Picket fence idol.

I am keenly aware of the focus on the family in conservative churches. I can’t say that it’s wrong, but I can’t say that it’s right.

Timothy J. Keller said something interesting about that (emphasis mine):

Now I know this may sound very strange, but what we have here is a form of idolatry where you put your hope in something to give you a sense of being loved, of being valuable, of giving your life meaning. And these are not idols of the liberal world. These are idols of the conservative world, because Jacob says, if I get this gorgeous wife on my arm, if I am married, then I finally will have happiness. And it didn’t work And poor Leah turns and says, if I have a child, if I have children, if I have sons, if I have this wonderful family then I’ll be worth something. Then I’ll be loved. And it never works.

Don’t you know that when you build your life on a white picket fence, when you build your life on being married and having a perfect family and all of your children growing up to be so happy, the Bible comes against that. Huh? Well, doesn’t the Bible come against immorality and adultery and orgies and living together and, you know? Well, yeah, some other place. That’s not the text we have here.

We have a text coming against conservative idols here. We have a text coming against traditional values. We have a text that’s saying if you build your life on a spouse then, at the very best, you’ll be emotionally dependent or controlling or judgmental; and if anything goes wrong with that spouse, if that spouse has any problems, you will go to pieces and you’ll be of no help to that spouse or anybody else. If you build your life on your children then, at the very least, you’ll try to live your life out through your children till they either hate you or they just don’t have any identity of their own. And at worst, you’ll end up abusing them because they have got to be good, they have got to be right, they have got to love you or you don’t have a life. Again and again you see Leah saying, ah, a son. Now … She just fit right in with traditional values, especially at the time. You’re nobody unless you have children. You’re a woman, so you must have children. And she does, and it doesn’t work.

I know this.

I know what he’s writing about.

Not everyone wants to be a mother. Not everyone enjoys Mother’s or Father’s Day in church. Not everyone will be married, or even wants to be. Some of us get tired of church activities focused on kids, marriage, or divided out between spouse relationships. Some of us have made decisions to believe and live in this idolatry when we were not meant to because it was less of a battle. It required less explanation. It was what was supposed to happen.

I wrote in one of my journals that I was more than the things that I am not.

I joke that I am a Protestant nun.

I want to explain further — I have a whole journal of things I’ve thought and come to understand — but in the end I just joke because it makes little sense when the focus is on the family.

It come sneaking in, all these good Christian books on marriage relationships and men and women and raising the perfect kids and the way to homeschool children and fight the destruction of the family and on and on and…it is an idol. Families have been a mess from the beginning. Relationships have been a mess from the beginning. Yet the bookshelves in the Christian book stores are packed with such books. The focus is on the family, quite literally, and that is not where it should be. The focus is on the spouse, the relationship, and that is not where it should be.

Keller continues, writing about Leah, the one who was unloved by Jacob:

Every time she says, “Now my husband will love me.” “Now my husband will love me.” “Now my husband will love me.” And then it says she conceived again, and then she gave birth to a son and she said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Finally, no talk about her husband. What had happened? Through this suffering she stopped turning to her husband, she stopped looking to her children, she stopped looking to anything else and she said I’m going to praise the Lord. And at that moment she got her life back. At that moment, Laban and Jacob and all the people who had used her and abused her as long as she had stayed in the idolatry fell away; at that point she stood up and she got her life back.

And more than that, look—who was the child? When she finally stopped looking to her husband for those things that only God can give and when she finally turned to God, she said, “This time I will praise the Lord,” and the child was who? It was Judah

She stopped looking to anything else.

No person, no geography, no relationship, no children — stop looking there. Where we look, where we focus, we increase the trouble, the problem, the anxiety.

Stop looking there. Praise the Lord instead.