Small and trivial it is not!

The GirlTalkers have been focusing lately on the glorious role and responsibility of homemaking, and how I have been encouraged by these incredible quotes.

In a culture that demeans the honorable tasks of loving and serving one’s husband, raising and training children and making the home a haven and place of ministry, I am so thankful to be reminded of the significance of my role as homemaker!

“[W]hen people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely
difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I
cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean.
When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty
arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means
dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man
might drudge [at his work]. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the
soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean….
I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine
how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other
people’s children [arithmetic], and a small career to tell one’s own
children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing
to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s
function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is
minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will
never pity her for its smallness.” (bold mine)
;G.K. Chesterton

“Homemaking—being a full-time wife and mother—is not a destructive
drought of usefulness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is
not a dreary cell to contain one’s talents and skills but a brilliant
catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work; it is
not a rope for binding one’s productivity in the marketplace, but reins
for guiding one’s posterity in the home; it is not oppressive restraint
of intellectual prowess for the community, but a release of wise
instruction to your own household; it is not the bitter assignment of
inferiority to your person, but the bright assurance of of the
ingenuity of God’s plan for the complementarity of the sexes,
especially as worked out in God’s plan for marriage; it is neither
limitation of gifts available nor stinginess in distributing the
benefits of those gifts, but rather the multiplication of a mother’s
legacy to the generations to come and the generous bestowal of all God
meant a mother to give to those He entrusted to her care.” (bold mine)
Dorothy Patterson