Temporary Alternate Reality, UPDATED

Did you see the film, The Family Man? Nicolas Cage stars as a New York investment broker who is given the opportunity to see what his life would be like if he had chosen to prioritize marriage and family over his career. He gets to temporarily experience an alternate reality in the suburbs, and he discovers that it is what he REALLY wants.

I need my own temporary alternate reality right now. I’m sure it would be helpful for me to spend a few days back in Atlanta living the life of a career woman as if I had never left. How high up the corporate ladder would I have climbed? Where would I live? Who would my friends be? What would I be doing socially and for entertainment? How would I really feel about the evenings and weekends at my disposal to do whatever I wanted? How much money would I be making???

I can imagine loving my job, going for runs along the Chattahoochee River after work, living within ten minutes of Barnes and Noble, eating at interesting restaurants, watching movies with subtitles (in the theater), having leisurely evenings at home to read or to watch videos or go to bed early. These things are easy for me to imagine because this is what my life was like before marriage and children and life in the boondocks. However, to provide no additional information would be misleading. Because regardless of how “good” my life was back then, what I wanted most was to be married and to have a family. In fact, this desire is what God used to draw me to Himself.

Those of you home schooling half a dozen children will find it hard to understand, but this stay-at-home mom thing is the hardest thing I’ve EVER done. It’s harder than graduate-level quantitative analysis. (Back in the day, I did my linear programming WITHOUT a computer.) It’s harder than being a teenager whose parents won't let her go to the prom. It’s harder than marriage. Going to work every day and dealing with incompetents and office politics is a cake walk compared to this. And if one more person tells me that it’s only going to get harder, I’m going to do something drastic—like eat a whole quart of Blue Bell Banana Pudding ice cream.

There is only one explanation as to how I got myself into this situation. It is not a choice that I could have made on my own “in the flesh,” as we say in Christian-speak. Only Christ in me working through the Holy Spirit could have motivated me to choose a life of self-denial and hard work. Philippians 1:6 says, For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. God began a good work in me by saving my soul, and he is perfecting me through my being out of my element and through life being hard for me.

I never GOT I Timothy 2:15 until I was well into motherhood: But women will be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint. The Greek word for "preserved" is “sozo,” and Strong’s defines it as follows:

1) to save, keep safe and sound, to rescue from danger or destruction
a) one (from injury or peril)
1) to save a suffering one (from perishing), i.e. one suffering from disease, to make well, heal, restore to health
1) to preserve one who is in danger of destruction, to save or rescue
b) to save in the technical biblical sense
1) negatively
a) to deliver from the penalties of the Messianic judgment
b) to save from the evils which obstruct the reception of the Messianic deliverance

What I get from this verse and from an understanding of the meaning of “preserved,” is that in becoming a mother, I was rescued from myself. I am confident that my experiencing a temporary alternate reality would not only demonstrate all of the temporal things that I long for on a bad day, but it would also demonstrate a lack of the eternal things I have gained through my present life. I was rescued from a life of purposelessness and delivered into a life of eternal possibility (Colossians 1:13).

I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
—Philippians 3: 13-14

Addendum:
I don't feel the need to defend myself against the negtive personal attack I recieved on this post. However, it occurred to me that perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough on something, which resulted in inadequate glory being given to God.

Prior to my marriage I was completely career-oriented. I have an M.B.A. with an emphasis in corporate finance, for goodness sake! I had absolutely NO intention of being a stay-at-home mother. I intended that my income should be adquate to provide for in-home child care or a nanny, if possible. What I am doing now is completely against my goal-oriented, ambitious nature. And the credit for that goes to God. He changed my heart, and He changed my life, and I am thankful.