When a Trailer Park is Just Right, Part Two: Responding to Thoughtful Comments on the Issue

I wasn't planning on writing more about this issue, but the comments from yesterday's post were so thoughtful that I thought it necessary to do so. To all who responded, I really appreciated your thoughtful comments. I'll interact with them briefly below in an edited form, and you (and others) can feel free to respond back.

Anonymous 1: "From a woman's perspective, I wouldn't care if we lived in a trailer, but I would feel very poor for the lack of my husband's time and energy at home if he was pouring himself into 2 jobs. I know provision is a big drive for men, but for women emotional security is more important than financial security. I don't care HOW we live, as long as it is together and the quality of our time together is real. When the focus becomes work for whatever reason, then the marriage relationship can so easily become a case of two ships passing in the night. I think the definition of provision needs to include spiritual and emotional provision, and centre less around money."

Anonymous friend, you make good points here. Please note that I would concur in not wanting to pit emotional security against financial security, and that I was not attempting to encourage men to do so. What you and I are saying is not unrelated. I think that you might have misread me such that you think that I am saying that a man should work as much as possible to provide as much possible because I understand this to be a man's role. This is not what I am saying. I am saying that I believe that Scripture calls a man to provide for his own. If he must tax himself to do so, then so be it. But I am nowhere encouraging men to work so much that they have little home life. No, a man should work hard such that his family has shelter and food and a certain level of comfort. These are the basic needs of life, and anyone who does not so provide for his family is worse than a pagan. (1 Tim. 5:8)

Depending on what a man does, this may mean some long hours, and that may in turn mean a loss of time with family. The basic needs of shelter and food are so significant to a biblical definition of manhood, though, that according to the Bible, this man is acting rightly, even if we can all agree that the situation is less than ideal. The "two jobs and a trailer" lifestyle is not the model, and I would hope that it would be the uncommon exception rather than the rule. It may, however, be necessary in some situations, and though that is regrettable on one level, the man who cares in such a way for his family is honoring God, though he must still strive with all his might to emotionally care for his family.

You and I have significant agreement which could be confused in this discussion. I actually explicitly encouraged men not to work in such a way that their home life was compromised. The ideal, as I can see it, is for a man to both provide well for his family and have significant time with them. A man should attain all the training he can, all the education he can, in order to fit himself for a vocation (or calling) that uses his God-given gifts and that enables him to meet his family's material needs while giving him much time to spend with them. He should then go out and work and meet his family's material needs but do so, ideally, in such a way that he can cherish, care for, and disciple his wife and raise his children in the fear and admonition of the Lord by means of a loving, gentle, courageous spirit.


Kyle E.: "How do you pursue your Ph.D. studies and uphold providing at the same time? I experience the tension between study and work right now too--I'm a 2nd year M.Div. at Trinity. Thanks!"

Kyle, how nice to get a comment from a fellow TEDS student. I appreciate it, and thanks for writing on this humble little slice of the web. The easy answer is this: there is no easy answer! For me, providing for my family to this point in my life has meant a pretty busy life. My MDiv at Southern Seminary was a whirlwind for my wife and me. We existed in that "non-ideal" realm I mentioned above. It was difficult, and there was no getting around that. At the same time, though, we did what we had to do. We needed to pay bills, put food on the table, and be able to save a bit for the future, and so I worked, and my wife worked, though she did so to supplement our income and not because she had to. I would have been happy for us to have less money and for her to be home, but she was fine with working at that time, and so she did.

Essentially, I worked seven days a week for a year and a half. Monday through Friday I had work and class (four of them, and I did the language-intensive track), Saturday I caught up on the homework I couldn't do most weeknights due to the need to spend time with my wife (and due also to my own exhaustion), and Sunday I did work in between church services. It was a blistering pace, and I thank the Lord that we are out of it. That's one of the realities of certain seasons of life like that which the MDiv brings for most of us seminarians--I don't really see any way to remove some level of difficulty and hardship. If you stretch it out, you're in school forever and you can't minister like you want to. If you speed it up, you put your family through the grinder (if, it could be hoped, for a brief time). I chose as the head of my home to go hard and fast through seminary, and though it was hard and less than ideal, I think it was the right choice.

My PhD and job are actually more manageable than my MDiv and job. I'm not sure that's normal, but that's how it worked out for us. Whatever taxing degree program one is in, though, one has to commit oneself as a man to working hard for the good of his family, to taking the load on his own shoulders, and not placing it on his wife's shoulders (particularly when kids enter the equation). For me and many friends I knew, that meant long nights, sleepy days, and less time than we would have liked with our dear families. In the end, though, one makes it out, and perhaps the next season is all the sweeter for what one has just come through. Maybe that is the Lord's gift to us.


Anon. 2: "I worked two full time jobs and lived in an apartment in an old building so that my wife could be a full time caregiver. If only she had considered me and her son to be more important than television and drugs, it might have been worth it."

Anonymous (number two), I am so sorry to hear this. I don't know if I know you, but this sounds like a heartbreaking situation. If you are a Christian, I can only say to you that your hard work was honorable to the Lord, and will be rewarded, I am sure, on the last day. If you are not a believer, I commend you for your commitment to your family, and would encourage you to consider another costly example of sacrificial love--the love of Christ. This love will save your soul even as it frees you to forgive those who have caused you great pain on this earth.

Thanks to the commenters. Please note that I do not present this matter as uncomplicated, as neat-and-clean. As the responders have noted, the duty of masculine provision will often involve seasons of difficulty and hardship. Sacrifices will perhaps be called for. God never promises us that doing the right thing means that our lives will be neat and clean. No, doing the right thing often means the opposite. Difficulty must not turn us away from truth, however. More than this, it must not turn us away from joyful service in God's name. Whatever comes, we must gloss all our work with the remembrance that what we do, we do for God. That may sometimes be our only reward, but that is all the reward we need, is it not?

When a Trailer Park is Just Right: On Manhood and the Duty to Provide

"A man who really gets Ephesians 5 is the kind of man who will be willing to work two jobs and live in a trailer to enable his wife to be the primary caregiver of his children."

This line comes from a recent blog post and CBMW journal contribution by Dr. Russ Moore. I appreciated Dr. Moore's post, entitled "Pastoral Leadership and the Gender Issue: What Does Courage Look Like?" Moore raised a number of good points in the brief post, but none affected me more than that made in the line quoted above. In our milieu, I would imagine that this comment would sound strange to many ears. Why on earth would anyone live in a trailer park if they don't (absolutely) have to? In a materialistic society (and a materialistic church, maybe?), there is perhaps no sharper ideological razor to be applied in making familial decisions than that of economic concerns. Ockham would (not) be proud.

What do I mean here? Simply this: many of us in American evangelicalism so prize material comfort that we will allow almost nothing to impede our pursuit of it. So, for example, when it comes down to determining such basic questions like where we will live and how we will live, we are often quite ready to sacrifice things like family time, home life, and discipleship with things like a nicer home, more cars, better accouterments. I am not against these things or a nice standard of living on their own terms, but I am against them when they compromise the quality of our family life. Somehow, we have allowed the culture to whisper into our ear and convince us that it is better to be wealthy--on whatever scale and by whatever measurement--than it is to be together. We don't realize in making this exchange that we have taken the culture and its ideals as our guide. Accordingly, we have left the Word and its wisdom behind. The Scripture teaches us that the things that truly matter cannot be measured in dollars and cents, even though many--the Proverbs famously groups the materialistic masses under the moniker "fool"--believe the opposite. They think, in their fallen condition, that it is actually better to have cars than laughs, toys than time, renovated bathrooms than healthy marriages. The result? Husbands and wives alike work themselves into the ground, and the children suffer and grow angry, and the family slowly falls apart, the cycle to be damningly repeated again a generation later.

It is in the backdrop of such tragedy that Dr. Moore makes his point, and that I concur. If we could accept a little less luxury, many of our families would know far more health than they do. If we would accept a lower standard of living, more of our mothers could mother, more of our children could flourish, and more of our churches could know a fresh level of quality by the investment of older women in the lives of young women. If we could reject the American "dream" of material prosperity and see a trailer-park or an apartment complex through gospel lenses, we would see that it is no horrible thing to live as poor people when we have a joyful, gospel-centered, God-glorifying family that pulses with love and hope. Nowhere do the biblical authors instruct us to see such circumstances as a curse. No, if God is the Lord of the home, and the husband and wife fill their roles, and the children obey their parents, then the family is rich, rich beyond the wildest dreams of the wealthy secularists up the street who has great wealth in the bank but tragically little in the heart.

Again, this is not to say that wealth is wrong. It is not, and some Christians have a great deal of it and do not allow it to compromise a healthy home. Sadly, though, many do allow earthly values to drive their decision-making and home life. This problem--and its solution--begins with the husband. If he will commit to taking on the burden of the family's finances, to providing for his home though it may cost him much, then he sets his family up to flourish. If he gives them a vision of life together that is not driven and dictated by the culture and its ideals, but a biblical vision that prizes the principles of God's Word as they relate to the home, then he charts for them a course of great blessing. With his family, he may know times of great hardship and trial. He will have difficult nights, and sleepless days. He will see others entertaining themselves more and exhausting themselves less, and he may even question the wisdom of his path. But he will turn over and over to God's Word and its vision for masculine leadership and provision, and he will know, if only by the mustard seed of faith, that if it must be, a trailer park is not only enough--it is just right.