3:20 p.m. Today's project was to share and publicize our church's Heart to Home classes that will meet on Tuesday the 17th and the 24th. Kay Wardell will be teaching "Fashionable Homemade Diapers" (pictured above), and I will lead "Event Planning for Busy Women."
Heart to Home was birthed at Calvary Chapel Moreno Valley in April 2005 as an offspring of the "Willing Hearts, Willing Hands" ministry I had begun with Linda Thomson and Bonnie Lange at Harvest Christian Fellowship several years before Steve and I were led to Calvary. In 2008, Mickey Althouse began a new Heart to Home in Black Forest, Colorado! I was honored to speak at their opening session, and Steve helped the men in preparing and serving the luncheon.
We have offered classes on everything from mosaic tile table tops, quilts, chocolate candymaking, Mexican cooking, crochet, fleece blankets, strawberry jam, beauty and makeup, basic sewing, flower arranging, home economizing, painting, recognizing your child's spiritual gifts, aerobics, stencilling, sign language, beginning guitar, starting your own business, journalling, budgeting, gardening, scrapbooking, holiday decorations, canning and many more than I can remember! I offer the devotional message before classes begin. Heart to Home is also an outreach, because co-workers or family members who wouldn't come to church feel quite comfortable coming to a fun, creative and crafty event.
Now that our classes take place on Tuesday evenings during the same time slot as the men's Bible study and the high school study, women can attend classes on any subject that interests them, not limited by a one-time event. I have been blessed to meet many women I've never seen before, even as active and involved as I am!
Heart to Home is a perfect fit for the Titus 2:3-5 theme of our women's ministry. The scriptural exhortation to older, more experienced women in the church reads thus:
...that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things-- that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
There are many requirements of us older women, to teach and lead, and not be drunks or slanderers, to teach godly character to our younger sisters in Christ. But two items on the list gave me pause when I first read the passage many years ago as a young believer. "Why did the Apostle Paul find it necessary to direct that young women be taught to love their husbands and children? Isn't that natural?"
My favorite commentator Albert Barnes (1798-1870) comments that this particular word for love "occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. In Ephesians 5:25, Paul directs husbands to love their wives, and in verse 33, the wife to reverence her husband, and here he says that it should be one of the first duties enjoined upon the wife that she should love her husband. All happiness in the marriage relation is based on mutual love. When that departs, happiness departs."
As for loving one's children, "Nature prompts to this, and yet there are those so depraved that they have no maternal affection...Religion re-produces natural affection where sin has weakened or destroyed it, and it is the design of Christianity to recover and invigorate all the lost and weakened sensibilities of our nature."
In our classes, we teach women to enjoy, be at peace, fulfilled in their roles as keepers of the home, even if they also have outside employment. I think of women of past generations who worked very hard physically, but still found time to bless their families with handmade items and lovingly prepared dishes and treats. We serve the women by teaching them the "good things" our scripture refers to!
Barnes notes as to keepers at home (KJV), "This does not mean, of course, that they are never to go abroad, but they are not to neglect their domestic affairs; they are not to be better known abroad than at home; they are not to omit their own duties, and become 'busybodies' in the concerns of others."
Our Heart to Home ministry aspires to offer loving encouragement and skills to bless, please and comfort the ones we love!
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