Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done

by Mystie Winckler

Simply because homemaking is not something anyone can learn to do in five minutes. Our unseen disrespect for homemaking as a vocation affects even those of us who choose it. We see it when we hanker after titles like Domestic Engineer or Chief Operations Officer. Such titles imply that homemaking is inferior and needs some beefing up for the resumé. We see it when we discuss how much a mom would earn if she were paid for her various tasks. Such calculations defend homemaking while falling prey to the assumption that everything ought to have a monetary value attached to it.

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.

Worry is best handled by prayer. Prayer is like a vacuum running over the crumbs of worry. Sometimes, after my kids vacuum, you can’t tell they’ve done it. Most of the crumbs are still there. I call them back and remind them that they’re not done until the crumbs are gone. It’s the same with us, our prayers, and our worries. 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.

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.

We want housework to be something we can check off and be done with, but that’s simply not its nature. We will never complete everything all at once. The fact that housework won’t be done in this life need not discourage us. Instead, we can choose to practice, to make progress, and to give up on our false hopes of being “done.”

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.

God made the world for a purpose. He made us for a purpose. God’s purpose for us is to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever. We begin that forever call here and now, in this life, in the midst of our day-to-day work.

The home, biblically and historically, is not primarily a place for hygge, for coziness, for retreat. The home is where the primary action of culture happens; so much action happens here that it spills out into the wider world.

Your responses determine what kind of character you are. If you imagine yourself as a kind, loving, diligent mother, then you have to be kind even when the children are not, loving even when the children are resistant, and diligent even when you’re tired. Reading and thinking about virtues is not adequate; virtues are developed through practice.

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.

Adulthood, however, is about having the responsibility and maturity to do the right thing whether you feel like it or not. Adulthood is playing the long game, acting according to the big picture without getting sidetracked by fleeting distractions.

The definition of good time management isn’t doing all the things on our list; it’s doing what we’re called to do.

We often choose “spontaneity” as a method because our plans never seem to work out, and we assume the time spent planning was wasted.

Too often, our plans are wishful thinking on paper, not preparation for our real life. Instead, we need to make plans in light of our current reality, using them not as a tool of control against others, but as a tool to control our own moment-by-moment choices, even if the moment’s choice is to switch gears and take care of an urgent, unexpected need.

If “clean house” conjures up pictures of completely empty counters, decorated bookshelves, never-smudged windows, and spotless floors, then you are setting yourself up for frustration and failure.

A home that is clean but serving no one is barren, wasted, useless.

A dirty, chaotic home is not a useful tool, either. If we can never find what we need, if our bathrooms can’t welcome a visitor, if no one has clean clothes to wear out of the house, then we aren’t stewarding our resources to anywhere near their potential.

The best way to build routines is to connect them to the existing patterns of our day. By acknowledging our current reality we can slowly build up routines that fit our family’s situation and needs.

Decision fatigue is real, and routines are the first line of defense for homemakers. So much of the work we do will need to be done again that we might as well make it routine, regular, and repetitive, saving our decision-making energy for the situations that develop on the fly.

However, when we start our days with too much get-up-and-go, we risk crashing and burning by lunch. We don’t want each day to be a repeated boom-and-bust cycle, with a morning boom and afternoon bust. We need a just-right-sized morning routine to establish momentum for the day. Similarly, the way we end one day shapes how we begin the next. We can collapse into bed, ignoring the fact that we’ll have to be up to tackle the same struggles tomorrow, escaping into oblivion, or we can take a few minutes to set ourselves up for a strong start the next day.

Morning and evening routines should be short and sweet, the bare minimum your household requires for just-get-by maintenance.

Our house is not a showpiece that matters simply because it exists. It is our husband, our children, and ourselves that matter because we exist, because we are made in God’s image. Our house only matters because it is the stage that the drama of our lives is played upon. If the stage is impeding the action—either by being too messy or too clean—it’s a problem.

When we accept our role as stage manager, we’re able to keep up a cheerful attitude in the midst of life’s dramas.

Letting people into the middle of our lives fosters relationships and connection in a way that carefully styled dinner parties never can.

Homes are meant for hospitality. Hospitable homes are tools used in the formation of people, not trophies to be kept beautiful. Although our homes are not trophies, we also don’t want them to be pigsties because we aren’t raising pigs.

Hospitality isn’t something we do once the house is clean and we have our act together. Hospitality is loving others in and with our homes; love is the whole point.

Hospitality is not the same as entertaining. Entertaining is about impressing others and making ourselves look good; hospitality is about serving others and sharing life.

Warm. Friendly. Generous. Yes, that’s right, part of the very definition of the word hospitality has to do not with your home, but with your attitude, your disposition, your heart.

Love is a sacrificial action more than it is a feeling.

Maybe our kids or even our husband won’t appreciate the behind-the-scenes work we do that “magically” makes bathrooms “stay” clean or causes clean clothes to appear in drawers, but that’s part of the nature of blessing someone.

The beauty of changing your tone to reflect what it ought to be rather than what comes naturally to you in the moment is that, when done in love without bitterness, we find our natural tone and mood are lifted as well. As Scripture says, “Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered” (Prov. 11:25).

Women function as relational glue. Therefore, we will be satisfied and joyful the more we embrace and the better we employ this role. Men can’t have family without women; we bind fathers to their children. Women have always been the social force connecting communities—made obvious in the difference between the American colonists who came as families and those who came as marauding conquerors.

The classical concept of happiness saw it as a fruit of virtue, of excellence. When we live rightly, fulfilling the design and mission we were created for, we will be happy. The hedonists are wrong: we were not created for material pleasure. Therefore, ease and affluence will not bring happiness. The Marxists are wrong: we are not the sum of our economic contribution or our political power. Having more power or more money will not make us happy.

When we laugh with our kids, we build our relationship with them. Laughter brings us out of our self-centeredness and gives us perspective. Smiles, jokes, and laughter build the home atmosphere we want far faster and far better than vacuumed floors and dusted baseboards.

If you can’t laugh when your children act like children, it’s a sign you need to dig deep and get help from your husband or friends to climb out of your critical mental rut. Simply looking for and laughing at the funny side of life is one way out of burnout, fatigue, and overwhelm.

If we come into each other’s company without regard for one another, we are not telling the truth about Jesus and His bride. If we’re each wrapped up in our own projects and our own separate lives, we’re living like roommates rather than like husband and wife.

How we relate as husband and wife is designed to be a pictured proclamation of the gospel. Every marriage is either truthful or lying about Jesus and His body, His bride, the church.

We are not seeking a frozen, perfected balance as if our life is a set of scales. We are in a human balancing act much more like a ballerina, who has strengthened her muscles enough to hold a position or change as needed, but whose body is always making micro-corrections. The more we practice our core responses, the stronger they get and the easier they become. The stronger we get, the more we make it look effortless or even static. Yet we will always know, we will always feel, the tiny compensations being made as we go. Our balance is always a wobble, and this is as it should be.

We can have balance because we are not our own source of stability. God is our rock, and our stability is found in Christ. No matter how much we wobble, visibly or not, we can have a fundamental assurance, trust, and security—not in our ability to handle all things, but in God’s ability to handle all things.

A key part of wobbling in balance is to not grip our methods or plans too firmly, to not think that organizing means controlling anything other than ourselves. To be effective at home, with active families and busy lives, we have to be ready and willing to adjust. Time spent planning isn’t time deciding how the future will unfold. Planning is simply preparing ourselves to handle what comes. When we plan with our ultimate goal in mind—building up people—we’re able to wisely and effectively adjust to the unexpected. We’re able to wobble in balance.

Our motivation is love for our family, gratefulness for the gift of said kitchen, and anticipation of the service yet to be accomplished in it. As we clean, we notice blessing upon blessing surrounding us. Noticing blessing is encouraging; it’s a spur, a reward.

What if the purpose of our homemaking was not to have an organized house that is always clean, but to be a means of abounding in the work of the Lord?

The thanksgiving God produces in us and we direct back to Him is not simply a feeling; it is a motivator, a mover-and-shaker.

You can’t be grateful to the world in general, to the universe or fate. The universe doesn’t care. It is not a receiver of thanks. Gratitude is not a mere feeling nor simply positive thoughts. Thankfulness must be expressed for particular things to particular people. The Creator of the universe is a Person. He can be thanked, and He should be.

Growing in gratitude is not simply about feeling good feelings or listing things we enjoy, but about paying attention to God’s hand in each situation and walking in faith. Gratitude is a concrete practice of trust and belief in God’s goodness and a practice of kindness to others.

Gratitude, especially when put to melody, banishes our bad attitudes and guards our hearts from its attacks.

Sometimes a bad mood is brought on by our own underlying procrastination. We don’t want to, so we don’t, then we feel worse because we aren’t.

We can choose to smile on demand. Consciously choose the emotions you display, and the outward act of the will can work its way inward to change our emotions. If we find ourselves in need of a little attitude organization, one simple step we can take is to breathe deeply, then smile. Organizing our attitude is something we must continually do, and smiling is a simple tactic we can make use of that is good for us and our family.

When you aren’t sure what to do, smile at your people.

Our children’s pestering chatter is often a sign that they aren’t getting what they know they need: attention. And they will keep knocking, knocking, knocking until they get it, or they despair.