Discovering God's Will for You as a Housewife

"If the mother looks upon her children as obstacles to the prompt response to grace, she is missing the whole point. If the children look upon their mother as preventing their development in God's service, they have not yet begun to love God."

Excerpt from Holiness for Housewives and Other Working Women by Hubert van Zeller, Sophia Institute Press, originally published 1951

Discovering God's will for you as a housewife

"The only thing that really matters in life is doing the will of God. Once you are doing the will of God, then everything matters. But apart from the accepted will of God, nothing has any lasting reality. So if God wills that you should be bowed over the sink instead of over the pew in your favorite church, then washing dishes is for you, now, the most perfect thing you can possibly do.

"Once you really appreciate this truth, and act according to its implications, you save yourself a lot of unnecessary heart-searching and resentment. The whole business of serving God becomes simply a matter of adjusting yourself to the pressures of existing conditions. This is the particular sanctity for you.

"You will be tempted to say that it is impossible to serve God while worrying about the upkeep of the house; you will tell me that you get so irritable that you cannot see this principle of substituting your present duty for the envied prayer time; you will point out your inability to direct your intention toward God when you are so exhausted that you cannot think; you will quote your repeated failures, your bitterness, your manifest decline from wha tyou were before you came to be overwhelmed with household cares. You will say you are unsuited temperamentally, physically, spiritually, by training . . . . 

"But none of these things disqualifies. It can only be repeated that your whole business is still to look for God in the midst of all this. You will not find Him anywhere else. If you leave your dishes, your housekeeping, your telephone calls, your children's everlasting questions, your ironing, and your invitations to take care of themselves while you go off and search for our Lord's presence in prayer, you will discover nothing but self.

"This is the first lesson for the Christian wife and mother today: to let go of what may once have been--and under other circumstances might now be--a recollected self, and take on, with both hands, the plan of God. Indeed, it is the lesson for every Christian in every age: it is the gospel principle of dying on one plane in order to live on another."

The Polish Madonna