The Home Builder
She built it herself; and yet she did not know that she had a monument. She lived in it; but she did not know that it existed.
She never dreamed that she was great; or that she was specially useful; or that she had achieved anything worth living for. Sometimes, when she read the stories of historic heroines, she, too, had her “dream of fair women,” and looked with a sigh upon her life made up of little deeds, so little that even she who did them was not conscious of the doing, she whose loom moved so noiselessly that she neither thought how long die was at it nor what a beautiful pattern she was weaving. Indeed, it would have seemed to her, if she had ever thought about herself or her work, to weave itself. But she did not think about herself. Self-consciousness would have destroyed her monument.
Her monument was her home. It grew up quietly, as quietly as a flower grows; and no one knew, she did not know herself, how much she had done to tend and water and train it. She began to build the monument in her teens. She did not finish it until she lay down to her last rest.
—Lyman Abbott.
God’s Partiality To The Home
Search everywhere and you will find that God has reserved the sweetest joys for the home alone.
For The Common Good
When shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea.
Through all the circle of the golden year?
—Alfred Tennyson.
Alternate Reading: Matthew 12: 46-50.