2024 Home Themes: Churchill

Back in January, I decided to choose two quotes to theme my year. They represent attitudes or truths I want to keep front and center in my mind for 2024. I made them pretty on Canva and then hung them in the kitchen over the sink.

Side Note: The kitchen sink is a great place to put anything you want to see all the time because we’re always in the kitchen. It’s a good place for reminders and scriptures and motivations because so much contemplation can be done at the sink with our fingers in soapy water.

The first quote I wanted as a distinctive of 2024 was this one by Churchill: Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.

This thought struck me because it is humbling and motivating, especially as a homemaker.

Every success we experience is not guaranteed to stay a success. Every win fades. Holding on to our successes typically squeezes the life out of them and either brings stress into our homes or keeps us living unhappily in the past, stunted and dull. Every one of us knows that if we successfully get the dishes done, we’ll have to do them again. All the housekeeping chores are this way. Success is so far from final it’s almost funny. This can be true for our attitudes as well. If we start with a certain level of calm in the morning, we lose it after breakfast.

No success is final. That should keep us humble. Not demotivated, but humble. We don’t rest on our laurels. We don’t view our work with pride because it won’t last, and this is a good thing. Pride is a dangerous disease that invades us down to the cell level and makes us think much more highly of ourselves than we should. Are we proud of ourselves for getting the laundry all done, including the ironing? Yes! Have we actually done something far out of the ordinary for the homemaker? No. Humility serves us far better than pride. Pride screams at the world to look at what we’ve done and lavish us with praise. Humility quietly goes about her work out of love for others. Which do you think makes a better atmosphere in the home?

Why don’t we lose our motivation if our successes don’t stick? What’s the point of trying?

“…failure is not fatal…”

Failure isn’t going to kill us. In fact, failure grows us much better than non-enduring success. We tend to have a knee-jerk reaction against failure, understandably, but part of making home a safe space is making it a space where failure can happen with low risk and low regret. This means we don’t hold onto things. We don’t keep a list in our heads of all the ways our husbands and children have failed us or how we have failed them. We forgive and seek forgiveness. We build up and grow. We learn. We turn failures into success by not letting failure frustrate, dismay, or discourage us, and by reminding ourselves and our people that failure is a part of growth. Catastrophe can be turned into eucatastrophe[1] if we have read enough fairy tales, if we look for the good, and if we are thankful.

This is why we must have a long-term perspective on our homemaking. If this is a weekend gig, if home is simply a storage unit, the failures stack like the laundry until they crumble down and crush us. One burnt meal out of hundreds is not going to make or break my homemaking. One burnt meal when it’s the only homecooked meal anyone has had all week is far more drastic. Communication hiccups can be overcome when I’m all in in the home. We adjust and move on. They are a disaster if it was the only day this week that anyone set foot in the house and no one knows what’s happening. 

Side Note: The fact that successes fade out in the wash and that failure won’t kill us isn’t an excuse for laziness or perpetual bad attitudes. Both of those things need to be squashed. A failure to succeed because we’re too lazy to try isn’t the failure being talked about here. We need to be failing because we’re striving, trying, learning, and growing.

The last part of this beautiful quote is our motivation to stay at the task: courage. Courage is one of the Four Virtues and it is absolutely indispensable for the homemaker. We can’t do this job, we can’t tend our people with cowardice. Look at all the examples of women in the Bible and the courage they showcase again and again and again, often in the quiet, often unacknowledged. From Eve to Sarah to Jael to Ruth to Mary, these women softly and unobtrusively yet courageously went about their work. Each has dramatic stories or dramatic moments, but they are each in their homes loving their people and doing their work. Look at Jael. She killed an enemy of Israel with a tent stake. That’s dramatic courage. But she was also in her tent, managing her home, and all we ever hear about her is this one moment. She didn’t use that moment, that success, to leave her tent. She carried on at home as far as we know. (Yes, I know this is an argument from silence.)

So much of life, real life, is about showing up. That’s faithfulness. The first advice given to new writers is to write. Just write, butt in chair, show up. The first step to being a homemaker is being home! Not being crazy going here and there, but being home. It does us no good to call ourselves homemakers and then treat our homes like hotels as we work some other career. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re homemakers. And we need to have the courage to continue. We don’t rest on our successes as if the work is done. We don’t quit because of our failures. We carry on with courage as the seasons cycle, as we age, as our people come and go, we carry on with housekeeping, atmosphere creation, beautifying, and healthcare. We have the courage to not quit or leave.

That’s what counts.

Ladies, remember who it is who made this statement: Winston Churchill. I’m not sure of the context, but remember this man led the British during WW2. Winning one battle is great, but it’s not winning the war. Losing one battle is horrible, but it’s not losing the war. Staying in the fight is what matters.

Success is not promised.

Failure isn’t a sign from God that we’re in the wrong place.

Courage is being faithful in our work, unsung, unseen, but here!

This is the quote by my sink calling me to keep going, to wash the dishes again, to make tea, to hug my man, to just keep going. That’s courage: going when we want to quit, when the world tells us we’re a waste, when domesticity is viewed as empty or lazy or weak, when our neighbors think we’re weird. Courage sees the good and faithfully and loyally keeps going.

[1] A eucatastrophe is a word invented by Tolkien to point out the turning point of grace in a story. It is a catastrophe that results in good instead of evil. The two greatest real historical eucatastrophes are the incarnation and the resurrection.