Another Perspective to George Floyd: The Home

Another Perspective to George Floyd: The Home

By: Deji Yesufu

I just concluded a three year training at the seminary and my teachers, all of them White Americans, did a great job drumming the heart of theology into my spirit. It is one thing to know that the gospel is important, it is another thing to find practical truths to back this up and see that the gospel message can be brought to bear on every situation in life.

Besides learning the gospel, I had the opportunity to observe the lives of these men. My teachers at the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training, Egbe, structured our lessons in such a way that I must have had close to 30 instructors in all. I saw something about these men that non of them even talked about. It was something about their homes.

John MacArthur in a series of message to women in his church began to show them the great advantage of a stay at home mother. He explained that the things that made for viral and godly families, with well instructed children, were women who stayed at home; while there husbands went out to work. He went further to explain that there is a women’s Christian institution in the USA that simply trains women to keep the home. As he spoke, my mind went to one of the foremost restorers of Reformed Theology to our day: Martin Lloyd-Jones. Jones was a practicing doctor and had such a great future in medicine in the 1920s. But he left it all for ministry. He met his wife in medical school. She qualified as a doctor too. But soon as they began raising a family, the woman retired to the home. I suspect she never practiced medicine again.

So I observed that all my instructors, at least the few I could discern, had their wives at home – full time. The result is this: the man will work and earn the family’s resources. The woman will keep the home. They will raise godly children. The boys will go on to be leaders in society; the girls will retire to the house to raise another generation of stable children.

Contrast that with our day and time. An average Nigerian home. The first pursuit of the family is: survival. So, husband works and wife also goes to work. The age old roles of husband providing and wife keeping the home, gives way to both husband and wife providing. Both husband and wife keeping the home. The couple spend a better part of their marriage life battling whose finances runs what in the home. The fathers authority erodes away in circumstances where the woman is earning more. The children bear the brunt. But this is not the worst case scenario.

The worst case is the husband, getting frustrated and abandoning the home. The wife, not having been raised in a stable family herself, cannot understand “honoring her husband”. Feminism and activism eats into her marriage and destroys it. She is left to raise her children alone. It is doubly worse in the USA: single mothers raising unstable men. Then we have a George Floyd who gets into the hands of law enforcement too often and they snuff out his life.

So, on one hand, while not ever white family imbibed the Christian culture I have relayed above; most of them still keep the spirit of a stable home for the sake of the children. On the other hand, black families are increasingly unstable and producing unstable children to the world.

The home is the microcosm of society. Those who invest in building a stable home, will reap the reward.

Before women rights folks come after me: I am not advocating sit-at- home mothers. I am painting a picture of what makes societies work. You can make your choice as a woman. When a woman realizes that the children she bears are a trust and a ministry, she will give up anything to commit to fulfilling that ministry. All these women who sit at home to raise their kids didn’t do so because their husbands instructed them to do so. They did it willingly and sacrificially. And many of then live to reap the reward.

Children grow so fast a wise woman would realize that committing 15 years of her career to raising these kids to secondary school level will not detract from her. If she begins to have children at 25, she can be back to her career at 40. And she would be the better for it. Of course she cannot do this without a supporting husband.

I believe we would have less of these George Floyd incidences if our people will commit to raising stable homes.