Last week, Anita went back to her old job on a temp basis, and since my mom was out of town, I was left on full-time daddy duty during the day, or, as the 80′s movie would call it, I spent the week as Mr. Mom. Because I’m a Twitter junkie, I spent the week sharing my experiences with the world, hash tagging everything with #mrmomweek. As I look back on the week, here are a few observations and thoughts:

Appearing Great and Being Great Aren’t the Same

On the surface, I’ve always looked like a great dad. I’m good with Robbie, he loves being around me, and it’s not uncommon for me to be found on the floor with him at church, in a store, or where ever we might happen to be when we’re out and about. The problem is that “out and about” part. Last week I had this sudden revelation that, all too often, I only do those things when we’re “out and about”. At home I’m always working, or reading, or watching the game, or doing whatever else. In other words, I’ve looked great, but all too often, I haven’t been great, because I was only great when others were watching. Last week forced me to be great because there was nobody else to spend that time with him, and I refused to just park him in front of the TV all week.

This brings me to my second point.

SAHMs Get the Cultural Shaft

What’s SAHMs, you ask? I said the same thing the first time I saw the acronym mentioned on Twitter. It stands for Stay At Home Moms, you know, that dying breed of women who’ve decided to focus on being great at raising their family and managing their home rather than focusing on career or trying to juggle all of the above.

I use the term “dying breed” with some hesitancy because it implies a tone that will raise the ire of many, so let me clarify a bit. I realize that some women need to work, primarily single mothers. While I’m sure there are some other cases, I struggle to buy the argument most of the time. Sure, the extra income might be needed to pay the mortgage or make the car payments, but does the family really need a house of that size or cars that new? Let’s just be honest and say that most of the time, the extra income is to fulfill monetarily obtained wants, to try and get rid of debt, or is part of the woman’s quest for personal fulfillment. Now, there’s no judgement here towards dual income families, I get the wants, I get the debt, and I get the quest, I just think we should be honest about the why of the second income.

Now that we’re being honest, let me highlight the why of the tone behind “dying breed” … the hostility towards the women who chose to be SAHMs. I don’t get it, and I get it even less after last week. For years I’ve heard various forms of the expression, “Just a housewife.” or “Just a stay at home mom.” and, based purely on what I witnessed as the child of a woman who decided to stay at home, thought, “There’s nothing ‘just’ about it.” Now, after having lived it for a week, I’ll say it with far more fervor, because I’ve never had a week at work (with the possible exception of when I was student teaching) that was as challenging as the one I spent exclusively being a great dad … not the weeks I’ve written and preached three or more sermons, not the weeks I’ve put in 100 pus hours, not even the week I was woken up at 4am to consol children whose father had just died.

Think about it, here I was, for a single week, doing nothing more than what hundreds of thousands of moms have done year in and year out for generations with virtually no recognition or appreciation, and yet I think it’s so novel and such a big deal, that I’m compelled to share clips from throughout the day with the world (and, if I’m going to be totally honest, feeling like I deserve all kinds of kudos for it). Being a great parent, all day, every day, is the hardest job I can imagine and SAHM’s get grief for doing it. Talk about the cultural shaft.

I’m Not Built to Be a SAHMM (Stay at Home Mr. Mom)

As I finish up this post I’m sitting in Denver International Airport getting ready to head to England and Germany for two and half weeks so I can begin my doctoral work. While I already miss both Anita and Robbie, part of me feels like I need these next couple weeks to not only recover from last week (I could tell this morning that my patience was completely worn out), but also, in some way, to exert a tremendous about of creative energy that had little outlet last week because all of my time was spent with Robbie (I say little because, when Anita got home, I did have a chance to do a bit of work).

In other words, God’s gifted me to do certain things, and many of those things, like preaching, teaching, and writing require extensive amounts of time spent in study and creative thought. However, those things can’t happen when you’re spending all day, every day, being a great parent. If I’m going to use the gifts God’s given me, well, it makes being a SAHMM impossible. That being said …

I Can Still Be A Great Dad (and Husband) Without Being a SAHMM

Now, at a far greater level than me, Anita is built to be an all day, every day, kind of parent, but that doesn’t preclude her from having other gifts that are simply impossible to use while watching Robbie (music would be a prominent example). Now, if, after a single week of SAHMM I felt like I needed two and a half weeks of intensive gift usage just to balance out the scales, how must Anita feel when she’s not able to use her variety of gifts that demand some “her time” week in and week out?

As I think about this, I now see opportunities to love and serve two people rather than one. First, Robbie needs to be loved and served by a daddy who is a great daddy, not just in public, but in private as well. He needs a daddy who will turn off the game and play, or do a puzzle, or read a book. Moreover, Anita needs time away from Robbie so she can focus on using her other gifts, gifts that will, in turn, bless others, which means, by being a great daddy and spending quality time with Robbie, I’m also, at least in one way, being a great husband by giving Anita a chance to use her gifts.

I wish it hadn’t taken a week of Mr. Mom to make all these connections, but there they are. By the way, here are some pictures from my adventures with Robbie last week. Enjoy.

A few months ago I offered some thoughts on how the Christian faith can (and should) shape making a career decision, and then, about a week and a half ago, as part of another post, we commented that we’d made a decision to stay in the States rather than move to Africa full-time. I open with this because these two previous posts overlap, and, given the responses we typically get when people hear we’re staying in the States, I figure that this this week I should share a bit more on the why behind our decision, because it’s one of those places where our faith had a profound impact on our decision making.

First, we had two possibilities that were in the works, so let me fill you in a bit on what we decided against:

• Uganda: While we were in South Africa, we had a chance to spend some time with the head of LCMS World Mission for Africa, who asked us to send in applications as career missionaries with the goal of placing us in Uganda, an East African country on the northwest corner of Lake Victoria. If offered the position, I would have been doing theological education for the Lutheran Church in Uganda, equipping lay leadership for ministry in a country that has some 10,000 Lutheran Christians and only 4 ordained pastors.
• South Africa: The main reason that we went to South Africa was so I could be a guest professor at the Lutheran Seminary there. Things went really well and they thought I’d be an ideal fit for a position that would have me teaching the beginning students at the Seminary, doing campus ministry at the University of Pretoria, and working on a PhD. As time went on, there were also some really attractive and prestigious possibilities that I could have naturally moved into.

Now, typically, when people here that we’re not heading back, they assume it’s for one of the following reasons:

• Safety: While this might have been part of the reason my parents wanted their grandson staying stateside, especially after the bombings in Kampala (where we would have been living if we’d gone to Uganda), for us, this was really a non-issue. Our faith essentially calls us to trust that God is caring for us and so, while being responsible in our choices (aka, not living with a death wish), we make a point of not letting this issue be a factor (even after two incidents of theft in South Africa).
• Robbie: Other people assume that we decided to stay stateside because of Robbie. Typically, this reason alludes to issues like education, social opportunities, or similar considerations. Personally, I think these reasons point to American ignorance about the rest of the world, after all, in both Pretoria and Uganda, Robbie would have the opportunity to attend a world class international school where he’d be exposed to a wide variety of cultures and receive an overall experience that would unquestionably surpass anything that a public or parochial school in the the US could offer. In other words, if this had been the deciding factor in our decision making, we’d be moving back to Africa right now.
  
• Promotion: This one hasn’t come up, but since I talked about it on my previous post, I thought I should bring it up here as well. Again, like the Robbie issue, if this had been key in our decision making, we’d be on our way to South Africa, where there’d been talk about me eventually taking up a very prestigious post (at least in the Lutheran world) in an internationally recognized university. But, as tempting as Africa is on this front, it ultimately wasn’t a factor for us.

So, what was it that did matter in our decision making process that resulted in us deciding to not return to Africa full-time?

• Direct vs. Indirect Ministry: This was one of the key factors in our decision not to go to Uganda. Direct ministry is what people typically think of when missionaries come to mind. It’s going out and working with the people to start churches, engage in mercy ministry, or do whatever else that helps at a ground level. Indirect ministry is ministry that involves raising up local leadership so that they can do direct ministry. One of the things that I really missed while teaching at the Seminary was direct ministry, which was essentially limited to conversations that I would have with the street prostitutes or when I would occasionally get to spend time with someone in the local congregation. In the end, while I love indirect ministry, I really missed getting my hands dirty and engaging with people of all stripes, and, at least in Uganda, opportunities to do that would be severely limited (which is a good things, as I tried to express in my Trash Cans post).
• The Parable of the Talents: In the end, this was the key factor. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the biblical parable, which is found in Matthew 25:14-30 and Luke 19:12-28, it concerns a man who goes on a journey and entrusts large sums of money to three servants. Upon his return, the man then sees what the servants have done with the money entrusted to them, and they are rewarded or punished based on their faithfulness or unfaithfulness. A quick interpretation would have Christ be the one who leaves, entrusting his work to his followers, and when he returns at the Second Coming, he expects that we have faithfully used the gifts he’s graced us with. So, the question we had to ask was, “How has Christ gifted us, and how can we best use those gifts?”

Obviously, we concluded that we can be more faithful with our gifts here than in Africa. This isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have used our gifts in Africa, it just means there is a greater use here, and decided to pass good in favor of great. So, what gifts are we looking to make the most of?

• Anita’s Music: While Anita would be able to use her gift of hospitality no matter where we ended up, in South Africa, her gifts in music wouldn’t be fully utilized. God has blessed her with an amazing ability to speak to people through music. True she’s an amazing performer, but during worship, she disappears and the one people remember afterwards is Jesus.
• Joe’s Preaching: While I’m often uncomfortable with this gift because I feel like there’s too much of me and not enough Jesus, after years of trying to minimize my gift in preaching, I’ve finally decided that I need to be in a ministry setting that allows me to preach week in and week out so I can not only proclaim God’s grace, but also lead his people in mission (which includes the faithful use of their gifts) through preaching.
• Joe’s “Apostolic” Nature

Now, let me address that last one a bit more, after all, if anything in this process was the single deciding factor, this was it, so I can’t really leave it out of this discussion, however, I use the word apostolic with great trepidation because I know many Lutherans will have issues with the word choice because it’s not part of our standard vocabulary. However, since I don’t know another term to use for what I’m trying to describe, and it’s a term that others have used to describe it, I’ll go with it.

Let me try and explain a bit more, first, by pointing to what I’m not saying, namely, that I’m an apostle. In Galatians 1 and 2, the Apostle Paul argues his apostleship on the basis that he, like the other 12, was taught personally by Christ (Judas was replaced according to this same criteria). I haven’t been taught directly by Christ, so I’m going to make no claim to being an apostle.

However, in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, Paul list off a series of gifts that Christ has given to grow his Church, and in 1 Corinthians, he layers them in a clear order, beginning with the apostle. Now, we know from the broader context Paul isn’t saying that one gift is more important than another, but I believe he is saying that, for the Church to move into new territory, there’s a process that begins with those who have an “apostolic ability” to read a culture, figure out how to proclaim the gospel in a new context, and pave the way for the work that will follow.

As I’ve engaged in various ministry contexts over the past 12.5 years, the one consistent piece is people looking to me to try and make sense of the world we find ourselves in and how to be the Church in it … and, more specifically and increasingly, how to do it in a way that’s faithful to the Lutheran tradition. Looking back, it wasn’t something, at least initially, that I intentionally sought out, but something I fell into. It’s a journey that’s resulted in me spending countless hours trying to figure out the what and why of increasingly secular America, but also how the Church can faithfully be the Church in this new world … hours that will only continue as I begin my doctoral work next week.

After 12.5 years of both student and adult ministry, time in suburban and urban environments, and a variety of settings that range from the traditional congregation to “organic church”, Anita and I found peace in the decision that God has gifted us for, and placed us on a journey here that we haven’t finished yet, and until we do, we’re not ready to move onto something new … like Africa.

I’ve been playing with Posterous for the past day and am really liking it, both for the simplicity of posting (I can’t wait till I have some audio to upload so I can test out that feature) and the way it auto-posts to the various sites that I use for social media. You can check out my page here: http://joeburnham.posterous.com.

Now, no matter what, I’m going to keep the Posterous site and have everything posted there, however, I’m not sure if I should drop this site (which runs on WordPress) and just use Posterous (which would become joeburnham.com).

I’d like to get your thoughts via the poll on the right. Should I:

• Keep this site as is, meaning this is the place you go for weekly articles, and the only thing that shows up in the RSS or email feed from joeburnham.com are the articles from this site.
• Put everything in Posterous because, well, if it’s something I recommend, find funny, or think it worth a gander (and there’s quite a bit of that stuff), then it’s worth getting in your RSS feed or inbox.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!