Pursue hospitality at home – Homemaking Skill #6

With all the magazines and tv shows showcasing pristine, elegant homes with clean lines and bright colors, we have an unrealistic vision for our job as homemakers.

The home we are making is not the stuff of hgtv. Our homemaking is not supposed to be about creating monuments to our taste.

Instead, we make homes that foster humanity, life, joy. Guess what? That’s messy!

So homemaking is about facilitating the life and joy of the humans in our homes. Our homemaking is about true hospitality.

My new book, Simplified Organization: Learn to Love What Must Be Done, is all about the six skills of homemaking, and half of them are mental-emotional skills for a reason. We need to change our approach, our mindset, about housework before we’ll find joy and satisfaction in it – but joy and satisfaction — and traction — are totally possible, no matter how bad your attitude has been about homemaking up until this point.

Don’t miss the rest of this series:

• “Tell yourself true stories“
• “Stop your inner tantrums“
• “Take baby steps everyday”
• “Invest your time wisely”
• “Establish small routines”

What is your why?

Pretty much every goal-setting guru will tell you that you have to start with a why before you have any chance of achieving your goals. People need a mission, a meaning, to feel motivation for and satisfaction in their work.

What is the point of dishes and laundry and sweeping floors and making yet another meal? Why do I clean the bathrooms and go grocery shopping and vacuum the crumbs off the couch?

The default messaging of the world is that we do this work because we drew the short straw. The kids, our husband–people in our home that are definitely not us–have made a mess and someone has to deal with it, because they sure won’t.

Do you hear the ingrained bad attitude there?!

That’s not ok. It’s not ok because it’s not true.

We do all those jobs that many despise because that is the work of nurturing, growing, and loving people. Our mission is to raise up people – from the womb or just for a single meal – who love God and are as invested in living out their faith as we are.

Living out our faith looks like foolishness to the world, so we should not be surprised that it garners us no respect and quite a bit of scorn.

We have a mission

God created us, saved us, and told us to make disciples who obey His Word. This mission involves 3 duties:

1. Knowing His Word – How can we ourselves obey it much less how can we teach it to others if we don’t know what it says?
2. Obeying His Word – We begin by obeying out of gratitude and from a heart and will radically transformed by God’s grace. A transformed heart will result in a transformed life. It doesn’t work the other way around, a transformed life doesn’t make a transformed heart, but if we start by knowing our Bible, we’ll know that God saves us and then makes demands of us that He Himself equips us to live out.
3. Teach His Word – Even living as a faithful Christian wife is proclaiming the gospel, whether or not anyone recognizes it. Mothers disciple their children and housewives insist upon love and manners under their roof. The law of kindness, the law of God, is to be on our tongues.

Being the very heart of our homes.

Marriage is a picture of the gospel and women are the Church in the picture. Our every move is telling the world what people who are saved act like in the world, what Jesus’ blood does to a person, what effect love brings. That’s why Scripture says women are to be homemakers so that the word of God is not reviled.

The Church is a home, a refuge, in the world. Every woman’s mission is to be and to create little refuges, little sanctuaries, where love is given and required.

We offer hospitality – a refuge, a place of becoming more whole – in our homes. That is what our home is for and that mission is so big that it requires someone to be devoted to it.

We are to be the convivial, hospitality presence in our homes. That is our mission and purpose as homemakers, and it is satisfying, vital, glorious.

Grow your homemaking skills

Make 2024 the year of embracing cheerful, competent homemaking.

Join us for Simplified Organization Community Coaching, a 36-week baby step approach to making over your home management methods and mindset.