“Homemaking,” Tambuli, May 1987, 7
Visiting Teaching Message:
Homemaking
Objective: To stress that every sister, married or unmarried, with or without children, is a homemaker.
A woman who was required to move frequently because of her husband’s employment was planting flower bulbs in her yard. Her neighbor stopping to watch asked her, “Why do you bother planting these bulbs when you know you won’t be here when they bloom next spring?”
“I may not be here,” the woman replied, “but someone else will. I always try to leave my homes, temporary as they may be, a little more beautiful because I was there.”
Whether we live in a cottage, apartment, shack, or mansion, each of us—married or single, with or without children—is a homemaker. Our challenge is to make our earthly homes like the heavenly home we so recently left and to which we hope to return.
President Spencer W. Kimball wrote: “Heaven is a place, but also a condition; it is home and family. It is understanding and kindness. … It is quiet, sane living; personal sacrifice, genuine hospitality, wholesome concern for others. It is living the commandments of God.” (Faith Precedes the Miracle, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972, p. 265.)
President Ezra Taft Benson has said that “one great thing the Lord requires of each of us is to provide a home where a happy, positive influence for good exists.” (In General Conference, April 1981.)
A home is more than mortar, brick, wood, mud, or thatch. It is a place where something of heaven is built into its foundation. It is for this reason that the psalmist wrote, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” (Ps. 127:1.)
Inviting the Lord to help us build such homes is always a challenge. Certainly the counsel given concerning temple building in section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants could be expanded to apply also to our homes: “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning; a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God.” (D&C 88:119.)
Suggestions for Visiting Teachers
1. What is one specific thing you could do to make your earthly home more like our heavenly home?
2. Apply the counsel in Doctrine and Covenants 88:119 to your homemaking efforts. What would you need to do to better make your home “a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God”?