Cultivating Home

As the seasons meander one into the other, as summer greens fade into to autumn's reds and oranges,

time slows down in our home. The garden's production has slowed and so has our pace. Quiet reflecting often happens tucked in between moments of fall baking and home schooling...

This season is where I like to catch up on various home duties like cleaning closets and organizing them, dusting cobwebs, washing down the walls, scrubbing base boards... you get the idea. The kitchen also beckons me back with slow, simmering soups, and comforting baked treats. Also, bread baking begins again in earnest. With all of the duties of home, I find that I enjoy cultivating this lifestyle within my home; I love cultivating home.

So, what is cultivating home? For me it is creating an atmosphere of love, joy, peace, and contentment within my home, with Jesus Christ at the center of everything we do.

Cultivating home is bringing my children along side me in the kitchen as I cook from scratch, as I make beeswax candles, as we tidy the house, together. Its eating supper nightly around the dining room table by the glow of homemade candles. Cultivating home is sitting down in the evening for family Bible time and scripture memory, with the reward of getting to pick the next hymn we sing that evening for verses memorized.

It is the comfort my children have seeing the love their mother and father have for each other and the Lord. Cultivating home is enjoying time together as a family. It is the children working and learning beside their parents, the ones who God gave to teach, train, nourish, admonish, and nurture them.

What are some ways you cultivate home? I'd love to glean wisdom from y'all!