Housekeeping and Spiritual Life are Intertwined

Over the past few weeks I've been doing a LOT of thinking. And being hit with realizations that I don't necessarily want to make. I have never been a great housekeeper. I have always wanted to stay home with my kids, be the housewife and such, but I never thought of all the work involved. Work that I don't particularly like. So, of course I let it slide, and the house gets to be a mess. I started really cleaning at the beginning of winter, and I would just find myself gravitating to the cleaner rooms of my house. It was more peaceful there and I could think more clearly. I started to check out some books from the library, such as Restoring Order to Your Home by Vicki Norris and Keeping House, The Litany of Everyday Life by Margaret Kim Peterson. Both are Christian books in their perspectives, both come at the issues of keeping a home a little differently. I highly recommend both. In fact, I hope to someday own them.

Keeping my house is a reflection of my spiritual life. I am going to just say it, I've been rather lax in maintaining one. I haven't had personal devotions in a rather long time. I haven't been too consistent with prayer time (I am improving on that one). My spiritual life is a mess, just like my house. It isn't that I don't care, for me it is to the point of being overwhelming. Something I need to strive to do better at. And if I can start to reclaim time to read the Bible regularly, the rest of my life will be more in line also.

My home is slowly getting more organized (interestingly enough, it started getting more organized around here when I started praying more consistently). We did get our room cleaned, decluttered and un-kidded (banned their toys) and hung up and put away all the clean laundry (I hate the putting away part of the laundry process, it is the most redundant for me for some reason). Then, on Wednesday we got the girls' room cleaned up and reorganized. Next up, not sure which room to tackle next. I am thinking the bathroom as I can totally overhaul that one by myself and we aren't going to have a day in the next week to tackle one together. This week, we are using Hubb's day off to run the hour and a half over to the salvage grocery to do our major shopping for the month.

We host small group at our house the end of February, so this massive cleaning and organizing purge will have to be done by then. And the youngest turns two in a month and I don't know if anyone is coming out family-wise for it or not yet.

More reflections on why one should strive for their best in the realms of house work another time. My husband just got home from work, and I want to spend precious time with him.