Lovers of the world

Adulterers! Do you not know that to be a lover of the world means enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
-James 4:4

I wait on Wednesdays to do my "Wondering Wednesdays" post until Maggie at "From the Heart" does hers, because she is the originator of those posts. Well, I was surprised today when she posted, but it wasn't a WW type post.

Instead she talked about the ups and downs of pregnancy. (She is 33 weeks btw.) What really struck me is that she wrote this in her post:

Yesterday was a horrible day. It started out by reading a beautifully written blog post from Femininity Revisited. She wrote that her dreams of being a stay at home mother were literally too late to be fulfilled. The post broke my heart and of course I bawled my little eyes out. I felt so bad for her, but also was afraid that her dilemma could be my fate. As much negative criticism I get for wanting to be a SAHM and have more than 2 kids, I get a lot of positive feedback as well (mostly from you lovely folks in the blogosphere.) "You can do it! Trust God! Budget well! If we can do it, you can do it!" Unfortunately at this point I have this big fear that we won't be able to manage it. Maybe it isn't God's plan for me to stay at home. But I have the strongest pull and desire to be a SAHM. It isn't because it's what other people do or because I'm lazy and don't want to work or because I want to be one of those crazy, smothering mothers who end up having spoiled children. I feel it in my heart.

I was appalled. Negative Criticism... for wanting to be a SAHM and have more than 2 kids? I am not naive, I don't live in a bubble where I think the world is accepting of the idea of mothers staying home, having large families, homeschooling, homesteading, etc... I get that the tables have turned, and the fact that my wife can make bread, sans any electronics aside from the oven is freakish. I get that our friends down the road that have enough kids to field a baseball team is freakish by today's standards. I get it.

What I don't get is how people will go to the other extreme and advise against it. It doesn't logically add up. These people aren't speaking from experience, they aren't speaking from the same philosophical or theological perspective, and they sure as heck are speaking from the same family mindset. So why do they offer their advice? From what basis are they offering these ideas?

Most often we are advised against big families from someone such as a mother of 2, that had child one at 29 and child 2 at 34, whom has worked her entire adult life at various jobs, lives in a house with more bedrooms than people, owns a vehicle for every licensed driver, spends more on clothes in a month that some people do in a year, uses birth control, doesn't have the same religious beliefs as the person she is advising, went to public school and thinks that it is an OK option because it is cheaper than the Catholic school that is further away and VERY expensive, spent more time researching her day-care than she will spend instructing her children morally, has absolutely no basis from which to give advice to her "friend" that simply wants to live out the whispers in her heart.

As an example, if I owned only Chevy pickup trucks my entire life, and told you: "whatever you do, don't buy a Toyota sedan" you would look at me and say, skeptically, "why?" And I wouldn't have an answer. Now if I said, "Chevy pickups are awesome, and here is why you should buy one..." that would be a different story. But that isn't what happens.

Instead, people like Maggie are faced with criticism and anger directed towards them and about their desire to be a "natural mother." The worst is that it comes from women that have NEVER experienced what it was like to be a mother of a large SAH family. Why? [NB: I wrote a much longer post originally, that answered this question, but for brevity, and sanity's sake I edited it down].
To Maggie, her critics: The WORLD HATES Catholics and followers of Christ. Hates us. I wrote about this in a post called: The World HATES you. So when we, who take our faith seriously, are open to life and love our spouses and children in an attempt to perfect our love for God, we are criticized. We are looked at funny, and we are marginalized as weird and freakish.

People love the world, and they are worldly. They want heaven, but they want it here on earth.

"There's a lady who's sure
All that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.."
-Stairway to Heaven by: Led Zepplin