For the Family's Sake: The Value of Home in Everyone's Life

For the Family’s Sake

Crossway Books

by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

_________________________________________

For the Children’s Sake

For the Family’s Sake

For the Family’s Sake

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Published by Crossway Books

a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover design: David LaPlaca

Cover illustration: Debra Chabrian

First printing 1999

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture verses marked PHILLIPS are from The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J. B. Phillips © 1972 by J. B. Phillips. Published by Macmillan.

Scripture references marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

Scripture verses marked AMP are from the Amplified Bible. Old Testament copyright © 1965, 1987 by the Zondervan Corporation. The Amplified New Testament copyright © 1958, 1987 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Every effort has been made to contact owners of copyrighted material quoted in this book and to secure permission.

__________________________________________

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Macaulay, Susan Schaeffer

    For the family’s sake : the value of home in everyone’s life /

Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.

            p.       cm.

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-111-9 (alk. paper)

    ISBN 10: 1-58134-111-3

     1. Home—Religious aspects—Christianity.    I. Title.

  BR115.H56M33       1999

  248.4—dc21                                 99-33107

__________________________________________

VP           16     15     14     13     12     11     10     09     08      07

17     16     15     14     13     12     11     10     9     8     7     6     5

This book is

dedicated , with thanks

to the Lord

and with love ,

to Philip and Abigail.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Who Needs a Home?

2 Home—the Best Growing Ground for Children

3 Free as a Bird, Dutiful and Humble as the Angels

4 This Is Where I Put My Feet Up and Thank God

5 The Home’s Weight-Bearing Beams

6 Taking Time and Care to Create the Home’s Atmosphere

7 The Glory of the Usual or Jack of All Trades

8 The Infrastructure of Routine

9 Of Beds, Balance, and Books

10 Contentment, Thanks, and Enjoyment

11 Choose Wisely and Leave Time for the Daily Rhythms

12 Early Days, Vital Days

13 Homes and Life in Community

14 A Look at the Everyday All Around Us—All Year Long

Appendix

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the work of Elaine Cooper, my friend and the administrator of Child Light, this book would not have been possible. We all thank you.

Thank you also to my husband, Ranald, to my children, and to my grandchildren for their support and encouragement at a personal cost to themselves.

Thanks to L’Abri Fellowship, which has allowed me to devote so much time to writing.

Thanks to the members of the Charlotte Mason College Association, who welcomed Elaine and me to their reunion in Ambleside. We appreciate their generous friendship and the many conversations with us that helped us to understand their student experience at Scale How and the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU) schools they taught in during their professional careers.

Thanks to Miss Eve Anderson for the generous gift of her time and energies in helping us all as we seek to apply the PNEU ideas in homes and schools today.

Thanks to Phil Matthews for the hours spent telling me about Amy Carmichael and Dohnavur and also to Margaret Wilkinson for the long telephone conversations and the loan of letters. Thanks to the Dohnavur Fellowship office and Jean van der Flier for her help.

I thank my mother and my father for my early childhood and for so much more than could ever go into a book. Thank you, Nancy Barker, for my beloved Sunday school class when I was four and five years old. Her teaching forged for me a lifelong link with the Bible.

PREFACE

This is a book about life at home. Just as the use of the word homemaker has fallen into an uneasy past, the concept of having time for rich home life is also being relegated to history. I’m referring to a time when friends would congregate in threes or fours on front porches to laugh and chat while children played outside in the twilight, when neighbors knew each other and would pause to exchange words and events over the back fence.

HOME. Do we have to give it all up? We, whoever we are—the unmarried professional, the single person devoted to a vocation teaching inner-city children, the parent left alone to bring up children, the widow wondering how to go on and make a life that still has shape and meaning, the elderly person making decisions about everyday life patterns, the postgraduate student facing several stressed-out years, the Christian worker with never a spare moment, parents of all sorts and in different circumstances—we all need a fresh look at what we are aiming for at home.

Women ask whether it is worthwhile to give generous time and energy to the home. Is it necessary? And what should the home look like? Is it possible to find a map that shows? Can we see a stabilizing infrastructure that will clarify our priorities as we wade through details?

What do the most vulnerable of persons, little children, need? In our real-life circumstances, how can we give them a satisfying childhood? What does that look like?

This book will address these questions and more. Of course, because human life is anything but obvious, getting to the answers takes some telling! The questions are like icebergs floating in a deep sea. To give worthwhile answers, you have to look deeper than the obvious. Is there a big picture beyond the details, a reality below life’s surface? Christian believers think so. If the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are reliable, they offer a view of our lives that explains matters and directs us. Hopefully, we can discover a balance in our practical lives that is life-giving and works well. For hundreds of years people have found life-giving ideas this way.

In a short book like this, the big view can only be sketched briefly. Many questions can’t be answered. There is an appendix at the end of the book with suggestions for further reading and a list of addresses that may be useful to you. There you’ll also find a short description of people and organizations mentioned in the book— Charlotte Mason, Amy Carmichael, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, and L’Abri Fellowship.

1

Who Needs a Home?

If you were to stop and ask a miserable refugee, Who needs a home? he or she would not think it a question worth answering. The cold winds of winter and gusting rain make the covering of canvas provided by a relief agency a poor shelter, and it is too noisy for conversation anyway.

Turn to a sophisticated young business person in any city, and you might be rewarded for using such an old-fashioned word with a supercilious gaze. That person might also be speechless. "Home! the gaze seems to exclaim. That word isn’t in my vocabulary or life. Nor is marriage. My parents used those words, and they are retired in a backwater."

The dictionary tells us that home is the place where we live, whether we are single, married, young, or old. The definition also includes the idea of a family or another group living in a house. Further, it says that home is the place we are at ease.

What is a tree without its roots held deeply in the soil? What is a cup without its saucer? What are letters if they aren’t put into words and sentences? What is a child’s life like if there is no home and no family to belong to?

Most people agree that children need stable, loving homes. Are homes then a temporary arrangement for their care and development? Or, as many people seem to think, do homes only go with marriage? Novelist Jane Austen didn’t think so. She lived in a little Hampshire village and made her home with her sister.¹ This gifted writer stayed unmarried, but it never prevented her from having a balanced life within the ease of home and community. She wrote:

Our Chawton home, how much we find

Already in it to our mind;

And how convinced that when complete

It will all other houses beat

That ever have been made or mended

With rooms concise or rooms distended.²

We all need to think hard, or we may find ourselves rootless and drifting whatever our age. For many the very words family, home, commitment, and neighborhood convey agonies, fears, and questions. Others dream romantically about a warm, settled, creative, and satisfying life. But they find that nothing in the cold light of the everyday, the ordinary, can even begin to resemble the dream. They can become hopeless, bitter.

On top of this, for children there are special considerations. As fewer of the routines and less of the atmosphere of everyday life can be taken for granted, the resulting confusion has caused uncertainty about how children thrive. They are like little seedlings, and they do need a particular environment to do well. The more we’ve learned about children’s development, the more we realize that the hours and days from birth onward are the most formative in the whole of life. We now know that whether the child’s brain will be fully utilized or not depends on early care. We know that children’s emotional balance for life grows out of early relationships.

The main reason I am writing this book is that we all need homes. And, as we are made in a particular way, this life and home must suit human beings. There is a basic pattern that fits us, holds us, serves us.

It is too easy to make excuses about why we cannot follow these patterns. It is easy to excuse ourselves from working at our everyday lives with the words, if only . . .

If only I were married.

If only I were married to another person.

If only we could leave this miserable home and have a nice place.

If only my spouse had not died/left me.

If only I had more money or a better job.

If only I had more time/energy/ideas.

If only I’d had a good childhood model.

Homes are for everybody—single persons or families with children, young or old, people with good jobs or bad ones. Homes are not a romantic idea to dream about wistfully; homemaking needs to be put into practice as a priority. A good home life is too basic a human need to whine and fuss about with the plaintive words, if only.

It is essential that older adults have the rootedness of a home. Probably those who are single have an even greater need to consider what goes into making home life for themselves and neighbors or friends than do families for whom homemaking might seem more obvious. For instance, widows often have to be reminded to cook nutritious meals again for themselves after being left alone. It can seem hardly worth it just for me. We more naturally follow good patterns when we are caring for others.

Sometimes life is too hard, and we go down. And that experience should find its place in this book too, for that is real life. It is also real life to find a way to go on. Today we expect so much that many of us are dissatisfied with simple basics in every area. We can also be confused about what matters and what does not. Commercial and media pressures mislead us there and breed discontent.

It is helpful to remember that we don’t have to do everything or have everything. What are the basics exactly? What is most important when we can’t have it all or do it all? What ingredients make up a good home? I believe that a mixture of common sense, realism, traditions that have worked, and a look at how different kinds of people have made a success of life will provide an excellent map to help us in our individual circumstances. Today we have so overcomplicated and stressed our lives, minds, and bodies with the too much that we’ve lost a pearl of great price: the basics of wholesome everyday life at home. A balanced life.

As we rush along this way and that, we may find an echo of our own dreams when we read the following Irish poem:

AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

O, to have a little house!

To own the hearth and stool and all!

The heaped-up sods³ upon the fire,

The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains

And pendulum swinging up and down!

A dresser filled with shining delph,

Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day

Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,

And fixing on their shelf again

My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night

Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed, and loath to leave

The ticking clock and the shining delft!

Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,

And roads where there’s never a house or bush

And tired I am of bog and road

Amid the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high.

And I am praying Him night and day,

For a little house—a house of my own—

Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.⁴

PADRAIC COLUM

Pity the tiny child who never has the peaceful comfort of the humdrum everyday home life described here. Watching such a child is like seeing a plant designed by the Creator for a sunny patch in the garden put instead into a chemical dish under a glaring light. The plant may sprout and put out leaves, but the roots wander miserably looking for . . . home.

This book is intended to be a practical help in creating homes that work well in a variety of circumstances. The special thrust is to encourage us all gladly to take the time and effort making a home requires. There are few shortcuts on the essentials—homemaking has to be a chosen priority in life for men and women. To create welcoming homes requires thought and then action.

Many kinds of winds blow on all of us in our generation. There are multitudes of lonely, tired, weary souls tramping through various sorts of mires or bogs. Although Prozac-type medications help in medical depressive states, no quick pill can substitute for the satisfaction of a contented life based at home. Why not look back and harvest the wisdom of past days? Our human makeup, needs, and nature have not changed. And so here is a book about the foundational place our homes have in our lives.

The primary example and references included will be to young children’s needs in home life. Home is the first part of our educational path; it is the place where our characters and personalities develop.

Writing about such a subject, I knew I’d draw on my own life, thoughts, and ideas. My husband, Ranald, and I have been making a home together since our marriage in 1961—thirty-seven years at the time of writing. And of those years, thirty-six have included children. We still aren’t finished with parenting! We had four children born into our family. During the years while they were fairly young, we also included other children occasionally who needed the shelter and the care of an established home. The three who shared our family life like this stayed for times ranging from three months to one and a half years.

Then twelve years ago two children for whom we were guardians were suddenly bereaved and needed stand-by parents to swing into action. Thus we found ourselves once again being mother and father to young children when our previous youngest one was a teenager. So it is that while some of our friends have empty nests, we have steadily continued the routines that go into making a family home. Of course this has been of benefit to us all. We were not tempted to give up on homemaking! Such a personal lifetime story could not help but become part of this book.

However, I’ve wanted to refer to other wise guides also. It was nineteenth-century educator Charlotte Mason’s writings that first gave Ranald and me a theory that explains how a child’s life works in practice and a clear educational philosophy. Charlotte Mason valued home as the primary setting for a child’s life and relationships. Just as she said that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, so we can say that the home is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.

As I write, I feel that I am saying, Miss Mason, let us together sit down in the drawing room of your home in the Lake District. The evening light comes in through the window; the peace of the lake and mountains is refreshing. This is a good place to talk together about our primary concerns and insights.

First things first, I can almost hear both of us saying, a century apart. One of the most important aspects of life is the home. And then communities of homes.⁵

My imaginary conversation between Charlotte Mason in, say, 1898 and Susan in 1998 will be in these chapters. Other people whose writings, choices, or examples are applicable will also join in.⁶

I hope that a clearer map for our homes and lives will emerge. May we be rooted and live generous lives. That is good.

2

Home—the Best Growing

Ground for Children¹

Before plunging into this book about home and the lives of people who make them, I would like you to have a picture of the home and community I lived in as a little girl. An author’s thinking comes out of a life, and my life will especially be part of this book.

The 1940s neighborhood where I rode my tricycle along sidewalks and played with friends in the vacant lot is now part of inner-city St. Louis, Missouri. In that era my friends and I were not warned not to trust grownups we didn’t know. In fact we were told the opposite. We were instructed to obey grownups along the way and turn to them for help if we were hurt or in need.

Our mothers hung out their washing in the yards while we played. We had a lot of freedom—going in and out of each other’s houses wherever our play led us, occupying long free hours in our own ways. We were, however, always under the caring eye of some grownup in the neighborhood.

Our homes were different. On one side was a Catholic family with one adopted child; on the other, a Jewish home full of children. We believed different things as families, but we as children had more in common than we had differences.

Neighborhood children were called in to supper at about the same time. We’d sit down with family arranged around the table. Most of us were read to before bedtime. There was no television. If we did wrong, we had to go and apologize to the neighbor. Sometimes this was very hard. I’ll never forget my despair at having to face my neighbor and apologize for picking her tulips!

When we were old enough, we walked to school. There the teachers expected the same sort of obedient behavior as our parents and neighbors. I, like so many others, loved school. There I could learn how to read; this I wanted to do very much. I also enjoyed art and games.

Our lives had form and freedom—routines and moral framework on one hand and yet a rich and generous childhood of safe freedom with many hours of play, fun, friendship.

Church was important, for my dad was a pastor. But I didn’t like sitting still at all. In fact, although graying Grandma Susan now enjoys certain church services immensely, there are still times when I can find myself more like the four-year-old Susan and can struggle to follow what seems a dreary grind!

Yes, I do understand myself as I look back. When I was really small, I sometimes deeply and urgently longed to stand up in that quiet place and make a huge, exciting noise, shouting and surprising everybody into good cheerfulness. One of our playmates, the young son of an elder, did call out in a clear, shouting voice in the middle of the hush of Communion. He then made a rapid escape, crawling out under all the pews. From then on, starting in my fourth year until much later, he was my hero.

Although the church service was a weekly test and trial for me (and more for my poor young mother as she coped with an unruly child), I was blessed with the immensely interesting and foundational Sunday school teaching of Nancy Barker. She told stories vividly, and when we acted them out, I felt as if I too had been called and was following the Lord Jehovah Himself.

Indeed, her teaching is still something I mull over with thanks. It was life-changing for one naughty little child. How can you not be affected for life when you had actually marched out of Egypt, had walked through the towering Red Sea pushed back for a path to escape from the terrible might of Pharaoh, and a few weeks later had found yourself camping under Mt. Sinai? Any child who has experienced that before the age of five or six obviously still shivers when remembering the holy cloud fearfully blotting out the higher levels of the mountain.

Why, I’d even had to watch out so that the family animals did not stray too near, or they’d have been zapped dead! And I was old enough to know what death meant in reality, unlike children today who encounter death only on TV screens. In my St. Louis life, I’d known people who had become ill. I had visited them with my dad in the hospital and later had gone to a few funerals. In that place and culture, I had sometimes seen the dead body.

Yes, of course in the Israelite camp I’d kept well away from that mountain so powerful that mere mortals died if they strayed too near. But Moses was especially called by God into the cloud, and so he was protected as we watched him disappear from sight. We still trembled though as we watched him trudge up to the mountaintop.

Upstairs in church there were recompenses. One of the elders always shook our hands after church, and he’d leave a yummy wrapped caramel in our palms. Also, my dad would sometimes let me choose one of the hymns for the whole church to sing. I loved the organ and singing. Usually I’d choose Holy, Holy, Holy. I liked to be in the brightness of the early morning rays approaching the tremendous might of the Lord God, just as Nancy Barker and the hymn described. God is powerful and yet all-shining and beautiful with light and total goodness and love.

Of course, when I started singing, I knew my full-hearted voice was praising God in another place as well as in the city church with its pews. I’d have a sort of Narnia excursion as I sang, joining in with the wonderful throng about the heavenly throne. I didn’t see them very well, but I saw their light, and I loved sharing in the wonder of doing something along with those who were in heaven right now. For I knew that reality was not only in everything I could see. The unseen was all around, just behind the edge of what is visible here. And I knew that my final destination would be through the seen barrier, right into this singing, enjoyable, great place. In fact when I was small, I’d pray I could get there before the next dreaded visit to the dentist!

Anyway, while I remembered Moses and the great throne in the heavenlies at church, I came to know the everyday Lord Jesus within the intimacy of a truly homelike home. My mother often sang songs of gladness about the goodness of Jesus as she worked around the kitchen. I could see He made her glad. Or on Sunday evenings when Dad went back to church, we’d be alone in the kitchen listening to a program on the radio that had lots of Christian singing. I think that because it was a special once-a-week program, it never disappeared into background noise for me. We’d sing along, happy together and cozy.

One warm spring St. Louis evening, Mother started whirling and dancing gaily as we both sang about the greatest love in all of life—our sweet Lord Jesus. This love sparkled and was enjoyable and gave gladness. I laughed as I joined in the dancing with a joy that can still bubble up. I’ll always remember this lovely young mother, the atmosphere and home I grew up in, and that special scene.

Other times I had nightmares or was sick in the night with croup or measles. But this meant all-night comfort when my mother sat near me. Sometimes my dad would stumble into my bedroom and rock me in his arms in the rocking chair as he sang his favorite song, Jesus loves me, this I know.

There is so much more that I could tell, for I was taught Bible stories clearly, even in those years when I was six years old or under. So I knew this Lord Jesus by word, by song, by hugs and comfort, by forgiveness and faithfulness and meals all together, blessed with prayer.

A childhood home like this is a very great and godly gift. Such a legacy does not come from perfect parents, thank God. In fact perfect parents could not prepare us for a life that is to be full of our own and other people’s failings. My parents were always open about the fact that they weren’t all that good. Anyway, all children see parents as they are!

How could anyone dare to suggest or say that working at the huge task of making a home and carrying on through years and years of ups and downs is not one of the very few truly worthwhile ways to spend our energies and gifts in human life?

We cannot start with homes. We have to begin with the people who make and live in them. We are part of a generation and culture that has forgotten the very framework and the truth of who persons are and why being human is special and wonderful. With this loss, personal self-understanding also disappears, along with a sense of purpose.

Having forgotten or turned aside from these roots, we’ve gone on to throw out the fruits that grew on the tree of this understanding. Our culture has changed rapidly. Fundamental knowledge of right and wrong is disappearing, and in the subsequent confusion, people sell their souls for a mess of pottage. Our schools, workplaces, houses, and apartments are filled more and more with lonely people seeking someone who will love them and not just use their bodies. Counselors are kept fully busy as persons seek self-worth and try to decide who and what they are.

Good relationships grow out of the lives of persons who have roots and who are living in a balanced way. Relationships have always needed perseverance, compromise, consideration, priority, enjoyment, forgiveness, and unself-centeredness. So of course, with so many persons unsure of who they are, relationships dwindle and start evaporating like the morning mist on a hot day.

Without a clear sense of purpose or firm self-confidence, myriads of young people have given in to peer pressure and to pressure from the money-making media to give up their fresh virginity and try to win the crowd’s acceptance. Too often adults have stopped protecting these