Edith Schaeffer

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Last night I was talking with a friend over a bowl of delicious ice cream while she did her family filing. Somehow we got onto the topic of home making and then onto Edith Schaeffer. This is the second time this friend has referred to Edith but this time she got out her book, 'The Hidden Art of Homemaking'. While flipping casually through the pages I felt like I had stumbled onto a gold mine! Just reading small portions of her book encouraged me to be the best wife and homemaker I can be for The Lord. What a lovely, wise woman. So today I thought I'd share some Edith Schaeffer quotes. Here they are:

“A Christian, who realizes he has been made in the image of the Creator God and is therefore meant to be creative on a finite level, should certainly have more understanding of his responsibility to treat God's creation with sensitivity, and should develop his talents to do something to beautify his little spot on the earth's surface.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“Interior decoration is not just one's artistic efforts, but it is that which your home (even if it is just a room) is. If you are 'decorating' with clothes draped on every chair, with scratched and broken furniture- it is still your interior decoration! Your home expresses you to other people, and they cannot see or feel your daydreams of what you expect to make in that misty future, when all the circumstances are what you think they must be before you will find it worthwhile to start. You have started, whether you recognize that fact or not! We foolish mortals sometimes live through years not realizing how short life is, and that TODAY is your life.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“It seems to me that whether it is recognized or not, there is a terrific frustration which increases in intensity and harmfulness as time goes on, when people are always daydreaming of the kind of place in which they would like to live, yet never making the place where they do live into anything artistically satisfying to them. Always to dream of a cottage by a brook while never doing anything 

to the stuffy house in the city is to waste creativity in this very basic area, and to hinder future creativity by not allowing it to grow and develop through use." pg 66”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“Is a Christian- one who communicates daily with the Creator- to divorce himself from the things God created and intended man to have, and which demonstrate the fact that man has been made in the image of God? In other words, are we who have been made in the image of our creator to be less creative than those who do not know the Creator? The Christian should have more vividly expressed creativity in his daily life.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking