All these—Routine, Journaling, To-Do Lists—are suggestions for how to start being intentional in your home. It’s easy to both wing it or think it will just happen. It’s easy to disconnect in the repetitiveness. To manage your home well is to be prudent, diligent, purposed, and intentional.

Struggles abound in this work. Thistles and thorns scratch our hands, rip our clothes, destroy what we have built. That too starts in our hearts and minds and can diffuse like smog, like killing gas, into our homes, choking, blinding, breaking. Calm may evade us. Anxieties haunt us in the night and join hands with the siren song of complaining during the day. We have eyes only for what is demanded of us and never for what has been done for us. A world never at rest weighs us down, and all we see is work, work, work, and never the seasons, never the hymns, never the slumber.