Helping them: Mothers
What should be the role of mothers in getting their children married? Indeed what has been the role of mothers in keeping their children from getting married?
Introduction
This post is the fifth post in my ‘Helping Them’ series: a series of posts where I examine the problem that we are having with getting our unmarried people married, and propose the radical solution that we need to help them.
Helping Them: Them
In my first post I pointed out that in order for us to help them, they need to be willing to be helped. Indeed more than willing, they need to actively seek out help. To publicly admit that they want to be married, and are willing to have help getting there.
Helping Them: Fathers
The principal responsibility for helping our unmarried people get married lies in our fathers. The unmarried people’s fathers in specific, and also father’s in general.
Helping Them: Pastors
Upstream of fathers are pastors. Pastors, elders, theologians, authors, teachers… those who are not only responsible for teaching doctrine, but who also are part of a network of similar people, and thus can help with the matchmaking process.
Helping Them: The Plan
Taking a pause from blaming various people, I look at some aspects of the marriage process as it looks like from the perspective of ‘helping’.
Priorities
One incredibly important aspect in the relationship between mothers and marriage might be summed up with the word priorities. Both in her own life, and in her teaching, what have the mothers of today been saying about the importance of marriage? Of husbands, children, sex, and their house? Versus their friends, their parties, and their careers?
When a child sees their mother make her relationship with their father a priority that is a child that is being prepared for marriage. When a child sees their mother denigrate their father, ignore their father, deprioritise their father, that is a child that is being kept away from marriage. Being warned away from marriage.
If everybody knows that mommy makes time for daddy all the little boys look forward to having someone in their life who will make time for them. And all the little girls get ready to make time for some boy.
Training in Obedience
In any well run household the foundations for child training is laid by the mother. The most basic of the principles learned is obedience. And obedience will be a foundation stone for the child moving into the marriage process.
It already is, in that parents teach, mothers teach, in millions of ways, children how to behave. All of which have their outworking even with our current systems of ‘dating’ and ‘courtship’, where the young people are supposed to be doing it ‘on their own’.
But obedience is even more important when you have a system in place of ‘helping’. Because, for the most part, the helpers know more about what they are doing than the person being helped. It will be necessary for the unmarried person not just to listen to them but, occasionally, even to… obey them.
And children who have been well trained in obedience will find this easy. And vice versa.
Networking
Mothers, like pastors, have a network. But it is a whole different network. And that network, too, can and should play a role in getting our unmarried people married. I am not a woman, and not a mother, so I can say very little about that network, but it exists. And mothers need to use it.
Nagging
Nagging gets a bad rap. I mean, who likes to be nagged? And, perhaps, there are other words that we can use to represent how the best mothers nag… I mean, ummm… continually encourage their children toward proper behaviour.
Look, it takes nagging.
Conclusion
And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them.
Genesis 24:60
When the family blessed Rebekah, calling on her to be the mother of ‘thousands of millions’… what did they mean? Surely they didn’t think that she would give birth thousands of times, let alone thousands of millions. No, they understood that the role of mother is generational. She has children… who have children… who have children.
Mothers are different than fathers. And pastors. Indeed, than anyone else in a child’s life. Even once that child is big enough to get married. To get married, leave the house, and become a mother (or father) themselves… their mother still has a relationship, and a different one than the father.
Historically mothers played a dramatic role in getting their children married. It was at the front of their mind from the time the kid was two, and part and parcel of what everyone considered their prime responsibilities. Today that role has been denigrated, denied, and even mocked… and we see the results.
God designed mothers to be part of the ‘get them married’ system. We reject that at our peril. We need to return to that system, we need to elevate mothers and their role in getting their children married.
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Von
