do a living work from the inside out. Perhaps I need a few thousand words to defend my leap between education and motherhood, and then between motherhood and general womanhood, but Scripture shows significant overlap of these tasks and relationships. Motherhood, the raising (and therefore educating) of children, is done as we build a vitalised and vitalising home.
Building in the ruins
But no one starts with blankness. No one begins with a level site, or an inherited family culture that only ever did us good. No one is free from a fallen nature. No one is beamed into marriage and family untouched, skilled-up and cashed up to buy all new materials and pay all the subcontractors. As we face our own building sites, we all are tinkering away in ruins, with recycled materials, salvaging what we can. We hold an ideal (and so we should!), but we work with much less. We are living with remnants we wouldn’t have chosen. Some of us have exceptional piles of rubble, and we fret, wondering if the ruins prohibit us—exclude us—from building our house. Be sure to note: the ruins we inherit, and build from, are different from the ruins that come from what the foolish woman has destroyed.
Looking at what we haven’t got stops us seeing what can be done with what we have. The absence of what we would prefer distracts us from valuing, and seeing possibility in, what is there.
My family lives in an old farm cottage. Several structures on our property have been deconstructed and the old hardwood has been stacked for when it is needed again. As we need new spaces to accommodate growing children, these old pieces are being reclaimed and built to meet new needs. I was inclined to toss out the old wood, not wanting messy piles of “potential” stacked around the place. But my husband saw something I did not. He knew what time and attention, skilful love, imagination (and some YouTube tutorials) could do. Old, ruined pieces are being sanded and shaped into new use. Dry grey timbers looking fit only for the fire have been restored into shelves, a bed, a threshold. What other dormant ruins might be waiting to be made beautiful and useful again? It’s hopeful work. There is more heart, more poetry, in these restored ruins than something simple and new and without story.
The wise woman builds her house, starting where she is, with what she’s got, for the people she has to care for. With whatever is at hand, she builds. Wisdom moves her to build. Wisdom shows her how to build with whatever materials God, in his Providence, has given her to use. Wisdom means she isn’t quick to scrap and burn.
As our trust in Jesus grows, we experience more freedom to face our scrap heap, because we know that these rough posts don’t carry the weight of our salvation. But their limited value (ie. they are not our salvation) doesn’t remove all value. The recycled pieces are the Lord Jesus’ good provision for us right now, the building materials. God’s work in us teaches us to build. He helps us handle and sort and sand and trim and plan for doing something with the splintered pieces. As he makes us new, our eyes and hands learn to make, like our Maker. His word teaches us wisdom to set the pieces in order, (things on earth as they are in heaven). The redeemed home isn’t just the superlative House prepared for us in the New Creation, the house to come. God makes us alive to build a house in the ruins, from restored pieces, now. Our house-building bears his divine likeness. As we build a house, our mothering finds an airy place and becomes much more interesting.
