This post is to encourage you to know that you can find joy and happiness being based right from home. You can thrive in your own environment when you create the conditions to help support you and your family. It takes time but it is well worth the effort.

By wisdom a house is built,
    and through understanding it is established; (Proverbs 24:3)

Wisdom helps us to order our lives with intent. The virtue of wisdom has constructive, life-giving qualities. It initiates life, produces good fruit, creates, nurtures, fosters, establishes, and fills a house- a physical house, a family, and even our personal character with strength for our days.

Feed your soul the inspiration it needs

As a busy mum, it is easy to spend my down time binging on things that don’t necessarily feed my soul because I feel tired and drained after a long day with my children. As relaxing as it can feel to go through a series on Netflix in one sitting, or watch countless Youtube videos, it doesn’t truly feed my soul with the inspiration and strength that I need in the long term. After a while I am still left feeling drained which means that it’s imperative to fill myself with spiritually, physically and mentally nourishing “food”.

Finding creative ways to squeeze in things that inspire and encourage our souls has to be a real intentional effort as we seek to shape and stir our minds toward things that delight and inspire us to love our homes and families better. When we pour into ourselves well, we are not only strengthened, but the overflow is like a beautiful fragrance that fills our environment- which in turn blesses those around us.

Some helpful tips include listening to relevant podcasts while cooking, cleaning or having a shower, listening to audiobooks while taking a walk or doing the food shop, and reading books/our Bibles during morning breakfast or read aloud time with the children. Also, identifying an interest that you may have, and finding a small margin in your schedule to engage with it (e.g. exercise, leisurely reading, drawing, cooking etc) helps you to engage with the things that make you you. I’ve found that when I have given myself a little time, I feel a little more refreshed to then give of myself to others.

Taking tasks in bite sized forms to beat overwhelm

Some days just feel very blah and no matter how much you spiritualise or “speak into existence”, it can just be a very flat day that requires things to just get done. As busy mothers, the to do list is endless. As you cross off one thing on your list, five more are added and this can create a lot of overwhelm, and feelings of being buried. Inspiration can be hard to draw upon, procrastination knocks persistently at your door and you just feel like doing absolutely nothing even when you have things to do.

So how can we be happier when we have a never ending to do list? We can break down our tasks into order of priority and categories, and start tackling them bit by bit. The satisfaction of ticking a few things off creates a snowball effect that gives us momentum to tackle the other things. What are the things you want to spend your time on? Prioritise the categories, put the most important ones first and batch/ block them so you feel more accomplished as you tick things off slowly.

This is a great way to be intentional with your time particularly when it all feels like a melting pot of things that need to be done but you don’t want to do it. Intentionality is not about ignoring the things we don’t enjoy, because that creates overwhelm, anxiety and stress. It’s about the management of all the moving parts of our lives and, and taking back the control and order as much as we can. When practiced and mastered, it helps us to live in a much happier, calmer state of mind.

Take stock of all the positives and be thankful for it

We are prone to look at the negatives all the time because there are painful, challenging and frustrating things to deal with on a daily basis. A part of it is the reality of adulthood! Decide that although challenging moments are always there, you aren’t going to camp there. While dealing with challenging and frustrating things, we can still take stock of all the positive things that we do have in our lives and that we have been blessed with.

One of the greatest hacks to be happier at home is contentment. We can make the choice to be content with what we have in our lives, and how our lives look like. This can be a hard one because we live in a time where we see and know everything that goes on in the lives of other mothers and families and it can make us feel as though we aren’t enough and don’t have enough.

Taking time out to write down the things which you are thankful for will help you to realise that you are indeed blessed- everyday! Your life is unique to you and your family and accepting this helps us to truly own it and then look for ways to beautify and enjoy it!

Decide what matters

Following on from the first point, I believe that intentionality means prioritising the things that you do every single day that line up with your personal values and your personality. We get to choose the things that matter to us and this in turn helps build a life around things that we need to do in order to achieve the goal of what matters to us. For example, being outside for some period of time each day is very important to me.

I find walking to be a great form of exercise, but very therapeutic and healing as I get time to pray, reflect, release and just enjoy the movement of my body and my surroundings without feeling the pressure of passing through to get to somewhere else.

As this is an important thing for me, and even more so for my boys, I choose to make it a priority for us to get outside in nature as often as possible. Depending on the day I’ll build our schedule around it or if we are having a particularly difficult morning, I’ll pause, we’ll put our trainers on and get outside for movement and fresh air.

Knowing what matters to you and how you can make steps to achieving that can be helpful when thinking of ways to be intentional as a mother. You don’t need to have a long list of things, but just taking action on a few core areas that are meaningful to you helps you to feel grounded and in control of your life during the busy and quiet periods. Working on a family mission statement is helpful in this area as it encourages you to dig deep to identify the things of value to you and your home. Once you begin to lock in on this, it makes you happier in the home and with life.

Create a Christ-Centered Home

Last but not least, as Christians, infusing our homes with the love and fragrance of Christ brings such peace and joy that really cannot be matched. Cultivating a Christ centered home is essential to the quality and longevity of our family unit and as a multilayered and complex thing that God has ordained to be put together, there is purpose, intentionality, and beauty that can be experienced deeply when we choose to keep Christ at the centre of the home.

We can achieve this by incorporating scripture readings, prayer time, and discussions about faith into our daily routines. Playing worship music throughout the day also really helps to draw our hearts back onto God as well as helping the children to memorise songs!