Creating a Culture of Rest and Celebration in Your Home

At some point along this mothering journey, I realized I had a deep thought that provoked bitterness and resentment. And that thought was… I never get a day off.  With that belief powerfully informing my daily habits and home life for a long time, I  made sure that is was always true. In fact, I would be the girl at the family gatherings obsessively tending to dishes or offering to help or just not really sitting down to enjoy the company of others. Always moving. Always doing. I made sure that belief came true–I never got a day off. But what I would go on to learn was that I was choosing that frenetic pace. I was rejecting rhythms of rest. 

an invitation

If you’re a high achiever and you’re a believer, you’re not someone who sits around and is lazy. You have a to-do list a mile long and you spend so much time scolding yourself for not getting everything on it done. I want to invite you this week to get in the habit of taking a day off on a weekly basis–I want to invite you to incorporate rest day into your healthy home rhythm. 

If you haven’t started taking a day off yet, I’m going to encourage you to please go listen to the podcast episode about rest and why it’s a good idea to start implementing it in your household rhythms. If you haven’t read the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry yet, please do. I loved that book. It changed my life. It helped me realign with God’s design and how He organized this life. It helped me get in rhythm with Him, so we could have more rest. When we have more rest, we have more fruit of the Spirit because we’re at peace and able to discern God’s purpose and plans for our lives. There are also previous posts here on the blog about rest day and how to adopt a new rhythm as a family.

When things in life feels clunky or overwhelming in our own family, that’s usually a good indication that somewhere we’re out of alignment. When the typical chaos of family life threatens to overtake the peace of Christ in our lives, it’s time to re-assess the habits of the household. It’s really easy to get into the state, guys. I do it even today as somebody who’s been practicing rest day for a couple of years.

celebration + completion

The inspiration for this blog was the celebration of one of my favorite churches that I follow online– they were celebrating their seventh year of being open and the pastor came out and talked about the biblical significance of the number seven. Now, I am not going to come at you as or even try to pretend that I am a Biblical, numerical expert. I find it very curious how God uses and works through numbers in a really rhythmic way and how  numbers mean things to Him. So they were celebrating the seventh year of their church and the pastor got up and said that the number seven stands for celebration and completion.  He said, when God finished creating the entire world and this earth on the seventh day, he celebrated. He celebrated the fact that it came to completion and it was good.

And so he was talking about how the seventh year is a time to celebrate. And what was funny to me is I started thinking about our weekly rhythm and how important completion and celebration ought to be when it comes to going into rest day. This is an idea that’s really under attack and I don’t mean this from just a spiritual perspective. 

Number one, a lot of things are left undone. In our culture, we’re not really great at completing things. It’s really difficult to “play the long game”. The second thing that I see in our culture is the lack of celebration. It’s this idea that whatever you have going on this week or this year, that even when you complete something and you feel the satisfaction of it, we’re moving on to the next thing so fast that we don’t stop to celebrate that we got that thing done and we got it off of our list. I tend to make lists of things I want to do this week–and they’re mostly all good things. When I get to the end of the week and have completed the items, I often don’t stop to celebrate. I think to myself, “Well, I have a hundred more things to  complete, so let’s start another list.” You know what I mean? 

This is an invitation to ask WHY? Why are we not celebrating and resting and resetting? 

countercultural

There’s this agreement within you that it’s never enough. My goal here is to challenge us as believers to be a countercultural people who not only take one day of the week off because God said to take it, but to also go a little bit deeper and ask ourselves, do we bring things to completion? And when we do, do we celebrate those things?

So when we start as a family and we take a full day of rest on Saturday, we have a nice dinner. We set the tone for the week. We take a little time to talk about what we’re going to be doing this week. And what I find to be really helpful is I like to take a look at my calendar or take a look at the week and ask the Lord what should take the top three priority spots that week.That way I can take an inventory of what I have to complete that week and it goes a long way in feeling more organized. Every week looks a little bit different, but I’ll just kind of give you a peek at some of the ways that we do this in our house, specifically for the kids. Taking a rest day as a family means that we acknowledge, as a family, that we worked really hard this week and we have come to the end of the week and then we celebrate its completion with our whole family together.

practical tips

When you have a big of family as I do, there are always dishes, always laundry, always things to do on the list. If you haven’t downloaded our daily habit system, I really encourage you to do that. I’ve created this for our kids daily routine and it’s a great thing which gives them vision for their day. So they have things to complete in the morning and then they have things to complete in the evening. What’s really great about this is this helps check that box of completion. One of the things that I implemented in my daily checklist is I have my top three priorities for the day. Sometimes it’s around my businesses or my work and sometimes it’s around the kids or some housework that I want to get done. I have my top three priorities for the day. One of the ways that you can mitigate some of this feeling bad about either not completing something or overlooking and lacking to celebrate what you’ve completed is to write down the things that you have completed.

What’s really cool is by the time we get to rest day, we’ve had six really good days of work. I’m starting to see this realization with my kids, too. We acknowledge that we worked hard and now we celebrate and rest. It is the absolute best way to wrap up the week. 

One of the ways that you can really enjoy rest day this week is that you can not only have that daily system in place, but also at the top of the week, before you are getting ready for rest day next week, you can ask yourself this really helpful question:

what do we as a family want to say we have completed and what do we want to celebrate from that completion this week? 

This is really helpful when it comes to creating your top three priorities for the week. It will also help you to create some fun top three priorities for each day. This is going to look different from week to week, but what would you as a family like to do? What top three priorities would you like to say that you accomplished as a family this week? And also what would you personally like to say you accomplished this week? So that way, when you go into rest day, you are not only taking a day off to take a breather, to enjoy, to really just soak in what you’ve earned, but also… that you can celebrate. I think this is a really important key piece to rest day that it’s not just scheduling in a day off, but it’s a time to take inventory of what’s been completed and then celebrate.

meaning makers

As Christians, it’s important that we have a deep level of celebration embedded in our lives. We have a lot to celebrate as children of God. We have this ability to be meaning makers because we are in relationship with God.  Celebration is much more rich as a believer than as an unbeliever. One of the ways that I have implemented celebration is to incorporate more beauty into my home. If you’ve been following me over on Instagram for any length of time, you’re starting to probably notice that I bought this beautiful oven and I’m kind of transforming my home into this cottage. A cozy place where everything is just becoming more and more beautiful every day and the tender moments and simple ways of family are treasured. I’m really starting to celebrate and romanticize my life a little bit. I’ve even gone as far as to buy linens for my dinner table, and I’ve been ironing my linens. One of the reasons that I’ve been doing this is because even at the end of the day, we have this invitation to  celebrate the completion of a day and what more beautiful way to do that than sitting at a nicely decorated table with candles? I’ll tell ya, my kids who are ages 0 through 12, are so much more slow and smiley at a table that’s filled with beauty and they’re more likely to celebrate when before it was kind of crazy and chaotic. So one of the powerful ways that I’ve been celebrating life is to bring more beauty into the house in tangible ways. I’d go so far as to say this a life skill I’m imparting on my kids that I hope they will carry into their own households.

Think of rest day this week in advance and think of celebrating what you completed this week. What do you want to give yourself a high five for? 

always cause for celebration

Are you the kind of person who feels like whatever you do or accomplish is never enough? There needs to be so much celebration because, friends, this is the closest to hell we are ever going to get as God’s kids. And when we get to the end of a week where we have fought the battle, we have completed things even when we didn’t feel like it, we battled against our flesh, we had to repent a hundred times over our sin, we’ll end up dusty, bloodied, bruised, and poured out. And this is cause for celebration! It’s the culture of celebration that really lights up as a lamp for unbelievers around us. They see we’re celebrating and they see that we have a strange peace that dictates our everyday routines. We’re salt and light always, even in the way we carry out our family rhythm and simple habits.

One of the ways that a greater sense of peace demonstrates itself in life is through celebration of the things that we have completed and recognizing that God is well-pleased with us. We do our work out of gratitude for what Christ has done for us and with the purpose of glorifying God and encouraging others. The transformational hope we have is too good to keep to ourselves. 

I’m so glad you are here reading the blog and I pray it’s a blessing to you! It’s my sincere hope that my thoughts and experiences make you feel seen, understood and valuable. It does my own heart so much good to visit with you over on Instagram, so I hope you’ll hop over and follow me there.