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May 31 - August 13, 2025
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.
Where once I might have silently fumed, now I smile at the “disaster,” which is just evidence of the abundance of life being lived in our home.
The adult maintains security and stability by holding the line of what is right, regardless of anyone’s current emotional state.
When we jump on them, pester and harp, and then switch it off immediately if someone walks in the door, we’ve got a clue—there’s a problem.
We can do it as soon as the Spirit nudges us that we’re being fussy.
We don’t have to be trapped by the whims of our moods. We
In fact, the most common self-care activities used to be called “disciplines.” They were merely a part of being ready, in season and out, to serve faithfully.
More important than making your two-year-old eat broccoli is making yourself eat well. More important than stopping a two-year-old tantrum-in-progress is stopping—or better yet, preventing—a tantrum of your own, whether the tantrum is internal, pouty and sulky, or expressed in more socially nuanced and acceptable ways.
If you feel like there’s too much to do and you need to cut back, try cutting back on the internal whining first.
We have to remain flexible and responsive in order to mother well. Because raising our children is our top priority, they are not interruptions.
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.
We’re giving up the wishful thinking, giving up the total life overhauls, and giving up trying to make life go our way; instead, we’re looking at what we are actually responsible for and making those things our priorities, cheerfully choosing them day in and day out.
The Sabbath is a day assigned to stop our striving to get ahead and remember that every good gift comes from God, not our own efforts.
Start your weekly review routine with fifteen minutes to prepare for the week ahead.
The difficulty is in choosing to use it for a weekly review instead of zoning out on random internet searches, Amazon-browsing, or social media scrolling.
We can’t do that moment by moment, so we must carve out fifteen minutes or so at the end of the week to pull back and process.
Our time isn’t our own to decorate the way we want, arranging it just so to get the right effect. Our time is a limited resource, and we will be satisfied in how we spent our days only if we spent them not daydreaming about getting in control, but rolling up our sleeves and digging into the good works God has put in front of us to do.
Housework is never done. We make the checkmark, but the task returns the very next day or week—maybe even the same day or hour.
Our homes are tools to be used for the real goal of loving our families and serving the people God brings through our door
clean house exists for the good of people.
I love to attempt a new set of routines from scratch. However, these routines are doomed from the beginning because they’re based on wishful thinking rather than reality.
By acknowledging our current reality we can slowly build up routines that fit our family’s situation and needs. How are you currently starting your day? When do you normally break for meals or transition to other activities? These
Routines remove the need to rehash every detail in our minds in order to decide what to do next.
Our abilities, our endurance, and our skills build up over time with routine practice.
Don’t try to shoehorn a new life into old routine structures; stretch and adapt your routines to fit your new circumstances.
We can always build from there as we improve, and, just as importantly, we can return to the minimum viable option when (not if) life goes haywire.
We begin either by preparing and executing or by lounging and lazing. Very often, the way we begin is the way we carry out the rest of our day.
Similarly, the way we end one day shapes how we begin the next.
Try selecting three tasks for the morning and three tasks for the evening that keep your home ready for action.
Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs at all but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom. —Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a Housekey
If those people make a mess—a physical mess, an emotional mess, or any other kind of mess—it’s not frustrating our goal or ruining our home. It’s giving us the opportunity to use our home for its purpose: mending, serving, building. 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.
With hospitality as a goal instead of a garnish and our homes as tools instead of trophies, we can see the evidence of people being built up in our homes as successes rather than frustrations.
The habit of hospitality includes but is much broader than having people over for dinner. It means inviting people into our lives—even the people who live in our houses. It is not enough to simply share a roof with people. We need to share a life—a full life, a conversational life—with them. Yes, it means more work, but that’s what we’re here for; the work is good.
The habit of hospitality will shape all our interactions.
Hospitality is a Christian duty and calling, and it is about showing love rather than demonstrating how put together we are.
Particularly when we are preparing to welcome dinner guests, it is all too easy to get short and snippy and frustrated with the children God has given to us as long-term guests.
Tearing them down with our words or actions is not a good way to start off a day of hospitality.
If hospitality is building up the body of Christ, it must begin within our own families and then overflow to others. Otherwise, it is likely not true Christian hospitality but something we do so that others will think well of us. It is a cover for our insecurities rather than a genuine offering of ourselves to others.
Pursue hospitality. It’s a command. It’s a duty. But it doesn’t mean we need to have people over for dinner every week. Well, except for our people—we feed them every week, every day—three times a day, even. That’s hospitality, too.
To give with grace is to give without looking for appreciation, fully satisfied in performing loving service regardless of receiving credit.
When they’re old enough, it’s even more gracious and merciful long-term to bring the kids along to help. Clean clothes are just as loving and magical if the kids help with the process—plus, they learn how to get clean clothes from dirty ones, which is valuable experience.
Like it or not, moms set the tone of the home. After all, our children—for a significant portion of their lives—spend most of their waking hours with us. From us, they learn their communication patterns, their response habits, their work ethic.
However, when God works to refine us, our children will also reap blessings from our sanctification.
Manners are love displayed in little things.
We can rejoice in the repetition of life
Housework is not the kind of thing that is ever really “done” in this sense. Wanting the laundry to be done once and for all is to want laundry to be something other than what it is. By its very nature, laundry must be done regularly, over and over. If we’re working hard with the goal of “finishing” it, then there is no hope. We can only be frustrated because laundry will always return, and rather quickly. Instead, laundry—and all the other chores, too—must be one of those things we just keep plugging away at. Sometimes there is more, sometimes there is less, sometimes we’re keeping up, and
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Just like the goal of the laundry is not to have it completed, so the goal of any housekeeping job is not for it to be completed. Laundry, dishes, and dusting teach us about life itself. Life is full of ongoing work that we continue to do because it continues to accrue. As we continually do the repetitive work of our home, we can learn that we also must continually do the work of our heart, which won’t be static and stay clean until Jesus returns. The outside work mirrors the inside work and vice versa. In both, we can plug away daily in ten-minute chunks, content with faithful plodding.
It’s so annoying when parenting applies to us. It generally turns out that we need character training just as much (or more) than our kids.
Not only will the laundry never be finished (and remember, it’s not supposed to be), it also fluctuates dramatically. Our job as homemakers is not to figure out automations (that is, plans or systems or routines) that generate equal results, day after day and week after week. Instead, our job is to live responsively, dancing the dance of home life.
