Making Your Home a Haven Day 6

Crystal at Biblicalwomanhood ran a post last week entitled Making our Homes a Haven: The Challenge . (You can read about it and follow the updates here). Basically for the past 6 days she has been encouraging us to do little things to make our home a haven of refuge for our families. This coupled with a very encouraging "Young Mother's " meeting at my church hosted by my Pastor's wife for the young mothers in my congregation motivated me to take a more earnest approach and effort to promote a environment of refuge for my family. So I will do this in a two part post. In my first post I will update my position in the Making Our Homes a Haven Challenge. Since I am a working momma, I had to condense my challenge to one day- which for me was Saturday! In case you don't have time to link back to Crystal's Blog I will list the daily challenges we are supposed to do in order: 1. Refresh My Spirit, 2. Do your morning routine, 3. Take time to plan, and 4. Do Something!

1. Refresh My Spirit- I woke up this Saturday morning and brewed myself a cup of honey/lemon/peppermint tea and devoted close to two hours of uninterrupted devotion and meditation time. My encouragement came from reading Ecclesiastes Chapters 3-5. I also read some in Psalms, Proverbs, and Isaiah. I skipped around to the last couple of chapters of St. John into the first couple of Chapters of Acts.. I especially wanted to study Paul's spiritual growth during this time.

2. My Morning Routine: I woke the girls up, had our daily thanksgiving, and went over my plans for the day. I gave them detail things to do and explained to them how important it was for them to finish their portion so that we could all take advantage of our free time with activities I planned for them after their recital that afternoon. Made breakfast.

3. Take Time To Plan: I kinda did this one in between the first two. I knew the girls had a piano recital at 1:30 and I wanted to leave the house and be at there by 12:30 no later than 12:45. I knew I had 3.5 hours to do everything that I wanted to do after my devotion, so I pulled out the timers, and gave each room 30 minutes. I gave the laundry 45 minutes and vacuuming 15 minutes. This was excluding the bedrooms but we did finish it all, and we successfully achieved our goal!
4. Do something- Well I put on my favorite uplifting gospel CD and went to work! I finished my laundry, living room, kitchen, dusting, refrigerator, and vacuumed. The girls got a little sidetracked but when the timers stopped so did we. By doing so we were able to accomplish our goal of leaving the house on time and getting to the recital relaxed and I got a great seat!

My challenge for Today
I read Deuteronomy 5:28-33, Prov 1: 1-9, Prov 2: 1-9 about the importance of instilling the fear of God and being obedient to his commandments. I read this to my children this morning. I also prayed over them before they woke up so that they would wake up happy and thankful. ( it worked!)

Whats for Dinner- homemade chicken poppers, salad, mexi-corn, and garlic cheese sticks w/marinara sauce!

Evening Routine- Homework and Devotion maybe some baking if time permits !