Target’s home decor aisles are littered with lettered phrases meant to inspire: “Keep Smiling”; “Boss Mom”; “She Believed She Could So She Did.” Imperatives beckon from the best seller rack: Spark Joy, Read This for Inspiration, Create Your Own Calm. Notepads and planners sprout helpfully on endcaps. Easy, fillable shopping lists pop up by the groceries. All coo out to the cart-pushers: oh you frantic, floral-loving mom, you, even you, can Get Things Done.

For us believers, both moms and those who care for them, such messaging should be a big deal.

The fervor nowadays to get things done is religious, claimed writer Derek Thompson in a much-quoted article from the Atlantic three years ago. Work has become, he said, not so much an ethic as a religion—the “centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose” (“Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” February 2019). If someone says they are pursuing their passion, it’s probably shorthand for justifying their existence through work. Thompson aptly concludes, “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight.”

But his solution is thin: spend more time at home with your family.

Time at home? Target knows otherwise. The language and patterns of workplace hustle, which often idolize busyness and find a sense of meaning in task accomplishment, are thriving within the four walls of our houses. Getting things done is as much a false religion in my kitchen as it is in any corporate office. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Recipe for Discouragement

“I am only in the first beginnings of shedding off a slavishness to productivity,” reflected Elizabeth Downs. Mother of two and member of Redemption OPC in Gainesville, Florida, where her husband serves as an elder, Elizabeth was converted in college. “Like many millennials, I was trained to be a productive student, to be a productive citizen,” she explained. Such an upbringing tunes us to measure ourselves by that productivity, she thinks. Thus, as household managers—I mean, as moms—we pull out our calendars with a sort of moral urgency. “The way we have gone about adulting has been planners and productivity reports, project timelines, GANTT charts; we’ve allowed these paradigms to soak into child-rearing,” Elizabeth said, laughing. “Where is the GANTT chart for my kids!?”

Then she said quietly: “These paradigms haven’t served me well.”

They don’t serve us well because they measure the achievable, and being a mom involves much that feels like it is “destined to perish,” Maggie Harr quipped. Mother of four, member of Immanuel OPC in Medford, New Jersey, and pastor’s wife to boot, Maggie described the early parenting season as a recipe for discouragement: “You’re making a bed that won’t stay made; you’re doing laundry that won’t stay clean; everything you do is destroyed before your eyes; but you spend so much time doing it,” she said.

That discouragement is, in many ways, probably no different from that of any generation laboring in a fallen world. But two things might be making it particularly acute and widespread for women of around my age. One is the assumption that our relative awesomeness at getting things done is a measure of our worth. The second, of course, is the omnipresent book of the law of What Things Ought To Get Done and How—in other words, the internet.

Raising Expectations

Maggie is fifty-five. She was on Facebook when she had young kids, and the community felt nourishing. Now a counselor, she advises clients to be “sober-minded” about their relationship with social media. Absent of the internet, she thinks, we may well feel discontent about what we accomplish in a given day. But after absorbing the lives and photos and vids and feeds of more neighbors than we can attempt to number, the feeling is intensified. “Now it’s like, I woke up a failure and I’m going to bed a failure,” she explained.

Some of that social media content is from moms who are also professional product-placers. They make a living from providing information on what products or experiences you might be missing out on. Interestingly, many of the most-followed “momfluencers,” as they’re called, are Mormon. Displaying their beautiful, color-coordinated passel of kids—and believe me, these kids are so sweet—is both lucrative and evangelistic. Their lovely accounts are meant to make one feel a lack, even an explicitly spiritual lack.

But even nonprofessional accounts do a great job of showing us how much we fall short. Some Insta standards are stereotypical: fitness, food, apparel, beauty, home design, travel, safety, diligent spouses, children mid-giggle. Keep working, and you too can achieve this, the captions often imply. Other standards hit closer to home: Bible memorization, Bible study, Christian books, Christian podcasts, hospitality, raising kids, outreach and evangelism. Keep working, and you too can be more holy, the well-meaning captions from parachurch organizations and friends seem to echo.

Our minds have been hijacked by these disembodied ideals, Maggie argues. Even while outwardly engaged in the mundane of mothering, inwardly we may be obeying impulses we don’t examine or understand in an attempt to live up to these ideals.

“I’m standing doing dishes, and my mind is on so-and-so’s gofundme, and how someone else manages to make their home lovely and beautiful and orderly. [I’m thinking] How are her kids so well-dressed all the time? And how is she producing meals like that? How does she manage self-care—my goodness, she runs six miles four times a week! Oh, and she also listens to all these enriching podcasts . . .

Ironically, the more we scroll, the more we’re “increasing the strength of that sense of ideals, but decreasing the amount of time to really do the stuff,” Maggie said.

Transcendence Through Work?

The impulses that control us could be articulated as a sort of guilt—a relentless, internalized voice, which loves the phrase, “I just need to . . .” I just need to donate to that gofundme. I just need to wash my vegetables and fruits the same day I shop. I just need to listen to sermons while I make supper. I just need to organize more crafts to keep my kids busy.

My conversation with Maggie Harr was in early spring. I asked her about a particular impulse of mine: I feel bad about this one flower bed. It’s weedy, bedraggled, and contains toy cars crusted in dirt. The only sin on my radar is laziness: I just need to Proverbs up and pull those weeds, I think. I put it on a to-do list. And the next day, another one. But somehow there is never enough time. The pressure builds. Other people’s flowerbeds look like Eden. I avoid eye contact with the dandelions. I am obeying an impulse I haven’t examined.

Exactly, Maggie replied: “What does it mean to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness? Does it look like having a nicely made flower bed? Or does it look like a surrendered flower bed?”

The internet-enhanced ideals for flower beds and everything else seem morally good: the guilt from falling short is so real. Our age heaps it on mothers left and right— “She Believed She Could So She Did,” and if you don’t, you’ve failed. Thanks to our phones, these laws are written on our eyeballs. So we obey the impulses. We keep trying.

This, Maggie believes, can be “thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought” (Rom. 12:3). She explained, “We think [that verse] means, don’t be grandiose, don’t be conceited. [But] the way I apply that now is, don’t spend your time in some idealized . . . reality, because it’s not in fact who you are. You are an embodied human with limited resources. And that’s OK.”

Our limitations aren’t necessarily the problem. Our desire to exceed them, can be.

Our Rest, Our Refuge, Our Fortress

Annie Nelson agrees. “Every day, you wake up, and you want to put on works righteousness,” she reflected. “So you say, no. No. Today, I am going to walk in the gospel.”

Mother of ten and grandmother of nine, Annie is a member of Bethel Presbyterian in Broomfield, Colorado, where her husband serves as an elder. When she was pregnant with her first, her sister gave her some advice. “She told me that being a mom is the most guilt-inducing profession you will ever know,” Annie remembered. “After I had a few of my own, I thought, oh, I get it.”

In a difficult season of her own parenting, Annie almost wore out the fabric on her favorite grey chair, so many times a day did she bury her head into it to pray for help. She had recently lost an infant to SIDS, she was a stay-at-home mom, and she was beginning to homeschool her oldest, an opinionated four-year-old.

“My own sin was always the hardest part of mothering . . . I would cry out to the Lord, ‘Here I am again! Teach me how to learn the fruit of the Spirit. Teach me how! I don’t know how to do this, and all I’m doing is failing,’” she told me. “I was pushed to come to learn to depend on the Lord, to make him my rest, my refuge, my fortress.”

Now, Annie is not in the business of measuring up. I first met her at a presbytery meeting in North Dakota. She warmly held my four-month-old with capable hands so that I could eat lunch, but she never once congratulated me on his cuteness. She didn’t tell me about any products to make my life with him easier; she didn’t reassure me that, although I wasn’t doing xyz, I was still a good mom. She didn’t signal whether I, or my baby, was up to snuff. Instead, she was joyful and at rest.

“Where Are My Pumpkins?”

Many of us may want to hurry up and find such rest. But being pushed to depend on the Lord, as Annie experienced, often means submitting to an unhurried rhythm of growth.

A few years ago, Elizabeth Downs was at a retreat listening to OP missionary Heather Hopp “just bubbling” because she was about to be reunited in the United States with two of her older children. Elizabeth listened, happy for Heather, but also not. She felt like she spent her whole day just taking care of basic bodily needs for her baby and three-year-old. “I wanted to be a mother like Heather, and just like, make popcorn and do play dough and pour blessing on my children in that lavish way,” Elizabeth remembered.

So she said as much to Heather. In response, Heather chuckled and replied gently.

“She said, ‘I feel like you are a farmer, who has just sowed a field, and you are standing at the edge of the field crying, Where are my pumpkins!?’”

“You’ll have years of picking up rocks and pulling weeds and watering and pouring the Word, and then picking out more rocks and more weeds,” Heather continued. “You pray that the Lord would bless your work.” Then Heather looked at Elizabeth and finished: “But it’s not your season, sister.”

“That was one of the most important conversations that I’ve ever had around parenting,” Elizabeth said. “It has lightened my burden repeatedly.”

As nurturers of small life, who do we hurt with our hurrying? Are we going to hold our children to same kind of idealized standards that have so wrecked our own peace of mind? Of course there’s another meltdown. Of course there’s another sibling dispute. That’s just our season.

Working and Resting with Joy

“God doesn’t do quick fixes. That’s not his style. Us wanting them, us selling our soul to them, that needs to be addressed,” Annie reflected. Mothering is not about the hack, the to-do, the schedule, the exciting new product. It’s also not about “giving yourself grace” and letting the house run wild, Elizabeth pointed out. We tend to “zigzag between [the two]”—but if we feel such a need to give ourselves grace and top off, as it were, the Lord’s grace, could it be because we are trying to keep a law that is extraneous to the Lord’s?

As Elizabeth gardens in her front yard—literally, not metaphorically—the rhythm of preparing the ground, pulling weeds, and watering faithfully has rewritten her framework for productivity. These days, she puts her to-do list on sticky notes in her planner, “to remind myself that everything is moveable,” she said. “It’s true, less is getting done. But also more. More washing with the Word, more discipleship, more heart talks.” All of it, she said, is part of the Lord’s ordinary means of building his church through families.

“Motherhood is so much work, but if we could just work on the right footing,” Annie said. It is all for the Lord; in his provision we rest—and resting, for Annie, is inseparable from joy. “There isn’t really heart rest if you can’t bubble over inside with the joy of the Lord,” she insisted.

Christ lived for us the perfect life, Maggie Harr explained. Maggie doesn’t write lengthy to-do lists anymore, “and it’s not because I got great at all the things.” What has changed is a more self-examined, lived-out recognition of what it means to be in Christ: “Your hope and safety are not found in your own perfection but in the perfection of Christ. Ultimately, that end-of-day checklist of accomplishments can only be burned away in the light of his glorious grace.”

When Christ was on the cross, he cried out that it was finished; the real work is done. “We live out of that,” Elizabeth concluded.

The author is managing editor of New Horizons. New Horizons, July 2022.