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.

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.

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.