Purposeful Home or Hollow House?
Go ahead and do yourself a favor and read A Place to Eat, Sleep, & Watch (Emptiness in the Modern Household) It is a wonderfully written response to a New York Times article entitled, The Pandemic Created a Child-Care Crisis. Mothers Bore the Burden.
For years, my heart has longed to create a purposeful, productive home, and encourage others to as well. A truly Christian culture requires us to reclaim the home as a headquarter of ministry and production. A powerhouse of sorts. We must understand the power and purpose in family and home and cultivating a joyful, beautiful (however messy) atmosphere where much fruit grows.
From the article he writes:
“When we read of women who express a distaste for confinement to the realm of the household, thinking of it as a sort of dungeon, we can hear in their complaint a groan that the household is not what it is supposed to be. The productivity, the ingenuity, the purposefulness — for mother and all members involved — no longer exists as it once did within the household. The modern home, in many respects, is hollow. Though filled with more goods than ever, it has been emptied of purpose.”
Let’s reclaim the purpose of our homes! Starting where we are. Using what we have. After you read it, please come back here and talk to me about it. I’d love your thoughts!
motherhood/family/parenting | Kelly Crawford | 
July 19, 2021 2:08 pm
Currently there is a glitch in my site not allowing comments. However, it has been corrected and should be allowing comments within a few hours. I’m sorry for the inconvenience! Please do come back with them. 🙂
From Layne…
“Thank you Kelly for directing us to this article. Wow. So good. And humbling. I am a homeschooling mother of 6 and needed this reminder of what “should be” happening in our home, which is not currently. Lots of independent living, and much screen time. Time for momma to buckle down, with myself first, then be a better example to my children. Putting down the phone now…”
Grace and peace to you and yours,
– layne
From 6 Arrows…
OK, I’ll go first. 🙂
There’s so much I could say — both in agreement and disagreement with various parts of the linked article — but I’ll simply share one point the author made on which I take issue.
He wrote, Have we arrived at the bottom when the Times sees nothing amiss in including the example of a mother who walks dogs professionally, wanting out of full-time mothering in preference to being “out and dirty with animals”?
When he says, “a mother … wanting out of full-time mothering” [emphasis mine] because she’s working outside the home, that’s the part that makes me cringe. Is a mother a full-time mother only if she doesn’t work outside the home? Would we dare to call a father with a job outside the home a man who is not engaging in full-time fathering?
Sorry, but I don’t see this as Biblical thinking, to imply that someone is not a full-time parent if part of their employment is away from the children.