A Home Life that Nourishes – Taking the Road Less Traveled

Does it seem as if I’m stuck on this topic of the home life? I’ve written about the subject twice recently. First when I talked about having a vision for your family and then why we should keep a tidy home.

I can’t help it. I feel very passionate about the home and the importance of it. If you’re a homemaker I’m sure you also realize how important the home life is. There is nothing that can compare with the influence and shaping that our homes can have on our children.

Home Life is Vital to Our Children

Home is so important but yet it’s so easy to lose sight of how necessary, how vital home is when we get tired and worn down from the multiple duties we mom’s have to accomplish each day.

Home is more than just a place for our children to lay their heads at night as they go to sleep, more than just a place to stop over to shower and change clothes as they run from one activity to another or from one friend’s house to another’s. Home is so much more.

Home is where we disciple our children – where we teach them the ways of the Lord, where we share our values, learn together, work together. Home is a place where our children’s souls can be fed in this too busy life we find ourselves caught in. A place where they can find rest from the hurts and pains they may experience from others as they grow into young adulthood and then later into adults.

It’s not easy but it’s so worth it

Having a homelife that nourishes is not easy. Life wants to grab us up and whirl around as if we were on a merry-go-round. We have to stop and consider what it is we want for our family.

Do we want this hurry, hurry, hurry pace?

Do we want our kids to have their own life hidden in their bedroom doing their own thing?

Do we want our children more connected to social media than they are to their family?

Do we want others values to have more sway over our children than we do?

If our answer is no to any of these questions than we have to take responsibility for the turning around of our homes. We must fight for the home life that we desire. Anything worth having comes with a price. It may not be easy but it’s worth it, my friend.

Being a homemaker is more than just keeping a clean home.

Don’t lose sight of what being a homemaker is all about. It is so much more than keeping a clean home, although that is an integral part of it. It’s all about nurturing souls for the Kingdom and at the right time releasing those arrows. But how can we nurture if our children are not around? How can we share values in the everyday walk of life if our children are not with us?

And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. –Deut. 11:19

Although I’m a huge proponent of homeschooling – even if there are Christian school options, or you have a very small school, etc. – I realize that maybe you have children in a school setting. If so, you have even less time than those of us that homeschool to make the moments being at home count, so you will have to choose wisely how you spend those hours.

 

Ways to Nurture the Home Life

Here are some ways we have tried to nurture the home life.

• eating meals together (so very important)
• evening time read-aloud
• devotions (most usually done at breakfast time)
• family fun night together but this has been harder to implement
• very few extracurricular activities outside the home
• family trips
• traditions (holidays, etc.)
• construction projects (my husband likes doing projects with the boys now that they’re older)

 

Maybe you are familiar with this poem written by Robert Frost called “The Road Not Taken”? When you read it this time around, think of the two roads as one being the picture of home life that is so common today – a road that takes parents down a path where they spend minimal time with their children and maybe even have the attitude that they’re a bother and that kids going their own way is perfectly normal.

The other road is less popular. It is the one less traveled but it is the one where we spend time with our children, mentoring, nourishing, encouraging them and even having fun. It takes something out of us momma’s because sometimes we just want to lay it all aside and have some time to ourselves. But remember anything worth having is worth fighting for and your children are always worth it. 🙂

 

The Road Not Taken  by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

What are some things you do to nurture the family life? I would be delighted to read them. Let’s encourage one another!