If femininity isn’t defined strictly, what if I’m not being feminine? Welcome to freedom. Freedom is a heart matter. Freedom requires you to judge yourself and not your neighbor, and oh how we hate this. We would so much rather not judge ourselves and gleefully judge our neighbor.

Freedom says you make your home according to your husband’s leading, coupled with your gifts, sensibilities, and tastes, within the bounds of providence.

Using the five senses to manage homemaking requires purposefulness and intentionality. We can’t have our head in the clouds, or be so frantic we’re rushing through life, or so discontent we just wish it all away. Noticing the five senses doesn’t require us to overturn our lives. We start small. It takes time to retrain mental habits. Start by just being thankful for temporary gifts filling this world. Once we start, worship fills our hearts. Thankfulness filling our hearts will go further in making home a delight than all the things money can buy.

Being a woman isn’t easy. Being a HearthKeeper isn’t a job for wimps. It is hard work, lots of growth, ever-changing, presenting constant new challenges, and requiring us to constantly renew our love for it and remember why we chose this life. It is a vast field of endeavors often overlooked by everyone. It is mundane and it is magic. Practice discernment. A woman with littles is living a life different than a woman with teens, as different as the life of a single woman compared to a married woman. This means we can all read the same article and yet have to pass on parts, embrace other parts, feel convicted by one thing and not convicted by another. This is not only true here, but in all of life. Life as pilgrims in this world requires wisdom and discernment.

God promised us the changing of the seasons and the food that they would produce. Autumn is given to us to enjoy! It is a time of harvest, a promised event, and a gracious act of God. He promised us seasons and every year, when Autumn overtakes summer, God is showing His faithfulness. What is not to celebrate?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whatever your heart song is, I believe it will point you back to your hearth and with such diversity as to enrich our world. Our diversity is a gift as much as our heart songs. The rich tapestry of our interwoven lives is one of the great beauties of God’s creation. We’re all similar and all different.

If we want to encourage each other and be an encouragement to other HearthKeepers, we have to embrace the idea that this is where we want to be, that this is worth it, that this is beautiful, and that this is hard work. How can we do that?

We’re all in a fight against sin and what may outwardly appear all the same, may inwardly be sinful or may not. Stay in the fight. Dishes have to be done, but they can be done with grace, love, and humility or pride, complaining, and laziness. Only you and the Lord know where your heart is. 

We don’t become instant Pinterest-worthy, book-worthy, blogging-worthy, Instagram homemakers at the moment we make our vows to our husbands. This isn’t expert-level achieved in 4 years. Homemaking changes too much for that and has too many parts. It is a massive job that becomes more massive the longer you invest yourself in it. You can’t perfect it in a year and you’ll still be tweaking and changing it as long as you’re a homemaker.

The world tells women to band together, that we’re a sisterhood, that we should go out and change the world, abandoning our homes before we’re relegated to only kitchen and nursery work, but reality tells me that the most amazing women I know are busy in their homes. This is sisterhood. This is where we bloom. It is here that we have flexibility.

When I gather at something like a baby shower, with a group of moms all talking about mom things, I feel like a fraud. I can’t seem to untie my tongue to talk about what is so very important to me: homemaking. I feel invalidated by my childlessness.

The tangible, practical elements of our lives are important, but they can also be a shallow trap that pulls us away from the real benefits of our labor, much like living by sight instead of faith. It’s easy to judge things only by the parts we can see. Much of every woman’s work is the repetitive rhythms of days and seasons. But, like living by sight, if we’re not constantly on guard, we can mistake the superficial, visual parts of HearthKeeping for the whole. We will blindly see cleaning and cooking and laundry as the only elements of homemaking and miss the deep, rich world just at the edge of our sight. We will miss the hospitality, comfort, calm, and beauty a skilled homemaker brings to the whole world around her.

I love the image of a candle in the window, the light shining bright and warm in the cold, dark gloom. I once read that in the past a candle was placed in a window to show those who were away how to get home. It was both practical—keeping your family from getting lost in the dark—and symbolic of safety, warmth, and love. A Candle in the Window.