Soft Life Dreams

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Let me firstly start off with a funny story which is 100% true. To verify this story I will need to dig through my emails going back over a decade – I just remembered why that might be challenging. Hmm!

So I used to attend a church which I have previously ranted about on my various blogs. Ultimately the Pastor treated me carelessly blah blah blah what a surprise!

However this humorous incident happened while I was at the church and each time I remember it, I just start laughing! 😂

So basically the church was tiny. While I was going there, it probably had fewer than 10 regular members. Additionally no-one, apparently, had any money, including me! Now while a church is so small, to me it would make sense to just meet in the Pastor’s house or someone else’s house, to save money on renting out a space. However this type of thinking never seems to make sense to Pastors in the same way. So no matter how small their church is, invariably they will insist on renting out a hall, eg a school hall, and buying audio visual equipment for their church. Because of the rent that they pay for their hall, this means that they have regular overheads that they need to cover no matter how few people attend their church.

So what is funny is this: one day this Pastor was complaining about how little money was coming in to the church, versus the overheads that the church had to pay. But remember that no-one had any money. So he sent me this spreadsheet which he kept updated about the financial offerings that people had been giving in the church. And oh my goodness, there was one particular entry where the total financial offerings contributed by all attendees altogether on a particular Sunday morning…amounted to less than 50p. Yes, that’s 50 pence, not 50 pounds. This is where I need to dig through my emails to verify the correct amount. It was certainly less than a pound. And by the way, that is not an average of 50p from each person, but everyone’s total contribution taken together amounted to less than 50p. I know for a fact that the room rent was super-affordable at £15 per hour. Even if the financial contribution had been £50, that would barely have been enough to break even. Each time I remember that particular incident then I literally just burst out laughing. Talk about completely unsustainable. It was in thinking of that incident a few hours ago in preparation for writing this post that I coined a name for that church, that is, “The 50p Church”.

And to be clear, back then the pastor himself did not have any money either. I pray that this man is no longer reading this blog because what I am about to say is extremely candid. He was a highly qualified professional, extremely bright. Since then he has completed a PhD. He is one of the few people I’ve ever met who can quote the Bible chapter and verse. To be fair, I don’t know the details of his work. Due to his profession, I would have expected him to have had a guaranteed, well-paid albeit stressful job. But oh no he felt “called” to the ministry. He felt “called” to do it full-time. So instead of being able to use his own earnings to fund the church while it took off, all the financial burden was put squarely on his wife, who was also a relatively well-paid professional, but not on the level of his financial potential, and was apparently needing to fund their entire household, plus this church dream, on her single salary. So unsurprisingly she was working quite a lot. [I wasn’t actually going to touch on that at all, but on reflection it is actually relevant to the main point I am making in this post].

So anyway, this man presented these details to me. At the time I was one of the most committed members of the church. And I thought to myself [and this is relevant for so many churches – please listen up Pastors!] – Sorry, but it is not my problem! I had only been in that church for less than a year, in fact I left shortly after that incident, so to be honest I was still checking out the church. Since then I have developed a mantra that I will not give serious money to a church until I have had a chance to thoroughly check them out, and if I am to be perfectly candid I sincerely did not have any money back then anyway. I think that on the Sunday morning in question I was in the service, but I literally gave a few copper coins. That is how skint I was back then.

So this is the way that I look at it: dear Pastors, if you insist that God has called you into the ministry, AND you also refuse to simply hold the church service in your home or someone else’s home, go and harass God, not your members, to financially uphold your dreams. After all He is the One who has called you, right?! I was still so brand new to the church, I had not made a long term commitment to the church yet and he was already expecting me to take responsibility for something that should have been resolved before I ever stepped through the door.

So let’s make this relevant to “Huggie-Wuggie” then: on discussion, this man expected me both to be giving more money to the church, that is, significantly more money AND to also be giving more time. How on earth did he expect that I would have more time if I started working in a job that would enable me to give more money to the church? The amount of commitment I gave to that church was already extremely high. This shows how someone can be intellectually brilliant and yet clueless when it comes to common sense. And there were other things which I have already previously ranted about. One new rant that I remembered just today was this: I offered to create a free website for the church, bearing in mind that they did not have any money, and neither did I, but this was a way of helping out the church. And this Pastor said “Oh no, he did not want a site to be created using the common established frameworks like WordPress or Joomla, rather he wanted this website to be created from scratch!” So this man was both entitled and clueless. So someone is offering you a premium service for free. And yet you insist that you want them to spend possibly hundreds or thousands of hours creating a bespoke thing for your church when your church is not in a position to give any money for this service? And remember that the church was tiny. Could they not have managed with a super-simple website to start with, until they had grown a bit? Not that I was offering a simple website, by the way. Using the common frameworks means that a sophisticated website can be created quite easily with minimal effort. To be fair, I’m sure that if I had a chance to sit down and explain the practicalities to him he would have understood and accepted. I left before it got to that. At that point of discussion though, I thought to myself: “Well, you’ll clearly have to make it yourself!” (After I left the church, apparently another woman came along and helped out by creating a free website. Well the resulting website was firstly about a fifth as sophisticated as the one I might have created, and secondly definitely made with an existing framework, likely WordPress. In short, it was that super-simple site that I thought his church should have been satisfied with all along.)

This then, is why all this is relevant. I sat down and realised today that if I was to get married, I would need to work harder both on maintaining my house AND on bringing in money. People often make it sound like it’s an “either-or” thing for a woman: either you are a housewife OR you are going out to make money. For most women these days, realistically it’s both. And this would be true even if I was merely to get married. If there were children, the thing would be compounded even more. I would have to spend exponentially more time on housework and chores and childrearing while simultaneously spending exponentially more time on ensuring financial stability for my family. At the moment, I already squeeze about 26 hours of living into each 24 hour period. So it is already impossible in terms of time. So someone please explain how on earth it could possibly be possible if I was married, or if I was married with children?!

I’m guessing that this is why women and mothers are so often burntout. I talk a lot on this blog about my various Afro-Korean dramas and other YouTube adventures. These represent a luxury in terms of time. On one hand, yes I make it clear that I tend to watch these while otherwise engaged, but still, to have time to watch and focus on them at all is still a luxury of time, instead of having my concentration taken up by twenty different things at once.

And then following on from that, and also another YouTube video I watched today, the following occurred to me: for a man, a “soft life” is attained by getting married. But for a woman, a soft life is attained by remaining single and childfree (a là my current situation) This YouTube video I watched today was not an AfroKorean drama or other drama, for once, but rather a video about how even good husbands drain wives. And a man was complaining that they as men could be “perfect”, and yet women would never be satisfied. And what this man was describing was literally the bare minimum. Provide for the family. Don’t cheat. Don’t abuse your wife or hit her. (Thankfully, there were other male voices on that video contradicting this mindset.) And then it occurred to me that many men of course want to do the minimum possible in marriage to secure a soft life earned from their wives’ labour. So of course they are resistant to having to fairly pull their own weight. The whole point of the enterprise as far as they are concerned is to get away with doing as little as possible. So of course they are going to pretend that they don’t know what to do around the house. Of course they are going to insist that you spell it out to them or give them a list. They know that pragmatically speaking after a number of times you are likely to give up asking them or simply do it yourself, which is what they are hoping for. So now as ladies we need to make sure that we look out for men who genuinely want to invest a lot of work and effort into marriage. Otherwise, why would we do it?! We may as well just enjoy our own soft lives and remain single, happily watching Afro-Korean dramas all day!

To go back to that Pastor, please know that where I am now, if I was a wife, I would never accept that from a husband. There is no way I would allow that half-baked quarter-baked tenth-baked and frankly ludicrous dream of running a non-self-sustaining church to be wholly dependent on my salary. I am not saying that running a church is inherently ludicrous. But when you literally have nothing, no salary, no savings, no nothing, and yet you’re looking at me, and you are saying “God said”, I would tell you to go back to God. It is not my problem. As a church member it was not my problem, and as a wife it would not be my problem either. So then, having to support this church, single-handedly, essentially, became her responsibility too. And they did have a child. To be fair, I think the Pastor was doing a lot of childcare.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be clearly discussed before marriage. And this is the kind of thing that the wife clearly needs to agree to. If being a Pastor is a calling, then in candour being a Pastor’s wife is if anything even more of a calling because of all the quiet supportive work that she would usually do behind the scenes, and all the more so if she is the one financially bankrolling the whole enterprise. And if the Pastor receives his (or her!) calling during the marriage, then the spouse needs to have the power of veto, or to otherwise be able to walk away without blame. Otherwise in this particular case, the wife may have been looking forward to a life of financial comfort and stability, only to find herself supporting a struggling husband and ministry.

After leaving the church, I did my best to cut off contact with this Pastor. But then he inexplicably became more committed to a fellowship to which I too am strongly committed. Which is why I am now unavoidably in regular contact with him. And in this ministry they call about people’s spouses and children all the time. While they have mentioned his child, they have not mentioned his wife in years (ie since I myself reconnected with the fellowship).

Now mind you, this man could have married a woman from the same professional background as he was, with the same earning potential as him. This way she could have comfortably carried everything financially, even when he felt “called” to the ministry. But he deliberately married someone with a lower earning potential so that he would feel more powerful in the marriage. I don’t think he explicitly articulated this but all the same it was so clear to me. So in the event his wife’s salary was not enough to comfortably carry everything without her stretching herself. Now this wife that he married may not have had his dazzling intellect. All the same she she had her head firmly on her shoulders. Furthermore, the fact that she was the one actually earning obviously gave her considerable power in their marriage. During the year I attended their church I watched her play him from start to finish. Honestly, it would not surprise me if, after a few years, she got fed up, and spoke to her tired legs and took herself out of that situation.