“I don’t want to depend on my husband financially so I just started a shop. I have chronic fatigue and want to know if it is okay to work my shop less than the 20-30 hours a week you put in when you first started? Will I still be successful if I work it less?”
This is a really great question, one with SO many layers. So let’s break it down one by one… 💖
I don’t want to depend on my husband financially and just started a shop.
Why don’t you want to rely on your husband financially?
There could be a genuine reason not to want to. Maybe he has severe health problems and can’t work. Perhaps he’s sick or had a recent heart attack. Maybe he’s disabled or injured and you want to make money to help your family and that’s great, but all in all, it IS the husband’s job to financially provide for the family.
If we go back to Genesis where Adam and Eve sinned and take a look at Genesis 3:17-19, we will see the curse of the man.
It was his curse, and all men’s curse therefore from then on to have to labor for his food. The Bible is very clear.
For the woman’s curse, that is in Genesis 3:16 and says pain in childbearing is the curse for the woman. It also says that the woman will want to rule the man.
Let’s unpack that a little bit.
The woman’s curse is to have pain in childbearing and want to rule her husband but the husband is the ruler/leader in the relationship. We have the whole submission idea come into play here, which we won’t get into today, but I want you to look at the actual curses themselves.
Man has to labor for his food and woman has to go through pain in childbearing.
Let me ask you a question…
WHY are you trying to take on both curses upon yourself??????? 😯💣🤯
Why?
Woman’s curse is to go through pain in childbearing, it’s NOT to work.
Sometimes a woman has to work and I get that, but it is not the woman’s job to work. That is the husband’s job.
One of the biggest problems in our society is that feminism is in full rage and it’s very subtle.
👉 Just like men are taught from an early age to not cry, that it reduces their “manhood” somehow (which is ridiculous, by the way), women are being taught from an early age that we are Xena.
We are this warrior princess that must fight and be strong and do ALL the work and raise the kids and run the whole show, which is also ridiculous.
No wonder so many women feel overworked, tired all the time, and hyped up on coffee (which is full of cockroaches (uhm…eww!) and metal toxins that are slowly making you have brain fog and shutting your body down! i.e. chronic fatigue) just to make it through the day.
Now, if a woman wants to HELP the family income and all her tasks for the kids and home are tended to (whether you hire out housekeeping or not or whatever you do to take care of those things), if you want to make money from home, that is okay. It’s a GOOD thing according to Proverbs 31!
But to completely take over the man’s responsibility to earn the wages for your home, is not at all what the Bible teaches, nor what God intends for us as women. He’s not calling us to overwork ourselves or to take on both curses! He loves us way too much to put all that burden on us and make us carry it alone.
You end up having two personality types.
One, the woman in the marriage is Xena, warrior princess and does absolutely everything, takes on both curses and everything else, or you have a woman who sits at home prattling all day long and doesn’t do much at all because she’s “taking care of the home and kids”. They do nothing to serve God, their communities, they don’t outstretch their hands to the poor, and life is all about selfish preoccupations.
I get it, taking care of kids is a lot. Hello, single mom here, but BOTH of those ideas are 100% WRONG.
We must strive toward being balanced in the middle of things.
NOT taking on everything. Allowing our husbands (if we have them) to work and do his part, meanwhile, we are like the Proverbs 31 woman where we take care of the home, the kids, and “buy a field to plant a vineyard”. That means a side business. That’s okay. It’s a good thing. But that side business, can’t take over our whole lives. We can’t ignore our family and work all day long on that side business. We can’t let the house look like World War IV and hide behind a veil excuse saying we are just trying to help. God wants us to be orderly.
NOR can we sit at home all day long, feeling like we are overworked just taking care of the kids. If you feel overworked and overwhelmed taking care of your children, you don’t have systems in place to help you rest! You’re overworking on the wrong things and need those systems in place in order TO balance everything.
See everyone is coming from a different angle. One works too hard, one doesn’t work at all and is lazy, and yet, we are called to be the Proverbs 31 woman. Not overly working, getting rest, all while still working for God’s kingdom and our family’s.
If you struggle with overworking and doing EVERYTHING, a good book I recommend for you to read is Zeal Without Burnout.
If you struggle with feeling tired just from taking care of your kids and home all day long, I encourage you to purchase my Organize the Chaos course. It’s the system you need to manage everything in a more peaceful way.
No matter which point you’re coming in from on the spectrum, you CAN be the woman that God wants you to be! 💯
I have chronic fatigue
A really great thing (that is natural) to take for your adrenals is Drenamin. It helps the adrenals heal and they heal best during the night when we sleep. You need lots of sleep. Adrenals take around 6 months to heal so this is a long term thing you need to fix! If you don’t fix it, you’ll end up in the hospital eventually with all kinds of health issues, so definitely fix it!!!
I wouldn’t feel bad about resting at all because we all need it. So with chronic fatigue, it’s your body saying you’re overworked, overstressed, and your body is shutting down, it needs to rest.
We have to take care of our bodies. What will it matter if we build this entire empire that helps a billion people and makes good income for our family if we die tomorrow because we didn’t take care of ourselves??? 💣
You need to make it a huge priority to getting better.
God doesn’t ask us to work our guts out. He does want us to invest in His kingdom and others and serving Him will look different for every single human on the planet, but it’s never to work out guts out. He knows we are human. He created us! He’s not asking us to do more than we can humanly do, but again as women, we tend to put all that stuff on OURSELVES!
Key point: we put it on OURSELVES. Start saying NO! …and mean it. 😜
Will I still be successful if I don’t work 20-30 hours a week to start?
You don’t have to work 20-30 hours a week to make things a success, but you want to work it consistently. 👈
Maybe that’s an hour a day. Maybe it’s an hour 5 times a week. Maybe it’s 3 hours a day after the kids have gone to bed. Whatever it is that works for you and your life is totally fine. Just keep in mind that you grow as fast as you put the time into it, so building slower will reap slower rewards.
This is totally okay though because there’s more than one way to build a business! 💖 The key here is consistency.
As long as you don’t quit and you’re building in a constant, God-honoring way, you’ll be okay! 😊
