A Wise Woman Builds Her Home - A Quiet Simple Life with Sallie Borrink

The past few months I’ve been making choices that allow me to focus more on home and health which I previously wrote about in Focusing on Health, Home, and Homeschooling and My Themes and Goals This Year: Health and Home. As part of that, I’ve been returning to Proverbs 14:1 over and over again.

Here are a few of the translations:

The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down. (NIV)
The wise woman builds her house, But the foolish tears it down with her own hands. (NASB)
Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands. (KJV)

For a long time, I struggled with writing specifically about motherhood, marriage, and homemaking because my situation is very different from many other women. I don’t think I’ve ever written specifically about being a stay-at-home mom because I don’t consider myself one even though I am home all the time. I don’t fit the typical SAHM profile in so many ways. I have one child and share the parenting duties with my husband who is self-employed. I also work at home with my husband in our graphic and website design business and have for almost twenty years.

But I’ve come to appreciate afresh that Biblical principles are universal. Every Christian woman is called to live in light of the truth of Proverbs 14:1. How it looks may vary a great deal. But each woman has a responsibility and privilege to wisely build a home and love those who are a part of her household.

The core themes of creating a cozy life that I write about so often (peace, understanding, joy, and beauty) can be a driving force in every woman’s life no matter her marital status, motherhood situation, working status, theological views, financial level, etc. Every home consistently needs peace, understanding, joy, and beauty. Every home needs the woman in it to cultivate them.

Building my home is not going to look like how you build your home and vice versa. We have different blessings and challenges. Each woman must thoughtfully and prayerfully decide what wisdom dictates in her home. The Holy Spirit will lead each of us according to our specific needs. The important factor is recognizing the need for wisdom that can only come from the Lord.

What Does It Mean to Be A Godly Woman?

During the past week I’ve been doing a deep dive into the topic of what it means to follow Christ and, more specifically, what it means to be a godly woman in our culture. What does wisdom look like for a woman? What does folly look like? How do we seek out one and purposefully avoid the other?

When I say deep dive, I mean deep. I’ve been spending hours each day in the Wayback Machine. I’ve watched videos on YouTube. I’ve been reading blogs. I’ve been finding deleted blogs that I read long ago. I’ve been going back through my own currently unpublished archives.

Why am I going through all this older content?

Last week something clicked for me after a number of years and it made me want to understand where people who got so many things right went so wrong.

I wanted to understand why women I knew who (as far as I could tell) seemed to be solid Christians and professed to believe in the authority of the Bible now espouse and live beliefs that are absolutely contradictory to the Word of God or have even openly rejected the Christian faith.

I wanted to understand why people who were many years ahead of the curve in correctly assessing cultural trends in light of the Scriptures and how they would negatively impact the body of Christ now embrace and walk in the very errors they pointed out.

What was the lightbulb moment?

Where Do Christian Women Go Wrong?

It was when I realized that, far more often than not, women who allow their spiritual pain or abuse they suffer(ed) to significantly impact their beliefs almost always end up going wrong theologically.

I also realized that far more often than not, people who obsess about their sin almost always end up going wrong theologically.

There is a line a woman crosses where she allows the event, abuse, or pain to become greater than the truth of the Bible. She views everything through a lens of abuse or pain instead of viewing her pain through the lens of Scriptural truth. For others, they view the Christian faith through the eyes of a prominent speaker or pastor who betrays their trust in him/her. When that line is crossed regarding the event, abuse, or pain, all bets are off as to how far the person will fall into error.

There is also something about living constantly in the thoughts of sin that warps a person’s theology and seems to make them open to other errors that our culture is rife with right now.

There were a number of older posts I didn’t have on my site and I republished them this weekend. I added them because they show how I was working to put these pieces together years ago. I chose not to rewrite them so they are written differently than I would write them now, but if I edit older posts the comments oftentimes won’t make sense. Those posts are (in random order, not chronological):

So that’s what I’ve been pondering and plan on writing about more in the months ahead along with the topics I already cover. If you missed it, I did write last year about some of these ideas in Thoughts on Motherhood, Making a Home, Homeschooling, and Working at Home. I no longer feel compelled to avoid topics of Christian motherhood, marriage, and homemaking like I did in years past and I’m profoundly grateful to feel free in that regard.

Update: Please also see this related post I wrote afterwards: The Life Lessons of Warren Wiersbe, Rachel Held Evans, and Those Falling Away by Deconstructing Their Faith