Our homes are our sanctuaries. A sanctuary is a place of refuge and protection, a shelter considered sacred and safe from the outside world. Someone has to guard it with the greatest of care and with sacrifices of love and devotion.
This is a full-time position, a life-time commitment to the vocation of being a keeper of the home. Vocation isn’t a word you hear often these days. And “keeper of the home” generally means to the average public, someone who doesn’t feel like working a real job with a paycheck to show for it. But we know better.
So paramount is the family unit and the keeper of this family and home, that even Mother Teresa regarded it as supreme, even to volunteering for her own causes. In 1982, Mother Teresa visited the Abba House in Little Rock, Arkansas which was run by her community of nuns for unwed pregnant women. While she was there, she made a request of the women who volunteered and worked at the house along side her nuns. She said, “If one of my sisters call you needing help, but your husband wants you to go the the theater, you go with him. Your little Jerusalems (churches) are your homes.”
She also said that the greatest threat to peace is the breakup of the home and family.
And oh, how precise and accurate that statement has become.
With such significance placed on the keeper of the home by even Mother Teresa herself, there is no doubt in our minds that we should ever vacate it, leaving it empty and cold. There is no one else that can take the place of wife and mother as long as we are the wife and mother in our immediate family. We are, indeed, the heart of the home.
And, when the children are grown and moved out, we are still the heart of that home.
We cherish the husband and man of the house for as long as we are blessed to do so.
We receive and welcome grandchildren when each one is born.
We embrace our children, grandchildren, friends and relatives with every visit.
We accommodate all who enter there with love and hospitality,
and we keep the home fires burning and the porch light on.
We are Keepers of the home!
~ Gwen of IRISH ACRES
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