Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done

by Mystie Winckler

The business done in the home is nothing less than the shaping of the bodies and souls of humanity. —G. K. Chesterton

People made in the image of God need no additional decoration to make them respectable. People made in the image of God do need homes and families—and that’s exactly what we provide as wives and mothers. Our work is good, valuable work, no matter the time period, governmental structure, economic type, class, or culture we are in.

The work of homemaking is of utmost value to culture and society, whether or not that culture and society values it. Even if a woman has another job—one that earns her money—her most significant contribution to her family and to the good of the nation and world is her homemaking. Homes, after all, shape people. Those people, in turn, shape the culture, society, nation, and world into the next generations. Let’s not be surprised when that level of influence demands difficult, time-consuming work.

Even if it’s not the amazing solution to all our problems, organization is worth pursuing. When we organize our stuff and ourselves, we are imitating God. God made the world deliberately in an ordered, structured manner. He makes promises and keeps them. He keeps track of all His purposes and all His people. He wants our corporate worship of Him to be done decently and in good order. As beloved children, we mimic our Father’s providential care in our own derivative way.

Being organized isn’t about being in control, always having your ideas for your home and life and family work out. Instead, being organized is being prepared and ready for whatever comes from God’s fatherly hand.

In the first chapter of Loving the Little Years, she started with: “There is only one thing in my entire life that must be organized. The kids can be running like a bunch of banshees through a house that appears to be at the bottom of a toaster, and yet, if organization and order can still be found in my attitude, we are doing well.”

I realized all my attempts at organization were aimed at my material circumstances rather than my heart and attitude. I needed to organize my attitude before I would get any traction in organizing my home.

I worked at systems and organization not because I loved homemaking, but because I wanted to find any and every clever hack to get me out of the work. I wanted the homemaking equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme.

Such attempts never worked. What did work was dedicating myself to the calling of faithfulness in the midst of an ever-changing life for the long haul. My hope is that this book will help you skip the angst of avoiding the work so you can cut to the chase and learn to love what must be done because the work is good work.

I believe God is calling women out of the feminist lie that we are not fulfilled by homemaking and into the glorious truth that we can love the work and dance within the rhythms of life.

Our effectiveness in the world at large as women begins when we are effective in our homes, because homes are where people start, land, and connect. There is no greater privilege than to be given a home to run. We can and should glory in our duty as we learn the ropes of doing it faithfully.

Even when everything is crazy, you can be calm and enjoy your life

There is always time to do the will of God. If we are too busy to do that, we are too busy. —Elisabeth Elliot, Secure in the Everlasting Arms

We all feel pulled in a million directions at times. Parenting, cooking, cleaning, laundry, errands, church, and activities all add to our plate and take time in our day. However, we must remember that good work is supposed to take our time and our energy. Our time and our energy are gifts given to us to be invested in God’s kingdom for His glory.

Obligations to others are opportunities for service, not impositions. We are given time and energy not to hoard them or dole them out in miserly pinches. The whole point of having time and energy is to spend them on others in service to God for His glory. They are just some of the talents (see Matt. 25:14–30) God has given us in this life that we are to return to Him with a profit.

To declutter your head, you need to do a brain dump. A brain dump is simply writing down everything that pops into your thoughts. Write down whatever is on your mind—on paper—no matter how far-fetched or obvious those thoughts seem.

When we’re tracking so many details in our head, our thoughts feel jumbled and fragmented. We’re unable to focus patiently, think creatively, or problem-solve logically.

When you’re overwhelmed, your first impulse might be to ignore and avoid most of what’s weighing on your mind. However, before you’re able to focus, you have to clear your head and free your mind and emotions from the burden of holding vague obligations.

Prayer removes worry because it aligns our heart and mind with God’s will for us. Noticing a worry means noticing a thing to pray about. A worry should not be a prompt to fret, but a prompt to pray.

Feeling overwhelmed isn’t necessarily an indication that we have too much to do. Our first response should be to pray and give our cares to Christ. When we realize we can’t handle our own life, we don’t have to panic; instead, we can rest in our dependence on our loving and faithful God. Feeling overwhelmed is a reminder that we can’t do our life in our own power, so we need to stop and ask Christ to give us clarity and wisdom, joy and strength. If we cut back to only what we can do on our own, without Christ, we will be limiting God’s calling on our life.

Our impulse to keep things within the bounds we can control is an impulse to be the servant burying his talent in the ground because life seems too risky. God calls us to do much with what He has given us, promising us wisdom and the fruit of His Spirit as we do what appears to be impossible—even if the thing that seems impossible is simply feeding everyone a meal on time and then doing the dishes.

Doing one small job is the fastest remedy I know to stop feeling like a failure.

No matter what happens, we can orient ourselves to the interruptions, to the needs, to the emergencies by asking God to give us the grace to grow in fruitfulness through them. These aren’t fruits that spring up spontaneously in our heart if we just wait long enough. They are fruits that the Spirit gives us when we ask for them through thankful prayer—and then work out what He has worked in.

Every situation that feels overwhelming at first is just a practice play, a drill, sent by God. It’s a chance to replace our instinct with His, to choose His way instead of our own way. When we recognize God’s direct and personal hand in our life, we learn that our tension and angst is inappropriate. Our fretfulness is replaced with curiosity about what God is doing now in and through us. Our spiraling negativity is replaced by gratitude for all the ways God has called us to serve. Our inner turmoil is replaced by a willingness to practice kindness and gentleness instead, stepping into the good work before us with humble joy. God’s sanctification plan for our life consists of replacements like these.

My goal isn’t to avoid feeling overwhelmed, but to do the right thing with that feeling: pray. Over the years, I learned to pray and do the next thing without worrying about how “everything” would get done. The reality is that everything is never done. My job isn’t to do everything on my list, but to take the next step of faithfulness where I am. That I can do—and so can you.

Perfection isn’t our goal in this life. Sanctification is. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all. —James Clear, Atomic Habits

I didn’t want to start until I could guarantee a beautiful finish. I was spinning my wheels trying to invent a system that would keep the house running like a well-oiled machine without any effort. Until I discovered the optimally efficient way to do everything all at once and all together, I wasn’t going to do anything.

The goal of homemaking isn’t a perfectly clean and put-together home. The goal is making our resources useful and available for building up people. This means that those large housework projects don’t need to be complete in order for us to be faithful in our work.

We are called to faithfulness, and part of faithfulness is recognizing that we are weak, incapable of handling everything that comes our way—yet we have a dependable, fully capable God who gives us the strength that we need, not necessarily to be the most awesome version of ourselves, but rather to be loving, faithful servants who are ready and willing and excited to see God be awesome in our lives.

Growing our capacity for love and faithfulness is not necessarily doing all the things with calm awesomeness. It is being willing to take a humble, small step forward, regardless of the outcome. God is the One who will be awesome in our life, not us. He is in control of every situation in our life, and He is the strength and salvation and love that we need, come what may.

Progress doesn’t come after we’ve figured out the perfect system. Progress comes one step at a time, incrementally, over the long haul. A desire for completion is usually a desire for perfection. We need a strategy to replace our desire for perfectionism. I call this strategy iteration. To iterate means to perform repeatedly, to repeat a procedure, applying the result of the previous application to the next one. It’s technically a math term, but it applies beautifully to our busy life at home, which is so full of details and needs.

Don’t wait until the plan is perfect. Just start with what you have, where you are. Start using your plan before it’s perfect, and the next plan you make will be better still. Think of your new routine as the first attempt at an experiment you’re going to learn from, not as a forever-solution to put in place. A routine you make after experimentation and reflection will be better, more applicable, more personal. By trying out an imperfect plan rather than waiting until you have everything just so, you discover what works for you and what doesn’t. By iterating, your plans and systems can grow and adapt to fit your life as it unfolds. Iteration looks at a goal and asks, “What is one step toward the goal that I can take right now?” Therefore, with iteration, we make incremental progress and learn along the way. We don’t stall out by trying to skip straight to the goal from where we are in one big leap.

Perfectionism leads to procrastination. In its desire for complete control, perfectionism, ironically, leads to chaos. The more we give into perfectionism, the more likely it is that—one way or another—our situation will devolve into greater and greater disorder.

Homemaking is caring for people and their creaturely needs What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and the work flow. —Martin Luther

Often, our failure of motivation is a failure of imagination.

More than out minds, our heart leads our choices, whether we like it or not. Allowing ourselves to be led by our default emotions rarely produces love and fellowship. At the same time, ignoring our emotions doesn’t make them go away. Ignoring our feelings is just another way of being held captive by them.

When we let Scripture determine our mission, however, we realize that homemaking is a service we render to God and His people. Only with that purpose in view can we rejoice as stewards in the place God has put us. Homemaking is not about mastering cleaning lists and chores but about loving and serving people, making homes in which they—and we—can flourish.

Biblical homemaking is not about achieving a certain look in the home. Homemaking is a service of love to those who live in and enter our home.

A homemaker’s mission is to emulate Jesus, who is preparing a place for us, who has created and called a people for Himself, who wants so much to feast in fellowship with a great multitude of people that He died to take the punishment for their sins and reconcile them to His Father. Heavenly glory is a homemaker’s vision. We work out small foretastes of Jesus’s work for us, presenting them to our family—and anyone else in our home—for their nourishment. As homemakers, our work is a practice, much like a doctor has a practice—work he repeats day in and day out, managing the well-being of the people in his care. If we need more skill in executing our routine tasks well, then it is helpful that they are so repetitive—we always have more opportunity to practice! The only way to get better at something is to do it over and over again, and housekeeping inherently requires us to do the same things over and over again. Instead of seeing this repetitiveness as a drag, we can choose to see it as an opportunity. I can improve because I am going to be practicing.

We tend to see repetition as a problem because we’re focused on being done. Our job as homemaker isn’t to be done with the work; it is to continually hit the reset button. Everyone knows what the reset button does to a computer. Sometimes you just need to hit reset. It fixes a lot of the problems, right? In the same way, doing the dishes, washing the sheets, cleaning the bathrooms—all these are just reset buttons, and it’s our job to make sure they each get pushed often enough that things continue running smoothly. The real point isn’t that we finish washing the dishes; the point is that the dishes are ready for the next meal. They’ve been used, so we hit reset.

A homemaker’s concern is to first make a home for her family, then to extend the joy and provision of that home out to where it is needed. We truncate the role of homemaker when we limit it to meals, laundry, scrubbing, and vacuuming.

What more valuable product is there to put out into the world than a family? That’s our mission.

Instead of calling mundane tasks pointless, I called them stewardship, ways to bless others.

I had practiced rejoicing in the repetition, not merely bearing it, and now the rejoicing was normal, not awkwardly forced.

The ideal home is a place of living, loving people, not of static scenes. Often, we attempt to control the chaos from the wrong end, cutting down the amount of life lived rather than increasing the amount of maintenance applied.

The goal of organization and planning is not to be in control or look put-together. The goal is to be equipped and ready to respond obediently to God in the moment as He sends needs our way.

We need to organize with the end—the primary purpose—in mind, and the end is this: We should pursue effective organization so that we can honor our commitments and responsibilities. We want to be people of integrity, and that means tracking our obligations and following through reliably on our duties. We also want to be good stewards of our time, stuff, and energy. Being organized is not a matter of appearance that can be documented by a photo, despite all the marketing out there that says otherwise. Being organized is another way of being responsible, of operating with integrity.

We are given many gifts—abilities, energy, homes, family, community, opportunities—and we are called to make the best use of them all. Organization is managing our resources to increase the good works we are available and able to accomplish. When we are organized, we are more available to serve at a greater capacity. When we manage our resources and follow through on our commitments, we are more open and engaged, helping our family and others as needs arise. We’re more confident and calmer in our choices, able to adapt as needed when we notice opportunities to serve. If we approach organization from a desire to serve others better rather than to make ourselves more impressive, we will fall into discouragement less often because our heart is in the right place. Our attitude will be organized.

A home is a deliberately chosen space that something occupies. When it’s in that space, it is “put away.” When it is not in that space, it is clutter. Decluttering, tidying, and organizing are always a dance between stuff and space. If there’s no space, then stuff has to go. If there’s stuff, it will occupy space, so it must be intentionally given space to occupy. If you aren’t going to give your stuff a place to belong, you need to get rid of it. There’s no other option.

We don’t want our attempts at organization to turn us into harpies. We want to bless our family with our efforts. As our children develop a variety of interests, they will need accessories, space, and mess. Our job isn’t to minimize these things, just to manage them as best we can because it’s all evidence of a good life being enthusiastically lived.