Favorite Quote: "Your Home is your First Ministry."

Back in 2010 I quite my job in ministry to stay home with my kiddos. I LOVED my job! I loved seeing the impact that I was having on the people I was serving. I loved having people trust me with their heart as they would ask me to pray for a certain situation or whatever it was they were going through. I loved spending weeks/months to plan an outreach event and watching it be executed perfectly the day it took place. I was in my element. The last few weeks of my job I would go in crying and come home crying because I really didn't want it to come to an end, but for that season in my life it was needed. 

I struggled staying home the first year. My kids were three and five at the time and they were very demanding. I would get frustrated constantly picking up my house and five minutes later it would look like a tornado came through again. I was always cleaning up spilled juice and dropped food. The laundry seemed to never end. I wanted every.single.day. to be back working, serving, leading people to the King. 

One day I was surfing the web and came across this quote:

"Your HOME is your FIRST ministry."

I quickly printed it out and placed it around my house. This was when I began to embrace the Stay-At-Home Mom/Wife thing. Not one time in that first year did I ever think of my home as my ministry, honestly, I felt it as a burden. From that moment on I knew I had to make a change in my life. I knew I needed to embrace my home as ministry, just as I did my job.

 The Bible tells us in Ephesians 5 that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loves the church (5:25) and wives are to respect her husband (5:33). I had to figure out what that looked like for me. And for ME that means: I serve my husband his food and drink. I keep my home as tidy as I can without putting too much pressure on myself for perfection so he doesn't have to worry about it. I make sure he has clean clothes to wear, his favorite shampoo and bodywash. I try very hard not to ask my husband to do anything around our house that I can handle myself. I feel if I can make our home stress free for him, I should do that, especially since he works hard outside of our home to provide for us. 

As for my children, the Bible says in Proverbs "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." The way I act in my home is my ministry toward them. I'm teaching my daughter the importance of serving her home. I'm training her and teaching her how to be a wife/mom. She is seeing the respect and love she should have for her spouse. She is learning how to comfort and be present with her children. For my son, he is watching how I respond to his daddy. He is learning how to treat his future spouse and that he shouldn't settle for anyone that doesn't respect him. We lead our children in prayer and devotion time. We are giving them a foundation that is built on Christ, so they world doesn't give them another foundation. I'm showing them how to respond in love to the messiness of life. They are learning that the way we act in private is no different from the way we should act in public. 

My home is my safe haven. I take pride in it being my ministry. I pray over my home multiple times a day and I refuse to let anything in that doesn't glorify God, my marriage, or my children.