"The Value of the Home"

Philippians 2:3-4 (NIV)
3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Excerpt from Professionalizing Motherhood by Jill Savage:

Holly Schurter, a mother of eight, puts it so well in a letter she wrote to her grown daughter who was soon to become a mother for the first time:

Cultivate the skills, not only of housekeeping, but of making a home for your family. As you know already, they are not always exactly the same.

Homekeeping consists of the laundry, the dishes, the toilets, and floors that need to be scrubbed, but homemaking is something else. The difference between housekeeping and homemaking is the difference between a barren field and a lovely, fragrant garden.

Homemaking is the deliberate cultivation of beauty and productivity in family relationships. Homemaking is about helping your family feel loved and comforted. Homemaking is about celebrating each other, and about caring for each other, as well as for your friends and extended families and even the occasional stranger. Anyone can keep house. Not everyone bothers to make a home.