Creating a House of Order

So back in Dec./Jan. I read this blog post on thepeacefulmom.com!  She talks about creating a word for the year that you work on all year.  I decided that I wanted to do this (at least this year) and the first phrase that popped into my head was: "house of order," so I wrote the scripture from D&C 88:119 on my marker board and have been working on creating a house of order.

My first thoughts were I needed to create order to our routine, so I have been working on that (although there is still much to work on, we have made progress!:).  We sat down as a family for FHE and created some routines that we wanted to have.  We also added order to our prayer routine, and since we have 5 members of our family and should say 5 prayers every day then we created a rotation so that everyone gets to say 1 prayer every day!!:)  I love that since we started that there has been no whining or complaining about who gets to say the prayers!!:)

Then my thoughts went to organizing my house.  I searched online for House of order, found some websites, started working on purging my house, but I haven't gotten very far (really, I've only cleaned my bedroom and the storage room downstairs really good), but I am making progress in that aspect too!!:)

So in doing those 2 things I would create a house of order, and since it is only May and I still have 7 1/2 months of the year left, I figured I was doing pretty good, until yesterday when I was reading my scriptures.  I read in Moroni 9:18 that the people were "without order." That got me thinking, what does that phrase without order mean, does it have to do with righteousness?  So I decided to look up "order" in Merriam Webster's free app dictionary and then in Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary. I learned so much!:)

First of all you have the normal definitions that I think of (I didn't write down all of the definitions, because I felt like some of them didn't apply to my desire to create a house of order): 1 - put in proper place 2- straightening so as to eliminate confusion (I like this reason for creating a house of order, to eliminate confusion!:) 3-setting in a relationship - wait, there can be order to my relationships, oh yeah, there should be, you have grandfather, father, son, that is an order to a relationship, but this can go a lot deeper! 4- gathering and arranging in preparation of a particular operation or effective use.  Wow!:)  I felt like I needed to create a house of order to help our family prepare for something big that is going to happen (although I have no idea what this "big" thing is!:)  But this definition hit hard, creating a house of order is so much more important than creating routines and making sure your house is clean (even though these are included in it).  It is making sure that your life is ready for whatever may come.  It is making sure that everything has it's proper place. 5- arranging so that the whole works together-each part having a proper function.  This definition is so important for creating a house of order.  Everything has to work together and in order to do that, every family member must have a function and do their function correctly.  6- under religious rule.  I liked that definition, I don't know that I need to change much for that one, but I like it!:) 7- state of peace, freedom from confused or unruly behavior; shouldn't that be our goal, peace.

From Noah's dictionary I didn't get much more, but I liked some of the definitions: 1- order is the life of business; good order is the foundation of all good things. 2-care 3-purpose

So I have some things to work on in creating my house of order, but I also have some direction!!:)