The Importance of Being Homemakers

So many times, as some of us stay at home moms go about our lives, we run into the opinion that women who stay at home, who spend much of their time on taking care of babies and children, changing hundreds of diapers, teaching their children at home, trying to make their home lovely and their food good, and just generally trying to be good, successful and efficient in their work are simply wasting their time and that they’re doing nothing for the world. What we do is nothing with any purpose or significance is what too many, even those within the Church believe. We often feel like we are alone, like we are making little impact, like the difference we’re making is no more than a footprint on the beach that will be washed away with the next tide.

This is so far from the truth!! Satan would LOVE for us to think that our duties in the home are insignificant. God, however, wants us to know that our work in the home is an important part of the Christian community. Titus 2:3-5 says “Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.” We aren’t all older women but we are older than SOMEONE and here is a description of the things we are to be learning and practicing in our lives.

As people miss God’s purpose and God’s design in the small building blocks of life, more people abandon doing exactly what God wants us to be doing. It’s these little things that lay the foundation for the godly success our children’s generation and it’s these things that hold our own generation together. When we act as if the only significant life is a life focused primarily on vocal political activism or spent in a vocation of missions or spent on relief work to those in dire need or whatever someone other than God deems worthy, we are demeaning what GOD has put in place as the foundation for greater things. God has shown us what He desires for us to do. It’s what He has commanded and it’s through these little things of working at home, loving our husbands, children, etc, that we are taking part in building a structure God has planned.

A majority of us here spend most of our time caring for children, teaching them, puzzling over how to better teach them, praying that God will guide us in training them so that they will be equipped to be future leaders in our nation, praying that God will help us figure out how to deal with the strong willed attitude in one of our children, making schedules for dentist appointments, we cook 21 meals a week, we are in charge of the nutrition of our family, we are in charge of keeping our children clothed, in charge of filling these young minds with things that God desires their minds to be full of. We’re responsible for loving our husbands which includes feeding them like we love them, keeping their home like we love them, caring for their children and keeping ourselves like we love and care that our husbands should be able to enjoy and benefit from his family. The list goes on and on and some people would belittle many of these things, acting as if most of them could be done given only 10 seconds or 10 minutes a day and you should be able to do these things in your leftover time from a “significant” job.

The things we are concerned with are incredibly varied and some seem more important than others but remember, they ALL come together to build a structure designed by God and each little part is of great significance. Sometimes we think that the LITTLE things we do don’t really matter. We might think that our attitude about changing diapers and training children isn’t really a big deal but when you imagine all the ways God could possibly use that, you begin to realize that God can and does use every little thing we do to inspire others, to pass on good things to our children, to make others feel the love of Christ. We may not think our cooking or attitude towards cooking matters but our family is impacted when they see how we approach caring for them and they are impacted when they see the effort we put into it and they are impacted when they have a pleasant and enjoyable experience at the table with their family.

Don’t allow yourself to believe that what you’re doing is unimportant. God says that your efforts in these things has an impact on whether or not God’s word is dishonored!!