Eden, Heaven, Home: Why we long for perfection in our homes

As Christian homemakers, we are often striving for perfection. Is it possible we are trying to connect with the perfection of our God?

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This homeschool year we are studying Ancient History. We started with Creation and are now at Passover and the Crucifixion. During this time, I have been personally studying a lot in the Old Testament, particularly Old Testament prophecy and the fulfillment of it in Jesus Christ. Working through all of this has brought me to a place where I have seen so much depth and richness in the meaning of Eden and a return to Eden via Heaven that I wanted to share how this connects to our homemaking in the in-between time here on this earth, living the life God has given us.

Our homemaking contains a beautiful correlation
between Eden and Heaven,
the Old Testament and the New Covenant.

My deep dive into Eden and Heaven started with a Bible study I was in about a year ago which was led by a woman who walked us through the correlations between Eden and the Tabernacle. It was fascinating, and I began to dig deeper into Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and ultimately Heaven as we studied Ancient History in our homeschool this past year. There was so much there that I had never noticed before and it was super rich and super interesting, full of meaning and foreshadowing.

A Longing for Perfection

This correlation between Eden and Heaven has continually intersected my daily life this past year, and when I read the following quote from Theology of Home, I saw how much this relationship could impact my homemaking.

On page 33 where the author is writing of how we seem to be reaching for the future while we are currently in the present, she says, “It doesn’t sound so extreme when you think about the strong desire we all have for home, for even a perfect home or a forever home, no matter how elusive it may be in our own life. It is a yearning for something we’ve never seen.”

Now think about that. Don’t we all long for our homes to be picture perfect? We pour over pages of magazines and Pinterest and Instagram looking at what we believe to be perfect homes – the perfect homemaking plan, the perfect kitchen, the perfect schedules and routines, the perfect way to homeschool and on and on and on.

I have spent much of my blogging efforts telling women to let go of that desire for perfection, when I really needed to redirect those desires instead.

There is no doubt we are looking for perfection in our homemaking efforts. There is a yearning for something we’ve never actually ever encountered, witnessed, participated in, or ever had in our own homes, yet we still long for it. Why is that?

It is something innate in us. It is a longing for what once what, what will be. We are reaching back for Eden and forward for Heaven.

It is a desire for things to be set right.

We long for the perfection God has created, and rightly so. In Ephesians 1:9-10, it says, “making known to us the mystery of His will according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in Heaven and things on earth.“

This uniting of Eden and Heaven, perfection with perfection, through Christ is exactly what God planned all along!

The Sabbath as a Connection Between Eden and Heaven

Another book I’ve been reading is The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel.

I must say, as I read this little book, I found myself wondering at how this Jewish man could not see Christ in the Old Testament, how he did not connect the dots, how his own writings did not proclaim Jesus to him over and over again. This book is just so profound and I thoroughly enjoyed the read, but my heart was grieved over how he managed to miss the fulfillment of The Sabbath in Christ.

The juxtaposition of Eden and Heaven are discussed in The Sabbath, and at one point Heschel says the goal is to create a Sabbath that is a foretaste of Paradise. Isn’t that beautiful? The idea that our Sabbath, our Sabbath rest, our Jesus Christ, was and is a foretaste of Paradise here on earth. It’s a connecting of what God originally planned in Eden with what He has planned for us in Heaven. A restoration of everything the way that God intended it to be.

And that restoration comes from Sabbath – literally Jesus, our Sabbath rest!

Heschel also mentions how God didn’t ordain rest so that we could work harder. Again, this points to Jesus! God didn’t give us Jesus as a Sabbath rest so that we could keep working our way to heaven. That wasn’t what Jesus’s death and resurrection were for. Yet we tend to see a day of rest as either an inconvenience or a brief interlude before we get back to the business of work.

Homemaking as Communion with Christ

As homemakers, we tend to believe that we need to keep working, keep going, keep trying harder. Certainly, it’s wonderful to challenge ourselves and be creative, but if we see that as a way to achieve perfection, we have completely lost the message that Jesus has for us.

Remember that connecting of Eden and Heaven? How does this journey of homemaking here on earth reflect that connection, strive for that perfection, lean into the Paradise God has for us?

First of all, Eden was a place of communion with God, just as Heaven is a place of communion with God. As believers through Jesus Christ, we have communion with God in our homes, in our homeschools, in our very lives! What an exciting thought that we are communing with God right now, right here, without needing to work toward that perfection, without trying to make Eden in our homes or make Heaven in our homeschools! We allow that to happen through the work of Jesus Christ, and we allow ourselves to rest in Him by communing with God, by recognizing that He is right here with us through the Holy Spirit! He provides the perfection!

So in our homemaking, and homeschooling, and in our everyday lives, we need to be cognizant of the opportunities we have to commune with the Lord, no matter what it is we are doing. It can come in the form of praise music on the Alexa, extra love in the dish we are making for dinner, praying through lesson plans for the children, working out systems for the laundry.

Every time we set things right, every time we tidy a corner of our world, every time we dry the tears of a tiny child, hold the hand of a weary spouse, read a book, listen to the breeze, we commune with the Lord.

And every time we face a problem we don’t know how to fix, every time something breaks or something goes wrong or life simply feels deep and heavy, it becomes an opportunity to commune with the Lord as well. If we have moments when we can’t get things done, the bed isn’t made, the dishes aren’t washed, the mess and the stress are overwhelming, more than ever, we need the Lord.

Connecting Eden and Heaven in your home is like taking a walk with the Lord in the cool of the day. Just as Adam and Eve had that opportunity, you also now have that opportunity here on Earth through the work of Jesus Christ, through the REST and through the Helper He has provided you. You didn’t just get a little piece of Heaven…you got the Lord Himself!

No matter what the house looks like, no matter how bad your homemaking skills are, I would hope that you would be able to find joy and peace. Unfortunately, it often feels as if Christian homemakers lack a real sense of joy and peace and communion with God. We fail to lean into the Sabbath rest that is Jesus. We tend to lean on ourselves and only see our own shortcomings and failings. We lose connection with Eden and Heaven and the perfection we have in Jesus.

Can you imagine how differently you would live your life if you fully embraced this Rest? I can tell you without a doubt, you would have more joy and peace. You would have no need to figure out how to save yourself. At the end of the day, you aren’t required to set everything right all by yourself. You have someone who did that for you. What joy, what peace could you bring to your homemaking realm by simply living out that fact?

Tend the Garden

I know what it is like to wish you could keep everything together all the time. We yearn for a perfection we can’t quite seem to create. This is natural, innate to all of us. We want to keep trying. In fact, I would worry if you began to feel like you just didn’t care anymore. That most definitely is NOT the joy and peace you are looking for. You need the joy and peace that comes from knowing to whom you belong and that you are made perfect in Christ, and it is BECAUSE of that fact that you are still wanting to reach and strive toward Heaven, making things beautiful, making things joyful, making things peaceful along the path.

It reminds me of the broken pot analogy where God uses broken vessels, and through those cracks we pour out the Lord on others, and the people around us can’t help but notice because it shines through the cracks of our broken vessels.

We tend the garden here on earth the best we can. Who knows whose lives we are touching simply by being broken vessels that are pouring out the Lord onto the people we come into contact with?

That’s the kind of perfection that actually makes sense – that reaching back to Eden and forward to Eternity, resting in Jesus all the while. It’s not us trying to do everything within our own power. It’s us exuding Christ everywhere we go.

A Bit of Eternity in Our Homes

As you reach toward an eternal home with the Lord, you are in turn sharing that love with others, bringing a bit of eternity right here into your homemaking, into your earthly home. You are scattering a bit of eternity out on those around you, including your children and your husband, the people you go to church with, the people you run into at the store, the people who need to see the peace that comes from a connection with the God of the universe.

May you begin to recognize those connections between Eden and Heaven here on earth in your homemaking and homeschooling as you focus on building a relationship with Christ that reaches toward a perfection to come and an Eternity with Him!