My soul clings to you,Your right hand upholds me.
I was listening to a sermon, today, about raising daughters. One of the points of the sermon was how in our culture the focus is to train women for a career. Even in homes where it is believed that the mother should stay home, often the thought is to train her for a career and then when she gets married, she can leave the career and be a mother, as if being a mother is an easy thing and doesn’t need much training.
This is backwards. When we train our daughters, the focus of our training should be to train them for God’s calling on their lives, not the world’s opinion on what they should be. The focus of training our daughters is to teach them how to be godly women and to equip them to follow the calling that God has for them as wives and mothers. This does not mean that we don’t educate our daughters or equip them with skills. The Proverbs 31 woman was a skillful and well-educated woman. She was truly and independent woman and quite capable of taking care of herself. And she was quite capable of taking care of others. She kept her family warm and helped a many hungry have a full belly. And even quite capable in business matters, as well. And a godly woman should hone these giftings that God has placed in her. But these giftings are used to build up the home and to establish God’s work in her as a mother and wife and the ministry of her home. These giftings are not for building her career. A career is never her focus, being a godly woman and a godly mother and a godly wife are her focus.
So, in training our daughters our focus should be in training her to be a godly woman, not a career woman.
One objection might be what if my daughter never marries. There are two things, a daughter is under the father till she marries, so if needed she has that as a protection. But even without her father’s care, a woman like the Proverbs 31 woman, is more than adequately capable of facing the hazards of this world and has the mental fortitude as well as the strength and wisdom to do well. Also, a woman well trained in being a wife and a mother has been trained in skills that will not be wasted, they will help her as a single woman both for herself and for others. A woman trained in this way is a huge asset to the church and to others, whether or not she ever marries.
