This Easter, I will be received into the Catholic Church.
I’ve been on a slow, quiet road toward that moment for a couple of years — reading, praying, soaking up all the beauty, truth and reason. Along the way, I found myself drawn to writers like Jacques Philippe and famous Saints like St. Therese and Thomas Merton, to the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, to the idea that ordinary life — morning routines, school days, work hours, the dinner table — could be a place of genuine holiness.
That shift in how I see my days has changed how I run my business. And it’s how I discovered the concept that’s quietly transformed my life as a homeschooling mom and business owner: the Rule of Life.
If you’re a woman of faith trying to hold together a business, a home, children, and some semblance of yourself — this one is for you.
What Is a Mother’s Rule of Life?
The concept comes from St. Benedict, the 6th-century monk who wrote a practical guide — the Rule of St. Benedict — for how to live together in community with God at the center. It wasn’t a rigid to-do list or a productivity system. It was a rhythm: prayer, work, rest, prayer again. Ora et labora — pray and work.
A Rule of Life is simply an intentional framework for how you want to live. It answers the question: What kind of woman do I want to be, and how does my daily life reflect that?
For a modern mom who also runs a business, it’s not about following a monastic schedule (though honestly, the monks were onto something). It’s about creating your own version — a personal architecture for your days that makes room for what matters most.
Why Homeschooling Business Moms Need a Rule of Life
Here’s the honest reality of running a business from home, especially while homeschooling: the boundaries between everything blur constantly. Your work seeps into your evenings. Your kids need you during client hours. Your prayer life gets pushed to “when things calm down.” Things never calm down.
Thomas Merton wrote that we cannot live in a fruitful way without an interior ordering — without some sense of what we’re actually for. Without that clarity, we just react. We hustle and fill. We stay busy and still feel behind.
A Rule of Life is the antidote to reactive living. It’s a pre-made set of decisions about what your days will hold — so you’re not starting from scratch every morning trying to figure out how to be a good mother, a faithful woman, and a functioning business owner all at once.
The Four Pillars of a Mother’s Rule of Life
A Rule of Life for a business mom doesn’t have to be complicated. I’d encourage you to think about it in four areas:
1. Prayer and Interior Life
Jacques Philippe, in his beautiful little book Searching for and Maintaining Peace, talks about the soul’s need for a still center — a place that doesn’t move even when everything around it does. For women of faith, that still center is our prayer life.
Your rule doesn’t require hours. It requires intention. Ask yourself:
- When will I pray, and what will that look like?
- What will I read or sit with spiritually this season?
- How will I mark the beginning and end of my workday as something set apart?
Even a five-minute morning offering before you open your laptop is a form of rule. It reorients you.
2. Work and Vocation
Your business is not separate from your calling — it is part of it. A Rule of Life takes your work seriously without letting it take over.
Think about:
- What are my working hours, and when do I stop?
- What kind of work will I do in the morning (creative, strategic) vs. afternoon (admin, email)?
- What does a realistic week look like — not my best week, my normal week?
The saints spoke often of doing small things with great faithfulness. Your rule for work doesn’t have to be ambitious. It just has to be honest.
3. Family and Home
For homeschooling moms especially, the rhythms of family life and school life need to be named clearly in a rule — otherwise they get squeezed out by the urgency of business tasks.
Consider:
- What does our school day actually require of me, and when?
- What household rhythms help me feel steady (a tidy kitchen, dinner at the table, an evening routine)?
- How do I want to be present to my children each day — not perfectly, but intentionally?
4. Rest and Renewal
The Benedictine rhythm always included rest. Not as a reward for finishing everything (you never finish everything), but as a built-in part of the design.
A Rule of Life that doesn’t protect rest isn’t sustainable. Ask:
- What does a true Sabbath look like for our family?
- What restores me — a walk, a book, quiet, gardening, coffee alone before the house wakes up?
- What small thing can I protect in each day that is just for me?
How to Use the Liturgical Calendar to Plan Your Business Year
One of the most freeing things I’ve discovered as I’ve come closer to the Church is that the liturgical calendar already tells you what season you’re in — and that different seasons call for different things.
Advent is for quiet expectation, not your biggest launch. Lent is for pruning back, not piling on. Ordinary Time — those long green weeks between Easter and Advent — is where the steady, faithful, unglamorous work of life happens. And Easter? Easter is for joy and renewal.
Your business can move with these seasons too. I’ve started planning my work calendar loosely around the liturgical year, and it’s changed the way I think about launches, rest, and growth. Instead of pushing hard year-round, I have natural seasons for effort and for letting things be.
You don’t have to be Catholic to use the liturgical calendar as a framework. Many Protestant traditions and even secular planners draw on seasonal rhythms. The principle is the same: your whole life doesn’t need to be in high gear at once.
How to Create Your Own Mother’s Rule of Life (Step by Step)
Here’s the honest, practical version — no retreat required.
Start with a quiet hour. Not a whole day. Just an hour. Get a journal or a blank document and answer these questions:
- What does faithfulness look like in each area of my life right now (prayer, work, family, rest)?
- What rhythms already feel good that I want to protect?
- What rhythms are missing that I keep wishing were there?
- What season is it — liturgically, personally, in my business — and what does this season require?
Then write it down. Loosely. A Rule of Life is a living document — it shifts with seasons, with stages of your children’s lives, with where your business is. The goal isn’t to have the perfect rule. The goal is to have a rule at all — to be living intentionally rather than reactively.
Review it quarterly. Adjust it gently. Hold it lightly.
Peace Is a Practice
Jacques Philippe writes that peace of heart is not the absence of difficulty, but a kind of interior freedom — the freedom to be where you are, doing what you’re doing, without constantly fighting against it.
A Rule of Life won’t make your days easier. It won’t make your kids stop interrupting your work calls or your client deadlines move. But it will give you a framework to return to — a way of saying, “This is what I’ve decided my life is for, and I can come back to that even when today was hard.”
For me, it’s been one of the most quietly transformative things I’ve done as a business owner and a mother. And I’m still at the beginning of it.
This Easter, I’ll walk into the Church with full conviction — and a deep excitement for everything still ahead. The history, the traditions, the saints, the sacraments. A 2,000-year-old inheritance I get to actually live inside of now. The Rule of Life, in a way, was just one early glimpse of what the Church has always known: that ordered, intentional living isn’t a productivity strategy. It’s a path toward God.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it.
Are you working on a Rule of Life, or is this concept new to you? Send me a message — I genuinely love these conversations.
