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February 14 - May 22, 2025
The Only Kind of Control We Have Is Self-Control
Being organized boils down to exercising self-control, not situation control. We control our follow-through, our actions, our responses to messes. Self-control is responsibility. Attached to it are all the other fruits of the Spirit God is working in us, including joy. Happiness doesn’t come when we have everything lined up just so. It comes when we are walking in cheerful reliance on God to complete the good works He has begun in us.
Homemaking and hospitality mean offering what you have, welcoming people into your real life, not putting on a show to impress anyone.
Organization isn’t only about having dinner ready for unexpected company; it’s also about being open-handed and unperturbed when your day takes a different turn than you expect.
Simple living means you have direction, that all aspects of your life cohere around a single-minded focus. Everything you do moves your primary mission forward. Simplicity means your life is not compartmentalized. It means your energies are not scattershot across a wide field, aiming at no particular target.
To simplify, however, is to make your life an integrated whole where nothing interferes with the integrity of that whole. To simplify is to ensure that the different elements of our schedule, of our work, of our interactions, harmonize and build one another up.
The truth is, we don’t know what will happen today, much less what will happen in a year, five years, or a lifetime. We don’t know how long our lifetime will be. What we do know is that we are where God has placed us, that God has given us duties to perform here and now, and that He is using those duties to further equip us for duties He will give us in the future. Because He has called us, given us a vocation in which to serve Him, we can know whether or not we are on the right track. We simply ask, are we accepting our work with joy and gratitude, or moping and complaining about it?
In an age of instant gratification, we easily fall into a bad attitude about work. We seek out routines, habits, and plans that promise to reduce the time and effort involved in our work. Although routines and habits do make things easier, they do so by reducing the mental effort of decision-making and by increasing our strength and stamina through practice. The work itself will always take time and energy—and that’s OK.
I found that choosing minimal energy in my responsibilities led to putting forth minimal effort anywhere unless I got that deadline-panic rush. Once I began to be convicted that my home was worth my time and energy and started applying myself, I found I had more to go around, not less. My worries about burnout were unfounded. More of God’s will in my life was better, not worse.
Productivity is not efficiency but faithful fruitfulness As Christians, we are called to do hard work, but never by ourselves. God promises to help every Christian who is engaged in the pursuit of godliness. He is not going to do it for us, but He promises to do it with us. That is why we do not surrender to despair when we fail—and we frequently do fail—in our pursuit of sanctification. God will give us the grace, and He promises His help. —R. C. Sproul, Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith
As homemakers, we need to own the home as a creative endeavor we can maximize, expand, and figure out. It takes strategy and insight. It takes focus, dedication, and long hours. It takes the long view. The home is a business that is prerequisite to all other businesses, because the home’s business is people.
The difference between productivity feeling bad or good is not the work being done but our feelings about the work. This is why our attitudes are so important to our organization. We have things we need to get done every day. We have people we need to build up. We have homes to manage. We have good works God has called us to. It is possible to take joy in those good works—all of them—because of the One Who sends them.
A productive day is one wherein we respond in trust, with steadfastness and faithfulness, to the circumstances God sends us. That is how He produces in us the fruit of His Spirit, which is the productivity He desires. Our productivity, our fruitfulness in our homes, is not about measurable successes.
We can find joy and satisfaction in each cup of cold water given, each face washed and kissed, each meal set on the table, each sweeping of the floor, because these are our deposits in the investment of...
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When we adopt fruitfulness as our metaphor for productivity, it realigns not only our motivation, but also our attitudes.
Fruitfulness is a perfect metaphor for productivity because what God is working in us is a harvest of the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits are never abstract or theoretical. Each smile at a child, each mess cleaned up, each squabble adjudicated counts as a fruitful step on our path of sanctification.
But the work of the morning is educating my children. The oven, the pantry, the dust can wait—and will likely wait for weeks. Spending my time noticing all those areas, allowing them to nag me and pull away my attention, is a distraction and a temptation. Productivity is not about getting everything done; it’s about getting the right things done.
It can feel productive to notice something and immediately start working on it, but I’ve had to cultivate the self-discipline to stay on target rather than veer off wherever my attention happens to wander.
Inspiration and enthusiasm are good servants when they follow the train of diligence. However, if I let them drive the train, I can spend the whole day being busy at unimportant work while neglecting my family. Diligent, prudent, fruitful productivity simply shows up to do that day’s work. The more I’ve practiced showing up and starting, whether I feel like it or not, the more often I do end up feeling like it.
Much of our unhappiness and negativity arises from not taking our thoughts captive as Scripture commands. We allow any grumblings that enter our head to take up residence. We call these thoughts and feelings authentic and real because they happened to us. These default responses demand to be stars in our story, shaping our perception of reality. However, just because a thought or feeling comes naturally does not automatically make it worth our attention or necessary to our story. We need to ask: Are these thoughts true? If we want truth to become increasingly authentic in our lives, then we
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The temptation to become irritable is precisely the story-moment wherein patience is developed. Patience is not developed when nothing occurs that irritates or frustrates us. Patience comes when we exercise it, and we can’t exercise it without the difficulty that demands it.
We have to be willing to call ourselves out when we catch ourselves grumbling about our life. All complaints are ultimately ingratitude to God, unbelief that He is doing good to and for us. But we shouldn’t merely accuse ourselves; accusation alone would leave us stuck in a guilt cul-de-sac. We repent of all complaining and grumbling, which means turning away from it. We must replace any internal lies with truth. What is the truth of the situation? Repeat that intentionally.
What kind of a character am I in my children’s lives? What kind of a character am I in my husband’s narrative? What kind of a character am I in my church community? What is my character in the stories of other people’s lives? The wicked stepmother? The nagging wife? The gossipy friend? The kind of character I am in other people’s stories tells what kind of character I truly have.
An ungrateful, dissatisfied heart leads us to glaring misreadings of our story, just like the Israelites. To avoid this, we have to be intentional and proactive, rooting out complaints before they taint our perspective. However, you can’t just remove complaints. You have to replace them.
We will tell a story about our life. Every complaint-based story must be replaced with a gratitude-based story. How does faith reinterpret this same situation? How does love spin this circumstance? Choose that story to tell. It will feel awkward and maybe even fake at first, but rejecting a grumbling attitude and replacing it with a grateful one is worth the discomfort. Over time, a rejoicing heart becomes our norm as we practice gratitude and walk in Christ’s forgiveness, extending it as we have received it. When we’ve become accustomed to rejoicing, our interpretive grid is tuned to truth,
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However, in order to meditate on the truth, we have to know truth. To know truth, we have to be filling our mind with truth. Daily Bible reading and prayer are essential to an aligned and vibrant attitude. Without it, we are tossed on the winds of our emotions. We need the centering and stabilizing of God’s Word for our heart and mind.
We need to be in the Word enough that it is shaping the way we think, shaping the metaphors we use to understand life and the world. We organize our attitude by consciously choosing our speech and pruning our words. This goes both ways, too. We influence what we meditate on with what we say. We also influence what we talk about by what we think about.
Sometimes, especially in our current house—a small, temporary rental—I think that I wouldn’t be bothered by the gear if only I had a mud room so the boots and coats weren’t shed in the living room. I think that if only I had more counter space or a bigger sink, then my kitchen wouldn’t be so cluttered and cramped. Yet I know that we are where God wants us. I know He’s actively working in my heart and my life, so I am to be satisfied in Him, regardless of my circumstances. If the apostle Paul—who faced beatings and jail time—can learn to be content in whatever situation, then I, too, can learn
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The only kind of control we’re supposed to have is self-control If you live for yourself, your comfort, your glory, your fame, you will miss out on your very purpose. God created you to bring glory to him. —Tim Challies, Do More Better
The only kind of control you’re supposed to have is self-control.
We can choose our attitudes, repent of our whining, and cheer up because God gives us the grace and strength to do so.
Every act of patience is a drop of sap helping to grow our fruit. Our children are baby trees of their own, not the fruit on our tree. We’re in the same orchard together, but the fruit we must be looking to increase is the fruit of the Spirit within our own lives. They, too, will grow the same fruits through the Spirit’s work in them.
Let us be on the watch for opportunities of usefulness; let us go about the world with our ears and our eyes open, ready to avail ourselves of every occasion for doing good; let us not be content till we are useful, but make this the main design and ambition of our lives. —Charles Spurgeon
Often, the time we spend researching or brainstorming new systems is actually time spent trying to find a substitute for doing the work. We want a system that, once in place, will make life easy. Or we spend our time figuring out the very best way to do something because we’re focused on creating something impressive or being someone impressive.
Fighting against baby steps is choosing perfectionism and procrastination. Instead, we need to remember: Some is better than none. Make it better, not perfect. Progress over perfection. The point of our work at home is never to complete everything all at once, but to continuously do something to make life better. Choose baby steps to make real progress. Progress doesn’t come after we’ve figured out the perfect system. Progress comes one step at a time.
When we begin to take action more consistently, a weird thing happens with our time. Even though we do more, we have more time. If you feel like there’s too much to do and you need to cut back, try cutting back on the internal whining first. Make a list, choose one thing that will make a difference, and spend ten minutes doing it. Ten minutes is enough time to make progress, but it’s also super easy to blink and have ten minutes disappear. When we become more accustomed to using our ten minutes productively, in directing them intentionally, we discover that we do, indeed, have plenty of time
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Change happens incrementally, not overnight. Build slowly, and the lifestyle change will grow and flourish, taking root in a more lasting and meaningful way than an overnight installation of a whole new lifestyle. Stick with the small changes. You’re neither too good for them nor too far gone. They are meaningful. They don’t devalue or deny the vision. Instead, they are the means to get you there, step by step.
Because we are limited—in time, in resources, in energy—our to-do list also needs to be limited.
Every day, we evaluate and make the best intentional choices we can. The limit of three tasks reminds us of our finitude. We cannot do all we want to do. We need a to-do list, not a want-to-do list. Choosing three tasks forces us to prioritize and focus on what needs to be done rather than what we wish we could do.
When we’re working to increase our effectiveness, it’s important to see progress rather than failure. Too often, we only notice what we didn’t do in a day, which brings down our attitude and energy. When we complete our list of three, we are forced to recognize that we did what needed to be done. We’re able to call it a good day and end it satisfied.
Time is a gift God gives us to render back to Him in grateful praise
If you want to be organized, write it down, right away, every time.
There is no such thing as time management. There’s only self-management. You don’t use your time better and end up with more, though there are things we can do to maximize our use of the time we have.
As mothers, we are caretakers, which means our time is not our own to use at our discretion and arrange as we please. We have to remain flexible and responsive in order to mother well. Because raising our children is our top priority, they are not interruptions. They aren’t getting in the way of our work when they need us. They—and their needs—are the work.
It’s easy to see our children’s needs as something we have to get out of the way before we can do the things we need to do. Our biggest time management hurdle is not arranging our life so that we can accomplish our to-do list, but rather, arranging our to-do list so that we can pay attention to our life.
The definition of good time management isn’t doing all the things on our list; it’s doing what we’re called to do.
What if all days are home days? What if the home is your work? What if you’re surrounded by your work everywhere you turn? How can we take Sunday off, right smack in the middle of everything that needs to be done, and while people still insist on eating and making messes?
Yes, a Sabbath should be a day of rest, but we tend to start with our own expectations instead of with faith. We want the day to look like our version of rest. We want the house to be clean and calm and peaceful. In fact, we demand that it must be before we make it a day of rest, so we scramble and scramble and never get there. True rest is by faith, not by sight. It is obeying first, trusting that God will come through and make it all work. Maybe I don’t need to understand what perfect obedience looks like before I begin. After all, Christ is my perfect obedience.
It’s not that the work disappears or that I’m earning a reward for obeying God’s Law. Starting the week with a day of rest is a tangible, visible practice of offering to God the first fruits of my time and trusting Him for my needs—including trust for Monday morning cheerfulness and energy. When the Lord’s Day is prioritized and taken in faith, those Martha jobs on Monday are not fretful and fussy but joyful service, informed by Mary’s focus.
Intervals are the key to a mindset shift that allows us to move forward toward our goals in bite-size, reasonable iterations rather than waiting for the stars to align or for our motivation to pull us together. It’s a grid to be realistic about our time and put some blinders on in order to focus just on the next steps. It’s a way to be aware of current commitments and accept them rather than procrastinate.
