“He brought me out into a spacious place; He rescued me because He delighted in me.”
—Psalm 18:19
Dearest Daughters,
Some people look at the traditional role of a woman, mother, wife, homemaker, and see it as something small and insignificant. They view it like a narrow hallway without windows or like a life with too few options. I understand that fear. The world has painted a narrow one-dimensional picture of womanhood, but I want to share something with you that has stuck with me since I was a child.
I’ve had a repeating dream for most of my life of a little house, usually a house I once lived in as a girl. In the dream, I walk back through its rooms, and they are as tiny as I remember. I scan the walls, remembering where the table stood, how the light came through the dotted-Swiss curtains, what it felt like to belong there. And then, the same thing always happens: I open a closet door, and at the back of the closet is another door—one I’d never noticed before.
When I open that second door, it’s like stepping into a miracle. There is a whole section of the house I didn’t know existed, with a broad entryway. It’s a beautiful, welcoming space that’s well-furnished, full of light. Room after room, stretch far beyond the area we lived in when I was a child. And in the dream, I say, again and again, “How did we not know this was here? Why did we live in only that tiny part of the house when all of this was ours?”
The life of a woman, serving her place in God’s design, is not narrow. But it can feel narrow if we never open the hidden or locked doors, the door to deep relationships. The door of true sacrificial love. The door of God’s wisdom and the kind of selfless care that makes a place for others to flourish. We must open the door of prayer, where heaven stoops down to meet us in the ordinary and the difficult places of homemaking.
When we live disconnected, and when we don’t truly invest our all into the roles that tie us to others, and that demand vulnerability, we live only in the smallest corner of the house. But when we throw ourselves fully into the life God gives, investing everything in those relationships and responsibilities, our “house” opens up. We find that service is not drudgery, that giving our lives away enlarges them, and that the narrow hallway opens into a great hall where generations may gather and feast at His table.
We find that what looked small was only the entryway, but the temple is just beyond.
“He brought me out into a spacious place; He rescued me because He delighted in me.”
—Psalm 18:19
With all my love,
Mom