Diary of a Glad Housewife

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

I confess: I love being a housewife.

I know this is not cool or politically correct. Whatever. I'm just saying: I love it. I love taking care of my house. I love doing laundry. I love watering the plants in the garden. I love going through the drive-through at the cleaners and picking up my husband's clean shirts. I love going to the grocery store, thinking about what we might eat tonight or tomorrow night, picking out the butter and the milk and the pasta or the chicken. (The only thing I don't like about grocery shopping is lugging cases of water. I try to leave this chore for Dennis.)

I like my job, too, and I know that I am fortunate to only work part-time and have the flexibility I have. I love my work, studying the Bible and helping our pastors think about the week's passage. I am very aware, in the current climate, that I am beyond blessed to get paid to do something I love.

This fall I am teaching a couple of new Bible studies. On Wednesday mornings, I am teaching a group of women, mostly my age, many of whom I've known for 20 years or more. On Thursday nights, I'm teaching a group of young women, my daughter-in-law's age, some of whom I've only known a couple of weeks. They are young, in their twenties, just starting out in life.

My Wednesday Bible study is held at Brenda Holmes' beautiful and welcoming house. I was washing my hands this morning and noticed the quote above embroidered on a tea towel hanging in Brenda's guest bath.

If I could get these two groups of women together, I think that tea towel sums up what I would say to them. Because I remember what it's like to be just starting out in your twenties. You're just waiting for life to begin happening, or it's just starting to really happen. You're still waiting for the really big things to happen that will mean life has begun.

But when I think about the women in my Wednesday morning Bible study, I think about what we have shared together over the years. Drinking coffee together over Bible studies. Praying together for our children. Pregnancies and births. Christmas programs. Football games. Easter lunches. College visits. Engagements and wedding showers, weddings and grandbabies. Hysterectomies. Cancer. Hard stretches of marriages. Taking each other casseroles. Working in our gardens together.Sharing recipes. Singing in choir together.

These are the little things we have done for twenty or thirty years, daily things, week in and week out. They are the things I treasure. They are the big things that make up our lives, the things we pray about, the things we give thanks for, the things we remember at funerals. She was there for me. She cut my hair. She brought me dinner. She rocked my children in the nursery. She prayed with me. We planted tulips together. We went to Zoomba classes. I watch the girls in my Thursday night group do these things together, and I think, "Good for you. You are not waiting for life to start. This your life, and you have begun it."

I have no deep life lesson to share in this entry. Just gratitude for a lot of litte things, and I think we should share our gratitude, even when it's born out of the embroidery on a tea towel. God is good. And he has blessed us. And he is in the little things. Let us write that on our blogs and embroider it on our tea towels. Maybe that is what God meant when he said "Write it on the doorposts of your houses."