PODCAST TRANSCRIPT | Episode 60 – YOU ARE THE QUEEN OF YOUR HOME
FROM OUR HOME TO YOURS w/ Nancy Campbell
Podcast 60 - You Are The Queen Of Your Home
Rocky Barrett: Welcome to the podcast, From Our Home to Yours, with Nancy Campbell, founder and publisher of Above Rubies.
Nancy Campbell: Hello ladies. Today I’m going to start by reading you a little poem. I love poems and I love poems about mothers.
I have a lovely book called “Quiet Reflections for Mothers.” It has got loads and loads of poems about mothers. I put this together a number of years ago with poems that I had saved from over the years. It is available through Above Rubies. You can go to the webpage aboverubies.org and do a search for “Quiet Reflections for Mothers.”
If you would love some lovely poems to read while you are nursing your baby or you just need a little uplift, well you would love to get it.
Let me tell you this one. It’s called “They Forgot to Tell Me.” It’s about a mother having a baby:
“They said that I was crazy to let myself get fat
And to give up that super job that I delighted at!
They told me I’d be sorry as each morning I was sick,
But they didn’t tell me how I’d feel when you began to kick!
“They told me how my life would change and that I’d sit and weep
For time to make a peaceful bath, for uninterrupted sleep,
They said my home would lose its shine and that I’d get depressed,
But no one ever mentioned that you’d sing while nursing at my breast.
“They tried to raise my consciousness to think about myself,
They begged me to go out alone to help my mental health,
They told me that by leaving you I could improve our bond,
But no one told me that you’d notice I was gone!
“They said that Day Care’s just the thing and Nursery’s all the rage,
To encourage “independence” in a baby just your age!
They said there’d be no money with the mortgages all due,
But they all forgot to me how I’d fall in love with you!”
Erin Harrison: Aw, that’s beautiful.
NC: Alright, lovely ladies. I’m going to start a new subject called “The Queen of the Home.” I believe that God wants us all to be queens in our home.
There’s a beautiful Scripture, Song of Solomon 4:8. In the Knox translation it says: “Come to me, my bride. My queen you shall be . . ..”
The Song of Solomon can be taken as a revelation of the relationship between Christ and His bride. It can also be between the husband and the wife. I think that is a rather lovely statement, “Come to me, my bride. My queen you shall be.”
I think that our husbands are meant to be king, don’t you, Erin?
EH: I do!
NC: By the way, Erin’s with me again today, hallelujah!
EH: Yay!
NC: Praise the Lord! It’s so good to have her here. We often talk about being queens in our home, which is why I wanted Erin to join me for this subject because I know it is so close to her heart too.
EH: It is.
NC: I think many mothers think they’re just insignificant in the home and what are they doing? They’d rather be out doing some job or career. But actually, you go out to some job and you’re not a queen there. You’re just a servant working for somebody. In your home, dear mother, dear wife, you are a queen!
EH: What could be better than that?
NC: Nothing! You have the opportunity to run your home the way you want to run it. To manage it the way you want to manage it. To make it be the way you want it to be because you’re queen.
I do believe we should see ourselves like this because it’s biblical. Our husband is the king. We are the queen. Our children are princes and princesses. They’re royalty because we all belong to royalty. We belong to the King of kings and Lord of lords.
This kingdom that we belong to is a royal kingdom. It is the greatest of all kingdoms. It is royal. We are a royal priesthood, a kingdom of priests. The Bible says we are kings and priests unto God . So I think we should live like that, don’t you?
EH: I do.
NC: Yes. It’s so good to see yourself as queen of your home.
Now we had another question from a lovely lady who emailed in quite a long time ago and I’m just answering now.
She says here “You say on your podcasts that home is what you make it. I agree, but I am struggling to make my home what I want it to be. Just the basic responsibilities are hard. My feet hit the floor and the next thing I know it’s time to bathe everyone and get them changed into jammies, ready for bed. I have run all day and yet the house looks the same as when I woke up. I feel as if I’ve barely seen my babies, let alone enjoy them or spend quality time with them. Now I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining or self-pitying, but it’s just what it’s like. I have three little ones, five years to five months. Often my days end after the children are asleep with tears and feelings of guilt or failure because of wrong reaction or attitude. But here I am with them every day and I just so want to change. I wondered if you have any practical tips or advice that may be of help because I want my home to be a wonderful place that my children, husband, and I can take refuge in and enjoy being in.”
What do you say, Erin?
EH: Well, I have a lot to say on this actually.
As the queen of a home, you might want your house to look like a castle, right? You wouldn’t want it to look like a messy junk heap. I used to be the messy junk heap girl, I was a slop and I was a hoarder; I saved everything. I used to have cupboard doors that you would have to duct tape closed, otherwise everything would come piling out all over the floor. It was a mess!
I just decided one day that I wanted to have a nice house. I was a young married woman with five under five years old. I decided that there must be, just like the Bible says, a time for everything.
NC: You had five under five?
EH: Yeah.
NC: Wow!
EH: And I felt like I was running ragged and I just knew that there was a time and a season for everything just like the Bible says.
So I just simply put together a little schedule and I got my life ordered because I think that God is a God of order. He’s not a God of chaos. He doesn’t want us running around putting out fires all the time.
My husband says there is just people that coral their children—they don’t actually train them.
NC: That’s right.
EH: So I believe it’s really important first and foremost to train your children to do what you say they’re going to do and when you want them to do it.
I never asked my children, “Would you like to get dressed?” or “What would you like to wear?” or “By the way, are you hungry? What would you like to eat?”
No, I never did that. I always said, “It’s time to get up. It’s time to get dressed. It’s time to go to the table and eat, and this is what we’re having, and this is what you’re wearing. Isn’t that lovely?”
I kept it always positive and they always did what I asked them to.
When I was cooking in the kitchen, I had them cooking with me. When I was cleaning, I had them cleaning. They were my buddies. They did everything with me.
I’d have the five little children on the floor, and we would all be sweeping. I had little brooms for them. They would be sweeping at the same time I would be sweeping. I would even dump crumbs on the floor just because my house had gotten so cleaned up and organized after I decided I was going to have a clean home and put all my messes aside and get rid of stuff.
Then the house was so clean I had to make messes just in order for us to clean them.
We had so much left-over time! We would wake up at seven in the morning and eat breakfast. We would sit at the table and I’d feed them. They weren’t allowed to each make a different thing.
Some mothers just run themselves ragged because “This one wants pancakes and this one wants oatmeal. This one wants cereal and this one wants bacon and eggs.”
No way! Don’t do that! If you are doing that, STOP IT! It’s not a good way to be because you are not their waitress. You are their mother and you are the queen of your home.
You don’t need to be their servant. You are in a kingdom together. Mothers are not meant to be their children’s servants. They are meant to be their mentors and teachers.
You have to switch it around in your brain. Everything you do, have them do it with you because they are learning along the way.
Instead of them playing with toys, why aren’t they just working with you? That’s more fun for them than anything! All little children want to do is to pull up the chair next to the countertop or bench, as you say in New Zealand.
They want to be right in there, mixing the eggs in. They want to be cracking the eggs. You might have a little extra mess, but that’s more fun because you get to clean up the messes together! That gives you more to do.
NC: Yes, and I think too many mothers think that they are the servants. Of course, when your children are little there are lots of things that you have to do for them as you’re training them.
That is one of the wonderful blessings of more children coming on because the other children get older and you have more older helpers whom you’re training.
Sometimes young mothers can look at older mothers with eight, maybe ten children, and think, “Oh, how do they survive?”
They don’t understand that they are the queens of their homes. They have trained their children and really, if they have another baby, they can just sit and nurse their baby and the whole home is organized around them.
EH: I always had a rule, too. If they were playing with one thing, they weren’t allowed to get the other thing out until they were done with that thing. Then they cleaned that up and went to the other thing.
I didn’t coral my children. I had my children trained to always be right with me under my skirts, all the time. They were right there with me. They weren’t off playing something in another room, making a big mess.
I had control over my children in a way that it was fun. It was fun for all of us. We had great fun!
But so many mothers I watch all the time come over. They look so worn out and frazzled. They just look like they don’t enjoy motherhood because their children are running over here and they’re running over there.
Instead of training them they’re waiting until there’s just a fire to put out. Then the child runs over here, opens up a door and starts shoveling everything out. Then they have to run over there, and you hear the mother let out a big sigh and put everything away for her child.
Why not train them not to go into the cabinets? I never let my children go into other people’s cabinets. I didn’t let them go into my cabinets. If you let them go into your cabinets, then they go to other people’s houses and they go into their cabinets. They don’t know the difference!
It’s the mother’s responsibility to train their children in their homes so that when they go other places, they’ll act the same as they do at their house.
Don’t let them jump on people’s furniture and tear around, run around, grab things and pull books off people’s shelves or pound on people’s pianos. No!
NC: Or jump on people’s beds!
EH: Oh, I’ve had it all! And it’s disgusting! I can’t believe people don’t want to train their children. It is actually way more freedom. You feel like you have all the time in the world.
Every afternoon when my children were little, they had their nap from one o’clock till three o’clock. I felt like I was on a vacation every day from one until three.
I thought, “Well what am I going to do now?” I ended up doing computer work or painting pictures in the afternoons because I love doing creative things.
I had all this free time because my house was gloriously clean, and the laundry was done because we did it all together.
They were taking a nap and I thought, “I can write a song on the piano. I can do this or that.”
If you have them trained, you have yourself organized and you have control over your environment, you have so much unlimited free time. It’s unbelievable and you feel so relaxed.
NC: And this is what God wants it to be. In fact there are some Scriptures in the Bible. In 1 Kings 17:17 it talks about the woman, the mistress of the house.
Now today the word mistress can have some negative connotations in some countries. Men are married to wives and they have mistresses on the side.
But this is not talking about that kind of mistress. The word in the Hebrew is ba`alah. It is just the feminine of ba’al, which means “to be master, to have dominion over.”
There is another word, too, for mistress in the Old Testament. It’s gĕbereth, which is the feminine of gĕbiyr, which is master, meaning “to be strong, valiant, to prevail.”
Part of managing our homes and being the queen in our homes is to be taking dominion over our homes and being in charge. It’s managing your home.
When God spoke the very first words to the man and the woman He said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”
But He didn’t stop there. He went on to say, “Subdue and take dominion.” He said that to both the man and the woman.
There is that desire in us to take dominion. We want to take control. This is where deception comes in because many women take that desire to have control and be in charge and they take dominion over their husbands.
EH: And that’s not the right way to do it.
NC: Yes, that’s not where we’re to take dominion.
Then others, because of the revelation of God’s heart, they think, “Well, what am I doing in this home?” and they go out and get into a career where they think they can take dominion there.
But you see, this is deception. God wants us to take dominion in our homes.
We go to the New Testament and over in 1 Timothy 5:14 it says: “I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully [bring reproach among the name of Christ].”
Now the word for “guide the house” is a word that means “to take dominion, to be master, to be the manager.” To guide the house means to manage the house, to be the ruler of the house. It comes from the word that means “to rule, to manage.”
That is where we understand that we’re meant to be queens. A queen is someone who manages her realm. She manages a whole realm.
We are to manage our domain, our realm, which is our home and our garden, if we are to be totally and absolutely biblical, because we always go back to the beginning. The prototype of the first home was what? It was a garden home. It was the Garden of Eden. It was the first home, the prototype of all homes to come.
God loves us to have a garden as part of our home, to beautify our home, but also to grow food for our families.
Now some of you are in situations where you don’t have room to grow anything. Maybe it’s just impossible for you to do a garden. But you can grow something on your deck. You can grow some herbs on your windowsill—you can grow something so you can be a garden home.
But now back to managing your home. Some people don’t have much to manage. They have their one or two children, send them off to school, then what are they going to do? Look at their four walls and stare into space?
But when we have a vision for the enormity of the power of motherhood and we are open to God’s plan for us (now sometimes it is true, some God only gives us one or two or three and no more come. Others He will give more children).
In this day in which we are living where there is so much evil, deception, and falsehood coming into our public schooling, many are homeschooling, taking their children out of this deception.
How can we, if we’re godly Christian parents, send our children for hours a day to be trained in ungodliness, deception, and lies, because that’s what they’re getting today? I mean the homosexual agenda has just taken over our school system. They’re just getting their claws into it, right down even to kindergarten.
We better be aware of what we’re doing when we send our children into these places.
And so we have a lot to manage over. We become the managers, the queens, of our home and we’re teaching our children to be princes and princesses.
Now you were telling me the other day about a little girl who didn’t quite know how to be a princess. Tell me about this.
EH: Well, we were having this glorious tea party. I did it really on the spur of the moment. It was the night before that I decided that we were going to have this lovely tea party.
So in the morning I was cleaning my whole house and by ten o’clock in the morning we had this big tea party with about ten different ladies. I had the tablecloth and all the china.
One of the ladies didn’t get the memo that it was more for the adult ladies and brought her little girls along, because if I have a tea party for the little girls, then I bring out all the little tables and chairs and I have the tea party for the little girls.
I was kind of feeling a little bit stressed because I hadn’t planned for these little girls. So I was trying to hurry up and find all the little dishes because I was trying to make it special for them too.
You know, when you’re on the spur moment like that things can happen and you still want to make it very nice as a hostess of your home, as the QUEEN of my home.
Well at the end of it all, the two little girls were racing around the house, pounding on the piano.
I came in there a couple of times and I said to her, as if she were a special princess, “I have this rule, you see. The rule is that you either can only play the piano if you have an instructor with you, or you have to have had three years of experience on the piano.”
So I asked her if she had either and she said, “No.”
I said, “Well, I guess you can’t play the piano.”
She said, “Okay.”
She got off the piano and they were racing around, playing hide-and-go-seek. They kept leaving things behind. When the mother was ready to leave, the girls were scrambling around saying, “I don’t have my purse” or “I don’t have this.”
So they were running back into my home and tearing around into every room, looking for their things.
I kind of felt a little bit leery of people just tearing around my house going into who knows what rooms looking for their things and who knows what drawers because they were opening up all cabinets and everything.
She was about to run in again and I said, “Listen, I think I saw you had that in your hand so you can’t go back in my house.”
She said, “No, I put it on the chair in there!”
I gasped and said, “You’re talking to the queen of this home in that manor? That’s not a good idea. You are a princess and I am a queen. Every woman who is a mother in her home is a queen, did you know that?”
She said, “No, I didn’t know.”
“Well, you have to talk to the queen of the home like she is the queen. You have to be kind and stop and think before you talk because you’re talking to royalty, you’re talking to a queen.
“Instead you must think about it and say, ‘I might have left something inside. May I please go back in and look for it?’ Then the queen would say, ‘Yes.’
“So let’s try this all over again.”
She stopped and I said, “Wait a minute— just think about it when you talk because you are talking to a queen, remember?”
She said, “Yes, I think I had something, and I think I set it on your chair on the way out. May I please go in and look for it?”
I said, “Yes you may.”
She went in and I applauded her for learning to talk nicely instead of talking back to me and treating me bad.
I said, “Listen, if you’re nice to the queen of the home, she’ll invite you back. But if you’re not nice to the queen, well, I was nice enough to have you for this tea party, but I might not invite you again.”
She gasped, saying, “But I loved it here!”
“Well now you can come back because you asked so nicely,” I told her.
NC: How lovely. That’s so beautiful. I think we do have to teach our children these ways, don’t we? Even for our own children to realize we are the queen.
EH: Yes. Even her own mother said, “Thank you so much. I never thought of it that way, but that’s so good.”
Any mother can do that. I always did that when my children were little I would say, “You’re going to this person’s house and they’re so nice enough to have us over. We mustn’t touch anything. We mustn’t jump on the furniture. We must sit there nicely, ask politely and kindly, and treat everything with respect.
I always wanted them to be respectful when they went to somebody’s house, not just tearing around, jumping all over the place, ramming around and going into people’s cabinets.
NC: I think too many children are untrained today.
And I’ve actually just thought of that word I wanted to tell you. It was in 1 Timothy 2:15. It was oikodespoteō, coming from two words, oikos, meaning “home” and despotēo, or despotēs, the noun, which you can perhaps imagine we get our word “despot” from there. That word means to “rule and to reign and to manage.”
The Word tells us that this is where our dominion is to take place. We are to rule and take dominion in our home. That is the place.
When we do that, we find we have this wonderful domain over which we can rule. We have the freedom to do it how we want to. We can make it as amazing as we want to!
EH: It’s so the truth! The key to all of this is training and order. If you can master those two things, you’ve got it all made in the shade and you’ll have the most amazing time.
NC: I think, too, that the day starts the day before, because often we are up too late ourselves to get up and start managing the day.
Also, we allow our children up too late. Of course, that gets more difficult when they get into their teen years.
But I notice even today that teens are up much later than we were as teens. It seems as though it’s the nightlife. But really, God didn’t give us light to be up at night. He didn’t; He gave us the day. We’re meant to work in the day and the night is for rest.
Of course we just have that balance as they’re getting older.
I remember when my little ones were young, they were down by seven o’clock. Then we had this whole evening together.
Then as they got older, it was eight o’clock and in the bedroom. They were all in bed and we had a lovely time together.
Then it got to nine o’clock . . . then it got to ten o’clock . . . then it got to “Okay children, make sure the doors are locked and lights are out, we’re going to bed.”
It’s still like that now—we’re usually to bed before the young people.
But I do think, especially with young ones, that we should get our children to bed at a reasonable hour. I believe that is good for their health. It is also important for starting the next day.
We need to start the day at a certain time. That’s going to be different in every home. Many homes it’s seven o’clock in the morning. For others it might be a bit later. It depends on your circumstances and how you are.
We do need to get everybody up, teaching them to make their bed before they come out of their bedrooms and come and have breakfast at a certain time.
EH: It’s a schedule.
NC: I’m not one of those who is all about a rigid schedule. But I believe in having an underlying schedule so that it’s the underlying foundation of the home.
EH: Well does God have a schedule?
NC: Well, does He?
EH: He does have times for things, doesn’t He?
NC: He does!
EH: He appoints things.
NC: He gave the day and the night! He gave seasons!
EH: Exactly, and so shall we.
NC: I think if we’re really going to be managers of our homes, we’re not going to be sleeping in.
This is something that I found quite a challenge when I first got married and once I had children. I had quite a few little ones early and close together.
I had always loved to read. I still love to read and am a good reader. I could read into the night, but then, of course, you can’t get up in the morning. Therefore I had to really discipline myself that I wouldn’t do that, so I could go to bed and be ready to get up to face the day.
So I’m a great believer that if you want to be ready to face the day, it starts the night before. We have to discipline ourselves, not hanging out, watching movies, on social media, etc. and it can get carried away. Then you’re too tired and can’t get up at a good, decent hour.
In fact, who of us really get up when we should? The day breaks really early, doesn’t it? We get up and, “Oh, it’s light! Okay, it’s time to get up!”
We need to get the children there for breakfast. I don’t know how a mother can cope with children coming at all different times for breakfast. Could you cope with that in your home?
EH: No!
NC: I couldn’t cope with that at all! Breakfast is when it is breakfast and when it’s off it’s off, we clean up and that’s it. You don’t have breakfast if you’re not there on time.
I like to have breakfast on time because we then have family devotions after breakfast. How could we gather all of our family for family devotions if they’re not even up? They need to be up.
I like to have lunch at a certain time. Then we have supper, not at the exact time because it depends how long it takes to get your meal, but I like to have it between six and six thirty.
Some people have it at five. In fact your children were over here on the volleyball court and I think we were just going to sit down to have our meal.
I said, “Wow, have you had your meal?” and they said, “Yes, we’ve had our meal and cleaned up!”
EH: Yep, all cleaned up and everything. Well we have a schedule. I like schedules.
NC: I know, I have mine, too, but ours is just a wee bit later and yours is a bit earlier. You have whatever is best for your family, but you have it.
EH: Yes you do. You need to do yourself a favor and don’t be cleaning all day long. Here is another really good tip, especially if you have older ones. You give each person a special job. Everyone works for 20 minutes; you manage and watch how everybody’s doing their little jobs.
Somebody might be cleaning a toilet and a sink in one bathroom. That’s their 20 minutes. We all pitch in because they’re living there for free. We work together as a team. We’re all a family, so we do teamwork.
One might be sweeping the kitchen, another might be sweeping or vacuuming the living room. Another might be putting the dishes away after they were done the night before and another might be washing them. Someone’s clearing the table.
Everybody has their little 20-minute check point.
Right after breakfast the house is gloriously shining and gloriously clean. That’s what I would always say, “Well, we can’t start the next thing till the house is shining and gloriously clean!”
It would shine and it was glorious. Then we would start school and the house was just glorious!
Then we would eat lunch and do twenty more minutes each person. It’s twenty minutes of actual time. But think about it—if there are five people doing twenty minutes, how many minutes of work is that?
NC: That’s pretty cool!
EH: Is that pretty cool, or not? So twenty minutes times five children that’s what? A hundred minutes total? That’s a hundred minutes of pure work.
Instead of one person doing a hundred minutes like this lady who wrote in was so frantic and frazzled.
Instead of that, you have twenty minutes that you’re just managing it all and making sure everybody’s doing their job but then you’re getting 100 minutes of work in. Isn’t that great? I love it that way.
NC: Yes.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t do spontaneous things and we can’t be free. I find that if you have the underlying, basic sort of schedule, then that lays a basis for being free to go and do other things.
EH: Oh, every afternoon we had freedom.
When the children were older, we would go for a picnic. We had done all of our schooling; the house was shining and gloriously clean. So we would pack a picnic and go do a walk in the countryside, lay a blanket out and have a nice picnic next to a little pond or whatever. Or we would go to the park one day or do a little shopping trip.
We had so much fun! We had so much free time.
Then we would always be back by four and we’d all work together to get our meal on the table. When Daddy came home at five thirty, we always had the meal ready on the table. We all did our part. We did everything together.
NC: That’s the thing. You have the meal ready for your husband because he gets in at five thirty.
I think that’s the thing, is knowing when your husband is going to come in and having the meal ready for him. Don’t you think that’s such an important thing?
EH: It’s so important and so many women fail to appreciate what their husbands are doing for them all day long.
My husband is up on a roof. He’s in a hot building and he’s building the whole day, working his muscles all day long, sawing wood, pounding nails, and using these different saws and things. He’s carrying big things and putting things together.
He works so hard for our family and I want him to be able to come home, relax, and have a nice meal after a long day because he actually has earned it. He’s worked hard and he pays for the groceries.
So many women are like, “I slaved away all day long and my husband comes home, and he just wants to sit and watch TV. He doesn’t want to do anything with the family or do devotions or anything and wah, wah, wah.”
Instead, why don’t you think about he’s sacrificing all day long so that you can actually go to the grocery store and buy the groceries and make a nice meal for him.
NC: Yes, I think it is one of the greatest privileges of us as wives to have a meal ready for our husbands. I think it is just basic number one rule.
EH: It is. Why can’t we be a blessing to our husbands who are blessing us?
NC: That’s what we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be a helper, which is a blessing and a help. It’s the same word that is used of God that He is our help.
Goodness me, we’re meant to be like God, just helping them.
Let me just close with this beautiful quote from Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage:
“Thank God, Oh women for the quietude of your home, and that you are queen in it. Men come at eventide to the home; but all day long you are there, beautifying it, sanctifying it, adorning it, blessing it.
“Better be there than wear a queen's coronet. Better be there than carry the purse of a princess. It may be a very humble home. There may be no carpet on the floor. There may be no pictures on the wall. There may be no silks in the wardrobe; but, by your faith in God, and your cheerful demeanor, you may garniture that place with more splendor than the upholsterer's hand ever kindled.”
EH: That’s beautiful.
NC: “Father we thank You just that you have ordained for us to be queens of our home, managing our homes, ruling our homes, keeping them in order to make everyone’s life happy and contented.
“We pray that You will help us to do it the way You want us to do it. That we can fill our homes with Your presence and keep them in an order that You want us to have Father.
“We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.”