31 Days to Clean-Having a Martha House the Mary Way.

God has been teaching me so much lately. I love how my relationship with him is one of santification...meaning that He is always working on me and making me more like Him. It's such hard work, and sometimes I just feel like I just want to skip this part of my Christian walk all together.

I feel like God has been working on me extra hard the last year and a half.

One of the hardest things for me (you may think it's so silly!) is that I have such a hard time keeping a house.

I am creative and doing daily chores that never are going to be DONE (as long as I live!) is so mind numbing. I have two children and a full time from home job so I can always find something to keep me from cleaning. I have had such a struggle with this ever since I got married 6 years ago, and it has be THE biggest stressor in our marriage. I can't tell you how many times we've sat in marriage counseling talking about my housekeeping skills!

I always try, I always am looking for something that will make me be better at it, but over and over I am back at square one with a frustrated husband and a dejected me.

I feel like I grade myself as a wife based on how clean my house is (which probably makes me a D- type of a wife. It is also something that I am constantly beating myself up about.

"Why can't you be better? Why can't you stay motivated? Why do you give up?"

One day on Facebook I saw a link to an ebook called 31 Days to Clean-Having a Martha House the Mary Way. It was offering a free ebook to people if they blogged or facebooked about it in the next couple hours. Naturally I did, just knowing this could be my breakthrough!

Life has been busy and I have only gotten to read and do the first chapter. But I must say, that even if I don't get anything else out of it, I think this book has ministered to my heart in such a deep and positive way.

Every day it gives you 2 challenges. One is the Martha challenge...like, clean out your fridge. One is a Mary challenge that goes deeper into WHY we clean.

The first challenge was to come up with a mission statement of why it is important to me to have a clean house.

It's been over 3 weeks since I read that, and today I decided to do it.

It's amazing. No one with a full time job that wants to be better at it doesn't have goals or a mission statement stating WHY they want to be better at their job. Why should boring housekeeping be any different?

Why do I want to be good at it? Why is it important at all?

This is what I came up with:

It makes me want to cry. This new idea that keeping my home up every day isn't just so my husband can say I'm a good wife, or so that I can check all of my list off, but that I want it to be a place that we can have people come into our home so we can share Christ with them freely has blown my mind. I can guarantee you that this change in my mindset will not make me a perfect 50's housewife, but I can guarantee you that in the midst of such mundane and never ending tasks, if I remember this mission statement...my attitude will change and I will have the motivation to do whatever I can.

I made it pretty and hung it up on my fridge. I'm excited about going through this book (although I'll probably do it in 60 days instead of 31 just because I'm so busy this next month and a half). I'll try to check back once in a while with how things are going in keeping my home:-)