What if I told you that you can honor your husband now before you are married by keeping a hope chest?
It's true.
Picture this, if you will. You are a new bride. The wedding is over and you've returned from your honeymoon to your new home. You walk into the bedroom and realize you don't have any sheets for the bed. Oh well, you can buy that tomorrow. You have a lovely recipe you want to make for your new husband. Halfway into preparing the meal, you find that you don't have a potato peeler. No matter, you'll put that on your shopping list and find a way around it for now. When you go to serve your dinner, you find it necessary to dish up with a knife and a tablespoon because somehow you forgot to get serving spoons for your new house. After the great effort of the evening, you think to yourself that you will take a shower but you suddenly remember that you have no shower curtain. No matter, you don't need a curtain just this once. So you take your shower and get sopping wet before you realize that there isn't a towel in the house.
Along with the inconvenience, you have already cost your husband at least $68.80 and you have only been in your new house for one day (these figures are based on the cheapest prices I could find on Walmart).
Well maybe that's not a horrible amount of money but this is only the first day. As the week goes on, you find more things you need and things around your new home that need to be fixed. The kitchen sink leaks, one of the upstairs windows doesn't shut right and lets a draft in, there isn't a glass baking dish in the house, and have you ever seen such a nasty toilet seat before?
You're wracking up quite a bill and it's only the first week. If you had prepared for your new home with a hope chest, you might be able to at least knock that $68.80 off the bill. There is no guarantee that you will have a good supply of money coming in when you get married. I'm sure we have enough married ladies in our community that can tell you about how tough it can be starting out as a newly married couple.
Now take that $68.80 and spread it out over five or ten years. It doesn't seem like so much now, does it?
The time before you get married is a time of preparing and gathering, not simply waiting. (Check out Actively Waiting For Your Future Husband)
I know you want to look at your house and plan themes and colors but those things aren't necessary right away, if at all. The main thing is having what you need (the bare basics at the very least) and creating an atmosphere of peace and comfort for your husband to come home to.
When I turned sixteen, my brothers made me a hope chest but that isn't when I started. I started my hope chest with a plastic storage tub from Walmart when I was thirteen. You can do the same! It doesn't take much to start. You are never too young or too old to start a hope chest.
Planning ahead, saving money, budgeting, all before you get married is honoring your husband. Not putting added stress on your husband by buying unnecessary things is honoring him. Preparing for your home before you have one is honoring your husband.
Can you imagine how it would feel as a husband to know that your wife had cared enough for you before you'd even met to want to save money and do her part to prepare for her future home? That she had spent time preparing and saving.
You're never going to able to gather everything you need so don't stress it. This isn't something to overthink. What you do gather, however, you'll appreciate when you're first starting out.
Remember, baby steps. How do you eat an elephant, Ladies? One bite at a time.
Keep an eye out, I'll be doing another blog on what you might want to put into your hope chest.
What is your opinion on keeping a hope chest? If you already have a hope chest, what are you keeping in it?
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