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(And let's be honest: for both men and women, our "need" to work—to "use one's gifts," to "follow one's calling"—is sometimes little more than a justification for having been sucked into the capitalist economy's idea of the good life. At least that's often been true of my motives.)

Some mothers really have to work to live; their singleness and poverty require the earning of income, and they live by the sweat of their brow. But even this dehumanizing situation can be redemptive. When accepted in faith, all suffering turns us Christlike. If the cruel and dehumanizing death of the Carpenter-Rabbi is redemptive, so will the mother's cross of forced labor.

On the other end of the spectrum are mothers who balk at the sacrifices motherhood requires and still want all the stuff—including the social prestige—that comes with high paying jobs. Since their husbands already make decent money, it is hard for a person like me to understand why they bend the knee to our society's ideas about prestige and the good life. I'm sure I'll get a few emails explaining why, but to be frank, I've heard the arguments for nearly four decades, and I'm just baffled why any mother would be willing to give up those few precious years for such stuff.

But most working mothers fall in the uncomfortable and ambiguous middle. They are not quite poor—that is, they really could survive on one income. Then again, they live in a society in which children have not unreasonable expectations: To have new clothes now and then; to be able to go to summer church camp; to live where their family is not subject to the whims of a landlord; to go to college; and so on. And it is very difficult to offer such blessings on one income in many areas. They may not want to give their souls to General Motors or Coca Cola while they hand their children over to near strangers, but at this point they can't see how they can care for their children unless they do—and the irony is not lost on them.

Many couples, of course, work out middle solutions. Some manage to arrange schedules so their children spent the vast bulk of their time with one or the other parent, and very little time with relative strangers. Other mothers depend on the family of faith, which is, thankfully, more than a mere metaphor in many places.

And this brings us to the point where the church might have something fresh to add to this sometimes tiresome debate.

The point of God's provision for children is not that children need to spend every waking minute with the nuclear family, but that they are raised and nurtured in a family—with people who love them, who are committed to their welfare, who interact regularly with their parents, who care about them beyond payment for services rendered, and who share their parents' fundamental beliefs and values.

We in the church should certainly offer mothers spiritual discernment as they figure out God's will for their working lives. But we need to do more if we really are the family of God. We too should question our culture's capitalistic and therefore individualistic assumptions: namely, that we are solitary souls who must make our own way in this world. I'm wondering if we can instead act like an extended family, a place where spiritual mothers and fathers regularly take into their homes the children of mothers who really do have to work, so that those children can continue to nurtured by family during those working hours.

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May (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51