When the word home is mentioned, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Most of us long for responses like: love, refuge, safety, security, acceptance. 

The Martha in us would add: organized, clean, tidy, healthy.

Our honest answers might include: chaos, cluttered, crazy.

We reassure ourselves that we live here. Our homes are real places with real people—not a staged photo shoot gracing the cover of those magazines that mock us in the grocery check-out line.

But is it possible “the lady doth protest too much,” my friend? 

Even as we defend the clutter, are we also a teeny bit defeated by it?

Surely, it’s possible to achieve a balance. And don’t we all function just a bit better when there is at least a semblance of order?

My mom kept a neat, tidy house. She wasn’t employed outside the home; our home was her place of work and she did her job well. But somewhere along the way, I failed to pick up on all those good routines and habits that she used in homemaking.

Fast forward to the years after I was married. As each additional child came along, and as we added more subjects to our homeschool classroom and more activities to our schedule, the stress level for this mom grew in proportion to the clutter and disorganization in our home.

For most of us, managing a home is on-the-job training. Like much of parenting (and even life), it seems you figure it out just about the time it’s over.  So this is me hoping to help you—the mom still in the throes of it all—glean a bit of what I learned the hard way. The following are some things I wish someone had sat me down and told me 25 years ago. 

Today’s Laura’s Top Ten is a laundry list of foundational, learned-the-hard-way home management principles, ideas, and tips:

1. Love God more than you love your house.  Worship first. Be God’s child before you are somebody’s mom, teacher, cook, housekeeper, etc. Get up. Get with Jesus. Do that first and make it a daily priority.
2. Your house and everything in it will burn up some day. When Jesus returns, we won’t be taking our kitchen sink, pile of laundry, or dining table with us to heaven. But we will be accompanied by those who call Him Savior. Love people more than you love your stuff. Be intentional about sharing the good news with those in your life, and especially those in your home.
3. Making it routine makes it happen. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed with how much needs to be done that we simply don’t know where to begin, which leads to throwing our hands in the air and doing nothing. Maintaining a list frees up the mental energy required to think about what to do, and allows us to engage and just do it. Plus, most of us are spurred on by that natural tendency to want all the boxes checked off! Be sure to delegate to your children, too.
4. Let go of having it all done at once. Life is too full to devote one entire day to cleaning and laundry. (And really, would we even want to get out of bed on Tuesday if that was tackle-the-whole-house day?) But doing a little each day will have the whole house transformed in just a short time.
5. It’s easier to clean a clean house. It’s easier to organize an organized house. Maintenance mode is much easier than get-there mode. Stick with it and reap the rewards.
6. Peace trumps panic. I know that eternal peace only comes from Jesus, but when my home environment is in order, the freedom I feel is a type of earthly peace. I don’t panic when the doorbell rings unexpectedly, and I’m more patient with my children when I’m not living in chaos.
7. Spontaneous hospitality can happen. How many times I wanted to invite someone over, but grime and guilt kept me paralyzed. When my home was more organized, what joy it was to extend the invite and throw open the door with love, instead of guilt and shame!
8. Strive for excellence, not perfection. While we want to be good stewards of our time and our home, it will be easy to cross the line to pride. Perfection is not achievable, and never will be (even when you don’t have a house full of children). Give up on it. Striving for excellence in hospitality means we do our best, and we focus on making others feel loved and welcome. The goal is not praise for myself, but for God to be glorified in my home. And a little normalcy—things like unopened mail on the counter and dishes in the sink—might make your guest feel more comfortable.
9. Be kind to yourself. Mom, you extend grace to everyone else. Extend a little to yourself, too. You are doing an extraordinary thing:  educating your children, discipling them, teaching them about God, and cultivating Christ-like character even as you are learning and growing yourself. Own it when you mess up. Apologize. But move on and love well.  Let it go, and receive God’s grace that you so willingly extend to others.
10. Do it all for the glory of God. Colossians 3:23 was printed on every chore chart that hung on our refrigerator: Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men. As you pull your children in to work alongside you, model and teach this truth. It will be a lifelong blessing for them to learn to worship as they work. And, of course, a good one for you to learn or perhaps re-learn, as well.

Next Monday, January 1st, we will be publishing a free printable to help you create a routine for home management. Watch for a new one each month! These lists will include tasks that need to be done daily, weekly, and monthly (or less often), and we’ll include space for you to write in tasks that are specific to your life and situation, such as: feeding animals, tending a garden, etc. The goal is to adopt routines that will lead to an organized, clean, and maintained home where God is glorified and people are loved on.

The goal of home management: to create a healthy environment for our families to live, to learn, and to love God and one another. Click To Tweet

In the meantime, I encourage you to reflect on your own aspirations for the coming year. When January 1st rolls around, do you find that some variation of “get more organized!” is always on your list of resolutions? If so, my hope and prayer is that you’ll join us each month, as we work toward establishing good habits that, in turn, create a healthy environment for our families to live, to learn, and to love God and one another.