Category: Ministry

This is part 3 of Lies Women Believe.

In part three of the discussion on lies we women have bought into, Marina, a young mom brings up some interesting points that I thought were provoking enough to discuss.

Marina:Many have abortions because the timing is not right, they can’t afford a baby. This has become not just a mindest, but a cultural mindset affecting an entire nation. The laws in place are not a cure for this mentality, it just masks the symptoms. The real problem has come from a cultural shift on our priorities and what we regard as first importance.

Pastor Susan: What happened was that the moms of the 60’s raised daughters who believed that men were trying to keep us from our goals. We also had very guilty feeling moms who knew the heart-wrenching decisions of picking work over their children. Yet, they were stuck. Women were telling other women that they were somehow less than for feeling guilty or for wanting to stay home. They were asking the women why their husbands weren’t carrying 50% of the workload at home. So women sucked it up and did what they had to do. This created moms who were out of sorts, feeling guilty, tired and resentful of the whole mess. Women began to believe they had options. That their needs were more important than an inconvenient pregnancy. Only statistically we see many more women who live in bondage over the decision of abortion than women who live free. They end having deep regret, they think about it each year saying things like, “My baby would have been 14 had I kept it.” If this was such a flippant decision then the residue of that action would not permeate our thoughts in the now. It’s not as easy as women told us it would be.

Marina: I have been struggling with this issue even before I attended this conference because for the last few weeks, every time I drop my child off at the sitter’s I think to myself “I should be the one that spends time with my child during the day, loving him, playing with him and teaching him.”

Pastor Susan: Now there is this shift happening not just in Marina but in her generation who is waking up to the knowledge that women were sold a bill of goods. The adults who were raised as latchkey kids realize they missed out on something. The women of this generation are realizing that we weren’t given more freedom, we were given more burden. Now we are expected to work, raise children and statistically we are doing a majority of the household chores and running of the kids from event to event. We are tired! Women realized that they spent their childhood raising themselves, divorce rates increased in this society and we were not better for it.

The problem lies in that our society has changed. Men, for the most part, and I am generalizing here, don’t want to marry women who want to stay home and raise children. If truth be told, 40% of white, over 50% of Hispanic and over 70% of African American babies are born out-of-wedlock. 65% of kids in prison don’t know their fathers and if they do, they weren’t raised with them. Men also are in an period of finding themselves so they also think they are entitled to stay home. It’s a mess to say the least.

Tomorrow let’s talk about what this all means and what we have to do to make it work for everyone.

Yesterday I repeated a blog on Lies Women Believe. Marina commented on this from her perspective as a young mother. I didn’t want her comments to get lost and I want to discuss it further.

Marina:Wow….this article was sent to me by my mother…it is soo true. I myself have been evaluating this issue for the last four days, and here’s why. I was at a conference this last weekend and one of the speakers was Kris Vallaton of Bethel Church in Redding, CA. He gave us a little spill that has had me thinking. He brought up the issue of abortion and how this issue has arised in our culture and how our society’s value of children has been demeaned. America went through the agricultural age with a high value for children. The children helped with the farm and helped to bring income in their family. They were important to the family. They could do more. Somewhere along the line (after the war sometime) the feminist era creeped in and women had an itch to be comparable, to be valued as much as men.

Pastor Susan: During WWII women went to work, while the men went to war. It’s what was needed to keep our country going but what happened is, we really liked working. We liked the independence and we were appreciated in a new sense. This group of women, raised women of my mother’s era. My mother graduated high school in 1959 and for the first time, women of her generation were given options. No longer did they HAVE to get married and have children to be considered decent women. Suddenly they were going to college to get a masters and not a Mrs.

Marina:In the industrial age many women entered the workplace and suddenly the children became a burden for the family. Now we need somebody else to watch our children because he have the responsibility to provide just as the man because now we’re equal! Our mindests become as such: The more children we have the more expenses we have and the children are no longer valuable for helping us, but burdensome for taking from us.

Pastor Susan: This were the dilemma came in. As women, we were supposed to work and bring home the money but society still expected every woman to have a child. If you were a woman who didn’t want a child you were considered selfish or something was wrong with you. We still carry that stigma. If you wanted to stay home and raise your child, you were a stone-aged babe who needed to get with it. The pressure was coming from all angles and we, as women, were just as caught up in the pressure of this new generation as the men were.

Men became accessories in this era. Women determined that men weren’t necessary. We needed their sperm but not their input. We began to teach our sons that they needed to find a woman who would work and help him financially keep the family together. It was a pretty sad state of affairs but you would have never convinced us of this at this time. This is, coincidentally or not, if you see the writing (spirituality) on the wall, where the shift in families attending church services began to decline. I mean, think about it, with all we had going on at the time, we couldn’t fit another thing in. We were tired women and something had to give!

Good points. We’ll continue this tomorrow!