Changing Diapers, Travel and Christian Ministry

What happens to a woman’s calling when ministry takes her husband away from home?

“Having gone through bible college and ministry training…I don’t remember anyone telling me about being left behind. How my husband might travel without me while I stayed at home with kids and what that would mean for me. I wanted to be there too.” bayareamomma

You never thought you would be taking care of young children while your husband travelled to preach or to do ministry. This is the reality for many wives and mothers whose husbands travel as pastors or missionaries. Both spouses are trained, both are gifted, both are called to ministry, both are sent, overseas or to local ministries. At first, you both serve and then, once children come, one of you stays at home because that is the place of the wife: the wife builds the home. That is often what is expected and acceptable in Christian circles.

If you have ever experienced this and felt resentment, you are not alone. This happens regularly and to many more wives than you think. And like the wife and mum above, no one warns you. So what do you do about it? Accept it as your role and internally be consumed with anger? Or do you wrestle with it and figure out how on earth it is meant to work. God has gifted you with many talents. How is changing diapers using them? The point isn’t that changing diapers is beneath you; but does motherhood automatically mean the disappearance of everything else God has put in you?

Here are three suggestions that have contributed to changing my own heart in the season of raising children with a husband who is often away.

1. Praying When Your Husband Travels

If you feel that your husband is giving more time to the ministry than to the family, pray that your husband would consider you, and include you when decisions are made, pray that God would put you and your children on his heart. You cannot force someone to hold you in consideration. If they are single focused, passionate about their ministry, only God can touch their hearts and reveal to them how to show their love for you. Pray that they would be involved fathers when they are home and when they are travelling.

If they are committed to you and want to be involved, pray that you and your children would feel their love. Them being away can bring that feeling of being unloved. Pray that God would give you creative and specific ways to feel connected.

Pray for your gifts. No time is wasted. What you are learning with children will serve you and grow your gifts. God will bring out of this time something that you cannot yet imagine or conceive. Pray that God would give you a life’s work. A passion for something that only you are equipped to do. It may look very different to what you imagined or dreamed you would be doing, but your circumstances, yes the aspects you despise now, may be where this life passion will be born and honed.

Pray alone and pray together for your relationship, for your health and for your protection. As your husband travels, do not leave a wide open door for destruction to come in the back door. Do not leave the vulnerability that distance can bring. Cover it in prayer.

Work through your theology of prayer. Why pray? What does God teach us about prayer? Even if you can just manage one page of a book on prayer a day, read it. Memorise verses on prayer. Ask God to reveal the place of prayer in your life and ministry. Yes because you have a ministry, right now. It is raising children, and it is praying. At the very least. (by the way, it is your husband’s ministry to raise his children too). Develop your theology of motherhood and parenthood while you are at it. It is worth figuring it out. You will be stronger for it, able to withstand the tempests of life without being ‘tossed around’ by different people’s opinions on what you should and should not be doing.

2. Connect Together When Apart

Facilitate your husband’s connection with your children. Your role is vital in this. His repeated and frequent absences may mean that he loses relationship with his children. You may be struggling with being at home. Your husband may be struggling with loneliness. The dream life we think he may be leading may be carrying hidden griefs and losses of missing out at home. You can alleviate those losses by ensuring that he is informed of what is going on at home, that he feels a part of it, that the children know they are loved.

3. Play The Long Game

There are seasons in life. This is one of them. It will not always look like this.

The years when your children are small can feel endless, especially when you are carrying the practical and emotional weight of family life while your husband is away. It is easy to look at what you are not doing, what you have put on hold, or what you thought your life would look like by now. Do not dismiss this season and at the same time, do not measure your whole life by this particular season.

Build your home. Love your children. Every minute you pour into them is invested time in your relationship with them. Support your husband where you can. And keep listening for God in your own life too. Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep asking what He has put in you, what He wants you to put your hand to now and what He might be preparing you for in the future.

Your children will grow up. Your husband’s ministry will change. Your opportunities will change. You will change. The gifts God has given you have not disappeared because they are not being used in the way you expected right now. Some are being developed quietly. Some are being redirected. And some may emerge from this very season in ways you could never have planned.

I look back now and see that some of the things I resented most became the very things God used to shape the work I do today. The years of being at home, the experience of raising children with a husband who was often away, the frustration, the loneliness, the questions about identity and purpose — none of it was wasted.

God may reveal to you something you can do now while being home and raising children that you would never have discovered otherwise. Or he may use this season to prepare you for something that comes later. Very likely both because whatever we do, the way we live our life, is for His Glory and His Kingdom. Your will be done, your kingdom come.

What you are living is similar in many ways to what spouses of those who work in other sectors experience when their spouse is often away for work: humanitarians, diplomats on unaccompanied tours, FIFO and DIDO workers. So many professions require time away from home. Read more on what families from other sectors can teach us.

Contact me if you would like to join a group of praying mothers with travelling spouses. We pray once a week for our families as we experience this life.