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May 31 - August 13, 2025
Instead of seeing the laundry as an endless pile she was supposed to conquer, she began thinking of it as a way to bless her family and allow them to be more serviceable in their day.
As she practiced not only better basic routines but better stories about her routines, her interpretation of her tasks changed. She was able to count herself successful, even if all the tasks weren’t checked off.
A functioning Christian family is so fundamental to God’s plan that one half of a married couple is devoted to cultivating it with all her creative and productive energy. The other half is then charged with providing for it and protecting it. According to Ephesians 5, a wife is the picture of the church, a living proclamation of the fruitfulness and beauty of the gospel.
If society is falling apart, it is because homes fell apart first. Society is not a replacement for families. Societies do not run in parallel with families. Societies are made of families. And families are made in homes.
Let us focus our whole selves on the gospel work of building families, homes, and communities. If we focus our efforts on building up healthy, happy people, the world will feel the impact—even if it never knows why it happened or where the change began.
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.
When we get so frustrated and irritated and single-minded that we can’t smile at our children and be amused by their foibles, we’re probably falling into the trap of self-importance. Self-reliance, self-importance, and self-righteousness are the fastest roads to burnout. The solution is to laugh the laugh of joy, of faith, of hope.
The point was always to give attention to the way we came together.
With my husband working from home, we meet and greet many, many times throughout the day. Even so, we are not to live like roommates nor like coworkers, passing in the hall, absorbed with our own selves. In the midst of a busy day full of good, productive, fruitful work, we are husband and wife. We kiss when we meet. 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. There will be no marriage in heaven because we will have the fullness, the completion of being
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She recognized that she resented her family needing things from her when she already had so much to do, so she began giving thanks for interruptions and changes.
God has used these challenges as a prompt to fix her eyes on Him so that she can run with endurance.
When things didn’t go as planned, Rachel started praying with thanksgiving to refocus on what faithfulness really means. She realized it’s not about checking things
but about obeying God no matter what happens.
Balance is not static equilibrium, but an active wobbling
Messes don’t indicate a problem to solve but simply where attention is needed next.
Try yourself to balance on one foot. Successful human balance is neither frozen nor motionless.
Our balance is always a wobble, and this is as it should
We can have balance because we are not our own source of stability. God is our rock, and our stability is found in Christ.
we can have a fundamental assurance, trust, and security—not in our ability to handle all things, but in God’...
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To be effective at home, with active families and busy lives, we have to be ready and willing to adjust.
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.
We’ve all experienced entropy. It’s a law of nature: if left to itself, everything tends toward disorder. Right after we’ve folded the towels, an infant crawls over them, spreading them around the room. We clean all the way to the corners in one area, only to find that the area we cleaned yesterday has been—heaven forbid—dirtied already. The grocery run we just made (or was it last week?) has been entirely consumed, and people are still hungry. Entropy gets us every time. When God cursed the ground, He set entropy into motion. Gardens grow weeds, but so do homes, relationships, plans, and
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We can choose a better attitude about entropy if we think of our housework and mothering as tending rather than Getting Things Done™️.
It is tending, caring, stewarding work, not project work.
Sure, we want all the things done so that we never have to make trade-offs, but it’s just not going to happen.
If we’re going to keep anything in a steady position so it doesn’t fall, let’s make it our attitude, not our chores. Keeping an even keel emotionally will keep the scales balanced, no matter what suffered in the day’s survival-mode skirmish. Having a balanced emotional life is the best kind of balanced life to live.
Overwhelm, Naomi discovered, is a feeling and a choice. She said, “I can choose to not feel overwhelmed, and I can choose a different story. But this life is what God gave me, so I must be able to do it in Him.”
“I have enough time to do the will of God,”
“Be an observer and experimenter, not an Eeyore,” and “Just get up and make dinner.”
“Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19–20).
We clean because we are people made clean, no longer unclean. We’ll either attempt to become more organized for God’s glory, grounded in gratitude, or for our own. Gratitude is God-centeredness and self-forgetfulness that works itself out in visible ways in our lives. It is demonstrated by action. Gratitude motivates and brings about action.
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.
When you’re grumpy, you can’t sing. If you start to sing anyway, your mind and heart are instantly affected by both the music and the words.
Music is a weapon, a shield, a uniting bulwark. Try it and see.
Thus, tasks were displaced on my daily card by an admonition. I wanted to look up and smile when a child entered the room. I wanted to listen with a cheerful demeanor when we spoke. I wanted them to happen upon a happy mom when they saw me. Smiling at them was on the same level as cooking dinner for them. One nourished their spirits while the other nourished their bodies.
“Smile and start” is one of my favorite mottos. It smashes together the two things that I think are most important in home management: smiling and starting.
We don’t want to, so we don’t, then we feel worse because we aren’t. We have to cut the cycle short by starting, even if we don’t feel like it, because we realize the feeling will follow.
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.
Smiling is the overlooked secret to a happy home. Mom looking into her children’s eyes and smiling at them is a tangible, easy way to make them feel loved. A wife smiling as her husband walks through the door sets a tone of love and comfort. When you aren’t sure what to do, smile at your people.
When we have “smile” on our to-do list instead of some project-oriented task, we’re reminded that it’s not all about getting things done. Our real job is to invest in people, and smiling at them is an important way to do that. Smiling is contagious for our children. They will catch and mimic what we model, so we should be conscious of our expressions.
All people, children included, want to be heard, seen, known, valued.
Smiling is a simple first step to giving them what they are seeking. Both smiling by default and looking them in the eye are ways of giving attention, of really looking and seeing, to communicate that we want them, love them, and know them.
she needed the constant reminder that she wasn’t supposed to be in control of everything.
She was just supposed to serve effectively where God had called her—in her home, with her family.
She started with brain dumps and a weekly overview planning sheet. Whenever she began to feel overwhelmed, she recognized it not only as a temptation, but also as an opportunity to choose faith instead of control. She’d write out her thoughts longhand, gaining perspective by taking her concerns to the Lord in prayer. After using brain dumps and pray...
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As she smiled at her children more, giving thanks in all things, she stressed less about their messes. She was able to regulate her attitude with the help of the Holy Spirit, and her sanctification affected everything else in their home. Instead of working toward achieving a clean house, she saw her work as simply getting the props set up for the next scene in their life.
