What Should I Do?

When I first came home from college, I was baffled by the length of days and the brevity of my “to-do� list. How could I possibly fill the massive hours I had with my few responsibilities? While thinking on this, I had the opportunity to meet a wise girl who had stayed home until marriage and she gave me this advice: “Pray and ask God to fill your schedule, and He will!� So I did, for the most part doubting that I would ever be busy. As you may have guessed, I was wrong and my adviser was right, and I ended up with a fairly full weekly docket.

Laziness is a great temptation for girls at home, especially after high school. Now if you have six little brothers I suppose your time is pretty much full to begin with, but for others the path of duty may not be so obvious, especially if you have a few sisters who share the load. As our first principle of schedule-filling, we must remember that idleness is not an option! The old adage that “idle minds are the devil’s workshop� is quite true and idle hands can cause further trouble. Biblically, we don’t have the option of laying around, eating grapes, and watching television. We must work and we must work on something profitable.

In thinking about what activities should fill my schedule, I like to keep in mind 1 Thessalonians 4:11, “. . . Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands. . .� In considering business, we should do our own first. The path of the duty is the first to be walked and that starts in our own homes. We ought not be gallivanting around the country or the town or the street if our beds aren’t made and our family’s clothes aren’t washed. Take an inventory of your household, with the help of your parents. Is everything getting done on a weekly basis that needs to be done? Are the ceiling fans dusted? Are Dad’s shirts ironed? Are the cupboards getting cleaned regularly and the floors mopped? It’s easy to get into survival mode in a home and only clean the dirtiest places, so if we’re looking for something to do, we should start by making sure nothing is falling through the cracks in our own house. It may surprise you how many needful things have been neglected and how pleasant a few extra hours a week can make things!

Secondly, we need to consider furthering our education. Choosing not to attend college should in no way keep us from developing our minds! All Christians are called to study and learn all their lives and women are no exception. Chapter 6 of In My Father’s House says this: “A wife should be able to maintain intelligent conversation with her husband and his friends, and this requires the cultivation of general intelligence.� Even if we will never marry, it is our duty to be interesting people who know enough to carry on “intelligent conversation� with anyone we meet. A good way to do this is to know a little about a lot of things, taking care to ensure that what we know is accurate information. My goal has been to at least know enough to ask relevant questions! This may take a little creativity, but go for it anyway. Check into classes in your local area, frequent your library, and meet and converse with people from all walks of life. The guideline has been suggested in IMFH that ideally a girl should study between 10 and 1 each day. I’ve tried this and found it a good length of time, enough to keep my mind cultivated, but not enough to keep me from doing other necessary things.

Third, we need to explore options for serving others. This is where we get into the realm of even greater creativity! The world is big and we are small so we need to move slowly in determining where we serve. A great place to start is in your own neighborhood. My family has spent time getting to know some of the people on our street and in the process discovered that some of them need help and all of them love food, especially dessert! After that, take a look at your church; find an area of ministry that has been neglected and help out. Look around the town you live in; is there a program for feeding the hungry that could use assistance? Hurting people are everywhere and as part of the body of Christ, it’s our responsibility to meet needs where we can.

There are three other things to consider when talking about our daily schedule. First of all, it’s important to keep in mind the vision of our family. If your family doesn’t have one, make one! Our job as daughters should be to support the work of our father, whatever that may be, so we need to consult his advice in choosing activities. For example, part of our family’s mission is hospitality, so a good share of our time goes to that work of service. My dad often has customers from other countries at his office and he loves to have them over to our house. We are always and ever serving dinner to somebody, and my dad is pleased anytime we are able to help someone and bring him back a report. This year our company turned into overnight company and we ended up with out-of-town guests at our house almost straight for three months! At one time we had three weeks of solid visitors. Opening up your life to the Lord’s work can give you a full schedule really fast!

Secondly, many girls I know at home (including myself) are involved in something that gives them some spending money, be it music lessons, art lessons, etc. I don’t think this is a bad thing to do, but I think we need to caution ourselves to keep it in perspective. As women, we are to be bread servers, not bread winners, so we must be careful to guard anything we do for pay. These activities should never take precedent over our duties and service and ought to be flexible enough to be rescheduled or cancelled if some area of responsibility appears. This time of our lives is for growing, learning, and serving, and earning money is at the bottom of our list.

Third, remember there is nothing wrong with having a quiet life. Our world is full of busy people running back and forth constantly, with no real living going on. Those whose lives are quieter are often the only ones who notice and appreciate beautiful flowers, a pretty sunset, majestic symphonies, and other wonderful things in God’s creation. Sadly, they are also often the only ones who hear the sweet questions of small children, who are home on the street to run next door and help out when the ambulance pulls up, who can intervene across the country to sit with an ailing relative. 1 Thessalonians 4:11 even says that we should study to be quiet! If your schedule is not booked from sunrise to sunset every day, don’t assume you need to change that.

We are especially privileged in this time of life; we have no husbands and children that need attention, no house of our own to fix up and care for, no job responsibilities that call for us from 8 to 5. We are wholly able to allow the Lord to fill our days with activities that will help His kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let’s not be lazy; let’s not fill our days with meaningless tasks and other people’s business; let’s not live for ourselves. Instead, let us meekly remember what the Lord requires of us – not to do great things, not to save the world, not to buzz from place to place for the sake of having something “important� to tend - but simply to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. It’s the beautiful call of a Christian and we are uniquely suited to answer it.