Marriage is hard, but it is also beautiful. It is beautiful in its teamwork of men and women in a long dance of support, help, leading, following, working together, and working differently so that the whole family grows.

Orderly, wild, intimate. Umbrellas bring these three aesthetics to mind. They’re much like home, like a little piece of home you carry with you when the weather is wetter than normal. A bit of order, a pinch of chaos, and a nestling in close. Homemaking is about our heart-ability to manage the order, chaos, and intimacy of our hearths, to tend our hearths. Its breadth of options is often overwhelming. We want to truncate it or limit it so that we can check off all the boxes and know we did a good job. But the real limits of homemaking are beyond our sight because homemaking is an attitude before it’s an action.

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.

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.

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.

Homemaking is no more about being perfect than life is about being perfect. We don’t walk around saying we can’t discuss or share our Christianity because we’re still in the fight against sin. We don’t refuse to let our kids eat because they don’t have refined motor skills. Why do we treat our homemaking this way?

How could washing the sheets be important when my life is falling apart? How can cooking a yummy and nourishing meal be important when our families, extended families, and churches are facing great struggles?

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.

HearthKeeping came because I wanted a strong yet feminine title. I love homemaker, housewife, tending hearth and home. All these terms and ideas needed to be included but with a tomboy feel, a woman in the Old West, gun in one hand, a horse at her back, tending her food in cast iron while she actively waits for her man to come back kind of word: HearthKeeping.