Leaving Room (Part 3)
From saying no inside and outside the home to staying flexible with our productivity to realizing that leaving room to serve is also leaving room for others to serve, we’ve covered both practical steps and philosophical mentalities. What I want to explore today is the buildup and the downtime.
Buildup
We all have natural skills and trained skills. The buildup is the pockets of life where we hone our skills for our use, our homes, and the good of others.
We may desire to serve or help in a certain area but lack the know-how. Don’t offer to cook for a family of twelve when you don’t cook for yourself. Part of appropriately leaving room in our lives is developing our skills. It’s a good use of our time. It’s productive to cultivate new abilities and sharpen our techniques. Once learned, they can serve our families, churches, and communities.
Don’t use a lack of skillsets as an excuse to go on your merry way. If a need arises that you realize you can’t fulfill, ask yourself if it is a skill you could learn. Look for someone who is already skilled and pick their brain. Lean into your natural giftings, but don’t stagnate yourself by telling yourself you can’t learn something.
Example: Don’t offer to babysit someone’s kids if you have no experience with children. But realize that babysitting would be a good skill to develop and seek to do that. Talk to moms you know about supervised babysitting, tips, tricks, and troubles. Volunteer for the nursery. Have a friend over with littles. Babysit with a friend who babysits. Grow a new skill.
To work the buildup properly we need to be aware of the pockets, and we need to be aware of areas we want to either get better at or learn a new thing. This is looking for ways to serve our families by getting better at chores, decorating, cooking, gardening, health care, and any of the domestic arts. We also need to look at things from a broad perspective of productivity. Taking time to teach myself the art of cookie decorating is a skill that I can use in many ways for others. I can brighten the day of a shut-in. I can bless a young mom with all the rejects. I have increased my hand-eye coordination, my understanding of color, and added a touch of beauty to my world. I don’t need to open a bakery and sell my cookies. I need to learn how to make the right dough, mix the right frosting, and make eatable beauty for others. The creative process keeps my brain from growing dull, and the results are sweet delights I can bless others with. Any art or craft we enjoy doing can be used to serve our homes, churches, and communities. They may not always produce tangible products, but they can give us many intangible blessings.
Sometimes saying no to chronic franticness is saying yes to learning something new or getting better at something we love so that we can help someone down the road. If our lives are higgledy-piggledy and we’re trying to do everything, we aren’t being productive. We’re being lazy or selfish or proud or untrusting of the Lord. Slow down, take a breath, have an eternal perspective, and create some pockets to learn or hone. Practice seeing all the ways things can be productive now and put into service later. When we realize we don’t have the skills needed for a particular opportunity to serve, we should willingly and humbly step aside. Growing abilities and learning new things requires time. It requires rest, nourishment, and space. None of that will happen if we aren’t leaving room in our lives.
Downtime
Different problems bring different needs and sometimes you have tangible downtime. No emergencies, breakdowns, or general chaos. Put this time to good use by preparing for the next thing. Knock some things off your list of random calls and appointments, build a backlog of meals for your home and to share. Go on a date. Catch up the ironing and mending.
Be a prepper.
Not so much because the world is going crazy but to prepare for the next crisis.
It’s coming.
As any pastor’s family knows, the next thing is already looming.
Ladies, let’s leave room in our lives to prepare for serving and helping our families, and the people around us. The Proverbs 31 woman has stocked her home so her family is ready for winter. We don’t know what’s coming. Snow-mageddon, vehicle breakdowns, births, deaths, medical issues, and the flu. We don’t know. But we do know they’re coming. Prepare now and prepare to share.
How long can our families survive without a grocery store run? If our neighbors needed a meal, do we have something we could pass on to them? And can we do so with beauty and grace? What about Sundays? Do we leave room in our weeks to make sure that we can listen, pray, worship, and greet visitors with an open smile? Or have we so overfilled our homes with inside projects and outside commitments that Sunday is an insurmountable challenge, or at the least, a constant temptation to cut out, be late, or sleep through the service? Can we and our homes survive the next problem that is inevitably coming? Can we excel in the maelstrom of sickness, loss, and ruin?
If we are living lives of chronic franticness, no we can’t. The next thing might break us because we haven’t prepared ourselves or our homes to withstand the next blow. If we aren’t making sure there is actual downtime by saying no inside and outside the home, we will live lives of adrenaline, not peace, and calm. Ask yourself if your home is nurturing rest and delight or stress and anxiety?
We must be proactive in finding and creating downtime to build our backstock. If we fill every waking moment, go-go-go, we’ll wake up sick one morning and have nothing in the freezer and no home remedies to help. We’ll turn around one day and realize that someone needs a meal but we have no meals to share.
Proper leaving room, the real skill of leaving room, is found in not being frantic when trouble arises. Sacrifices will have to be made yes, but we shouldn’t have to throw our homes, families, and ourselves into cardiac arrest if we’ve properly prepared and if we’ve properly left room. We should strive to do the work upfront. Say no to as many extracurricular things as possible so that there is room left in your life to prepare your home and from that serve others. If being called on to help makes us frantic, we might need to look at why. Bad timing? That can’t be helped. There are times we just can’t say yes. But bad, lazy, or ignorant management of abilities and resources? Those can be fixed.
A big part of leaving room in our lives is saying no to all the extra stuff. Another big part of leaving room in our lives is getting better at what we do, learning new things, and preparing for coming trouble. All of this will help us be able to manage our homes, tend our hearths, and serve others outside our four walls. Has this at all helped you to not buy into the lies that homemaking is an easy job we should all do on the weekend? Doing this well takes time, work, failure, mental and emotional fortitude, wisdom, prudence, and courage. It’s not just going to happen while we’re not looking, or while we’re out doing one more thing. We must be in our homes, managing with foresight and with proper goals.
