Homemaking 911

Let me share with you several practical tips to help you transform your life from overwhelmed to overjoyed!

Let’s open with prayer:

Heavenly Father,

Please be present with my reader.  I ask for encouragement for her family .  I pray for the words that I have prepared to honor you and be true to your Word.  Lord, if any of the things I share do not align with your Word, I pray that they would be quickly forgotten.  I pray the Holy Spirit will work in every reader so that you can begin a transforming work in her life and home.  In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

Our God is a God of order.  From Genesis, when he first placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God had a very deliberate plan. He knew that before animals were placed on the earth, they needed vegetation to sustain them.  He did not plant the Garden of Eden without a water source.  He did not haphazardly plan the hours in a day, or the seasons of the year.  Our days are limited to a twenty four hour period.  He created our bodies to require us to eat and sleep each day.  He designed the regular and predictable aging process.  Infants are not capable of walking and running before they are capable of being trained by their parents for safety.  There is deliberateness to every developmental stage in life. Yes, our precious Lord is a God of Order.

When you have a yearning inside of you toward order and beauty, pause and recognize that you are a being made in God’s image.  Our loving heavenly father placed that yearning inside of you and me.

Many of us struggle with chaos in our homes, yet long for order and the peacefulness and productivity we know could come from it.  But going from that ideal image to making it a reality is a bit of a stretch at times, isn’t it?

We are women living on the edge.  In the words of Richard Swenson, “Even our sentences are peppered with such words as time crunch, fast food, rush hour, frequent flyer, expressway, overnight delivery, and rapid transit.  The products and services we use further attest to our hurry:  we send packages Federal Express, use a long distance company called Sprint, manage our personal finances on Quicken, schedule our appointments in a DayRunner, diet with Slim-Fast, and swim in trunks made by Speedo…We live in a nanosecond culture, wheezing and worn out.”

If you stop by my house unannounced on some days, you will find that my house is just like many of yours.  Things are not always in place, children are not always on their prescheduled and laid out task.  Sometimes, I still call my husband and say I feel overwhelmed, and ask him to pick up some carry-out.  But I do know that there are many simple steps I can take, and that you can take to help eliminate the days of chaos and replace many of them with days of productivity, peace and order.

This is my prayer for today:

“…that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ-to the glory and praise of God.”

Philippians 1:9-11

To make this process easy to remember, I set this up like a mathematical formula:

Chaos

- Distractions

- Decisions

÷ Delegation

+ Goals

X Spiritual Disciplines

=Order

As you can see from this formula, there are two major things we can subtract from our home in order to increase order and peace.

Distractions and decisions.

Distractions

Ladies we are distracted by many things, perhaps too many to list today, but by eliminating our distractions we can gain clarity of vision and strength.

The classic example in the Bible of a distracted woman is Martha:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10: 38-42

What is the key phrase here I want you to see?  Martha was distracted.  She lost her focus and in a whirlwind of activity she took her eyes off her Lord and placed them upon herself!  No wonder she was so upset that she was willing to interrupt a teacher to complain.  I love how Beverly Bradley talks about this passage.  Martha was not a wicked woman; she had the heart of a servant.  She was opening her home to a room full of smelly, dirty, hungry men.  There were preparations to be made and no one was helping her.  The Lord did not answer her in an unkind rebuke, though.  Like the true gentleman that he is, he merely pointed out that her distractions were causing her to miss the best thing in life:  a relationship with Him, a chance to sit at the Savior’s feet.  Maybe He has been saying the same thing to you.

Let’s look also at Hebrews 12:1

“….Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us….” Here again the Lord is reminding us that there are things that hinder us in faith life and we are to throw them off.  I submit to you that these distractions are often just the things keeping you from having the home and school that you correctly desire.

If we are to identify distractions, of course we must first define what is our actual goal.  As a woman and a homemaker, I can glean a worthy goal right from the pages of scripture:

Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.

Titus 2:3-5

I like to think I still fall into the “younger woman” category, so my primary goal should be to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to my husband so that no one will malign the word of God.

But God’s word has some other things to tell us as well.

Everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way

1 Corinthians 14:40

Also consider that the Lord is expecting us to teach our children.

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:5-9

Can you see that that the Bible does not say to send your kids to Sunday school and hope for the best?  Can you see a picture that God gave us?  Our children must be at our side in order to receive daily, consistent instruction. Time spent with your children doing any task, whether it is chores, social activities, volunteer work, sports, commuting, or fun activities, there is always an opportunity for training and instruction.

We have identified some of our goals, now, what are some of the things distracting you from your goals?  I have listed some of these things here for you.  After you have read it, think about your own distractions and jot them in the lines I have left blank for you.

Computer – The computer is a huge distraction.  Get together with you spouse and set reasonable limits.  If it helps you, use a timer, and keep one at each computer.  Protect your family at all times from the filth on the PC by not having any internet access in closed off areas.  Consider a “children’s” computer with no internet access.

Telephone – listen:  learn how to turn off ringers, set family limits (no phone during meals or prayer time, consider phones off during the school day) remember that to reduce Chaos, we must eliminate some distractions.

Driving to and fro – Think about all your errands.  If you can, plan one errand day for every two weeks.  I have a little list I keep for all the things I *could* do on errand day, then when it is coming up, I review the list.  The night before I get everything into the car that I am able so that I can be ready to get up and out as soon as possible.

Library -I love the library.  A great idea is to  train kids to only use one library card for checking out books, and let one child be responsible for printing the list from the library, gathering all books and getting them ready the night before you go to the library.

Television – If the television is a distraction in your home, set limits, let them earn TV time, eliminate cable, satellite, etc as you and your husband agree.  Having the children earn their television time also helps eliminate decisions, which is our next topic.  If they have to earn the time, then you are not constantly being nagged to permit them to watch television or movies.

Anything with a plug or batteries!  You know what I’m talking about here!  These items are considered a privilege, lamps at night, game boys, radios, cd players, noisy toys.  If you are finding yourself more and more distracted, make some limitations on how these things can be used.

Maybe, like Martha you are distracted by your service.

Now, take a moment to jot down the other major distractions that came to your mind.

To hear this workshop in it’s entirety, you can purchase an MP3 of this workshop in our store.

Also, our book, Chaos to Order, 25 Tools Bringing Organization to Your Home may be a benefit to you.

To read the next installment, go here.

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