Cultivating a Peaceful Home Atmosphere
I wish I could say that my home is always peaceful and orderly, that my kids never squabble, and that it is always a place of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (the fruits of the spirit). I have a vision for my home– that these fruits of the spirit abound within it; that they spill over into the way we live, work, rest, and be. I want my home to be a loving and peaceful place, nurturing and restful, as well as joyful, fun and full of laughter. I know there must be hard times in every family, and that God wants us to navigate these times and grow closer to Him, and to one another. But when my children are old and grown and have adult lives of their own, I want them to reflect back on their childhood with a glow of happy memories, and think, “what good times we had together”. I want their memories to be a tapestry of the ordinary and the special moments woven irrevocably together into something wonderful. As a wife, mother, and homemaker, God has written this beautiful vision upon my heart, but I fall short every day. Luckily for me, God does not.
If this is the kind of home life I desire, then I must pay very close attention to what kind of atmosphere I keep in our home. A wife and mother has a tremendous influence over the home atmosphere, and I do not merely mean over the physical orderliness of her home, but more importantly over that aspect which cannot be seen, but only felt. I am not going to say that our physical environment does not affect us, because I believe that it does, but our mindset affects our home atmosphere far more than what our home is like physically. Our mindset is much more important in the shaping of our atmosphere than the physical state of our home. If we as mother’s have bad attitudes and are grumpy and unpleasant toward those within our homes, then our home will feel unpleasant, no matter how nice they look externally.
So what must I do to have the kind of home atmosphere we desire? I must surrender my desire to control and instead be faithful to the work of each moment. For it is this very scrambling for control that causes us to lead lives that are full of frenzied activity, and anxious striving rather than lives that are peaceful and joyful. We are trying to do it all, but we were never meant to. It can be easy to think that if we just work a little harder, if we get a little more organized, if we get a little more done, things will start to fall into place. We will achieve the results we want to achieve, and our children and situations will “turn out” how we want them to. But this is not the case. Anxious and fretful striving will not bear good fruits. After all, we were never in control in the first place, and the illusion that we are leads us to anxious and frenzied action as we try to do it all ourselves.
It is such a blessing that it isn’t all up to us. We can heave a sigh of relief; we don’t have to do it all. We don’t have to be in control. We get to lay down our burdens, and God will take care of them. For Christ invites us to come to him with our burdens: “Come to me all you that labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: And you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28-30) Perhaps this is what God means when he says that we must become like little children. After all, for the most part, children, especially very young children, do not fret about tomorrow, but rather, simply do and be in the moment that God has given them.
This kind of surrender does not mean that we can be lazy, or that we don’t have to make any kind of organized and responsible plan, but rather that we must be all that much more faithful to the work of each moment. We must use our time carefully and well because it is God’s time and not our own. However, we should not fret or be anxious even when we mess up, but rather bring our mistakes to God, and try again. After all, God is much more powerful than our mistakes. We should make a plan to use our time well, but not fret when more important things (like people) interrupt our plans. As Elizabeth Elliot says, we must be faithful to doing “the next right thing,” and leave the rest to God.
