As I worked on the three articles about hospitality, something jumped out at me: this is our work all the time. We don’t just try to fortify our guests. We want our people to be fortified too. We don’t just make sure our company has a place to sit and drinks and clean bathrooms. We want that for our people too. We don’t just make sure our company is welcomed, tended, sheltered, and fed. We want that for our people too.

Our goal when having guests over is for them to leave fortified. We want them to feel cherished and ready to go back to their lives with more strength than when they arrived at our door. We want them to know they’re loved, valued, and understood. If people leave stressed, embarrassed, and thinking they never want to come over to our homes again, we’ve done something wrong.

Hospitality is sheltering human finiteness with love and compassion and understanding. This means we must take into account the physical needs of the people around us. This work is how we build strong cultures within our families and strong communities and connections with those outside our four walls.

When I first came home and stepped away from “my career” I said yes to all the things and was never really focused on my home. As I said at the start, one of the blessings of my chronic health issues was being forced to be home and focus on home. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to just go-go-go all the time. I want to find the balance between housekeeping and hospitality. I want to have slow, quiet days and weeks. I want to be careful with my health. Housekeeping and Hospitality must be held in tension to stay in the golden mean.

Hospitality is a worthy engagement of our time and skill. It is a worthy endeavor of the homemaker. What are we, ladies, if we’re not being hospitable? Isn’t tending to the physical and emotional needs of others the whole point of all we do? Then it should be within our reach to include others in that worthy work.

Us cooking nourishing meals, cleaning our homes, washing sheets, encouraging rest, planting flowers, tending our shelters, clothing, and food is tending the church. Who do you think makes up the church?

HearthKeeping is closet-keeping. This means keeping up with the condition, fit, and organization of closets and clothes. But look deeper, this is an element of hospitality and communication. What you wear says something about your husband, it says something about your home, it says something about your homemaking, and it welcomes others or pushes them away.