HearthKeeping and Serving the Church
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?
Education
Don’t allow yourself to be mentally lazy. I get it. We’re all busy, busy, busy, but if we’re so busy we can’t study theology even for a few minutes, we might need to reassess our priorities. Your children need to see this in you. I remember getting up in the morning as a teen to get ready for work and always finding my Mom up before everyone else reading her Bible and memorizing Scripture. I remember her engaging with my Dad in family worship, in Saturday night theological reading, and lots of theological discussions. That is a legacy given to all five of us kids that can’t compare with any other earthly inheritance.
Little Suzy Homemaker
It’s so easy to slip into feeling judged and then back-pedal on what you believe to relieve that sense of judgment. It’s so easy to say what you think people want to hear, so that you don’t have to deal with conflict.
Image Is Important
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.
Temporary Things
From the floors to the seats, to the displays, closets, clothes, to the organization, to the plants, dishes, tools, and everything else, we should seek beauty, use beauty, create beauty. Not because it is forever beauty, but because God thinks temporary beauty is important and He has given us things to richly enjoy. We may live our lives here below the sun, but we have an above the sun attitude. We know it is temporary, but because we do it to glorify God, it takes on an element of the eternal.
Holidays & HearthKeeping
Holidays break routines. This is a good thing. Broken routines don’t become ruts. Holidays help you see the routine. Holidays give you a break from the routine which helps you appreciate it more. Don’t we all just love January when things get back to normal? Holidays help us appreciate the normal by charging into the middle of it and making a mess. As HearthKeepers, if we see this we can appreciate it, embrace it, and use it.
A Weary HearthKeeper
When our lights are low and the window is large, we look to women who have kept burning. We look for women who have passed through the trenches. We look to the old Sergeant, not the raw recruit, if we want to live through the battle of loving our husbands, loving our children, and keeping our homes.
Gaining Perspective
Attitude change: how about being thankful for a morning that starts with simple things? Take the quiet as a sign that your family is well, fed, and off to face the day. You never know when you might wake up and spend your whole day, or several days, in a hospital watching the people you love face major health issues.
Quiet Mind, Quiet Home
Struggles abound in this work. Thistles and thorns scratch our hands, rip our clothes, destroy what we have built. That too starts in our hearts and minds and can diffuse like smog, like killing gas, into our homes, choking, blinding, breaking. Calm may evade us. Anxieties haunt us in the night and join hands with the siren song of complaining during the day. We have eyes only for what is demanded of us and never for what has been done for us. A world never at rest weighs us down, and all we see is work, work, work, and never the seasons, never the hymns, never the slumber.
