There’s a question I’ve been asking husbands for a while now: “Do you feel as cofident and competent at home as a husband and father as you do at work, where you know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to get better?”
The answer has been an almost 100% ‘no’ rate. The only yes I got was from a friend who laughingly admitted he didn’t feel confident or competent at home or at work.
It’s like we’ve lost the narrative thread of the home. In prior generations, sure, we had horrible husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. But they weren’t usually oblivious to the ways they were failing. Now, we live in such a world that couples can miss whole swaths of their roles in the home and not even notice that they’re missing.
If we don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing to run a beautiful evangelical home, or why we’re doing it, or how to get better, that’s a recipe for misery both for ourselves and everyone who lives with us.
It’s a recipe for misery unless we think those are all addressable things. And I do think they are all addressable. On a natural level, the home is the school of virtue, the school of politics, economy, and culture. There is a structure to the home that makes it the building block of society, and it’s both learnable and flexible enough to fit the uniqueness of each union of man and woman. Supernaturally, the sacrament of Matrimony is ordered toward the salvation of others. It brings together two baptized Christians in a union that is blessed so that each spouse might be a blessing to the other and together be a blessing to the world. It’s a sacrament with a specific shape and purpose that can be learned and lived out.
The home and our role in it will remain miserable or stressful or avoidable as long as we don’t take steps to learn. But when we do take steps to learn, it becomes a glorious game– we learn the rules, the roles, and the purposes, and let it play out in our lives.