Doing the Hard Things in Community
This article is two thoughts I’ve woven together to create a single tapestry. It was inspired by some things Emily Velez brought up in our casual chat when we were talking about complaining that rattled and rattled around in my head. Here you go:
One of the great rewards of curating a knitting circle is ending up with catchphrases that become shorthand for big concepts. They become part of the weave of your life. You lose track of where things started, and they blend and grow to take on richer meanings.
As avid appreciators of Homemaker Chic, Sarah and I, and now Rachel A., and hopefully, many of you, have started saying We Do the Hard Things.
This lovely phrase holds in its cupped hands the concept that our work has lots of hard elements involved in it, but! but, that’s not a bad thing. Hard work, difficult things, and learning curves aren’t bad or evil or to be avoided. And just because they’re hard doesn’t mean they’re insurmountable. Hard doesn’t mean impossible.
We do the hard things.
Sometimes this catchphrase is used to confess that things are particularly challenging without leaving us hopeless and daunted. We do the hard thing: acknowledgment and encouragement.
Sometimes we use it to halt complaining. When we’ve moved beyond sharing to just grumbling about our lot in life, we remember or remind each other that we do the hard things. Things being hard isn’t new. It isn’t new to this world, or us. We do the hard things: get going!
And that is one of the rubs of community, isn’t it?
How do we live honestly and openly with each other, shoring each other up, and sharing hardships and burdens without complaining? How do we do this work and stay encouraged and encouraging?
Hard is good. Our hearts, emotions, and the world will tell us that anything hard is probably bad. Things should be easy and come naturally to us. The world tells us we shouldn’t have to work, strive, or struggle. We should be rewarded for just showing up. We deserve everything. Wealth and ease are my right. The world has forgotten that work, labor, and productivity are necessary for the health of the human soul. Talk about self-care. Work is good for us. We must learn things. We don’t come into the world just ZAP! knowing how to do things. We must educate ourselves, learn, grow, change, and make mistakes. We must expand ourselves. We must push ourselves. We must look the hard thing in the eye, crank up Eye of the Tiger, and get to it.
All that is hard.
Our work of managing our homes isn’t an easy job or a weekend project. It takes grit and grace, perseverance and fortitude. It takes long nights and early mornings to tend from birth to death. Taking care of people, plants, animals, and structures with any level of finesse is tough. Doing it in a culture that thinks it is a waste of time, if not downright abusive, is difficult. Our work is hard, but we do the hard things!
Communities are Limited. If we want to form thriving knitting circles that listen, encourage, and give us that oh-so-necessary swift kick in the seat of the pants, we need to understand community and not put expectations on it that it can’t bear.
First, we need to be cautious of being up in each other's business. In our age of smartphones, it’s easy to go from house to house with our fingers. We must watch gossip, habits of complaining, or oversharing in an unhealthy way. We should all err on the side of sharing less. I have found that having a small handful of close friends (spouse included) that you dig deep with works better than trying to share struggles with a big community. A big community can’t support that kind of intimacy. Two or three friends, yes? Once you move beyond about three things broaden but also become shallower. That’s okay. Sharing one on one, you can share a lot and it is a good thing to have several friends you share one on one with. In a healthy community, there will be bubbles of closer friendships that touch each other. This isn’t wrong, unfulfilling, or harmful. It just is. I’m much more likely to form close friendships with women who are older, younger, or have kids out of the baby-toddler stage. My dear friends in the baby-toddler stage are necessarily focused on the close intimacies of baby life. I don’t have kids. Our worlds at this stage are about as separated as they can be. That’s not wrong. No one is sinning. It just is. Not all of us are going to be best friends all the time with everyone.
Second, remember we’re all at different phases and places. Be hard on yourself and gracious with others, letting love cover sin and failures. Be suspicious of yourself and suspect pride and complaining and laziness of yourself while granting other women the graces of humility, honest struggles, and productivity. Assume they’re doing all that they can and making wise decisions. Remember that your life isn’t their life. What might be against your conscience isn’t against theirs, what would be lazy to you is as much as they can handle.
Augustine said, “To my God a heart of flame; to my fellow man a heart of love; to myself a heart of steel.”
The idea of giving yourself grace applies to our finiteness, not to sin. Finiteness is understanding that we all need to eat, sleep, rest, recreate, and shower. Giving ourselves grace is to acknowledge that we aren’t God, but only small creatures. We don’t give ourselves grace in the fight against sin. We don’t give ourselves grace in disrespecting husbands, not taking our work seriously, excuse-making, complaining, and laziness.
The Lord sanctifies all of us in different ways and at different stages. This is true in our marriages, families, communities, and churches. Life is different when we’re single, married, raising toddlers, guiding teenagers, between new homemakers and seasoned homemakers. We must help one another, not condemn one another.
Community, be it family, culture, and especially church, takes kindness, humility, great patience, and a correct understanding of what your community is there for and proper expectations.
Third, if you are looking for something, be that thing. Again, don’t just complain about something, do the hard thing and work on it. I’ve had so many women over the years tell me they don’t have friends at church while at the same time isolating themselves, never reaching out, never inviting anyone over, and when I did talk to them all I got was a torrent of complaints. If we want friends, we must be friends. If we want change, we should change ourselves, and if we want a knitting circle, we make one. It will take time! Making a close community and knitting circle takes time, years, but it is worth the hard work.
Gladness is Hard. The hard things we do must always be balanced with delight. This applies to all of life. Sharing wonder and jubilation isn’t flippant and takes more courage than sharing struggles. I’m not talking about the canned “How are you? Fine!” way that we greet each other, I’m talking about someone asking how your week was and genuinely lighting up and saying it was wonderful. Not because there weren’t struggles or fighting or suffering, but because you have chosen to look past that to the good. Choose to let go of the suffering, struggles, fears, and failures of our work and cling white-knuckle to the good, the wonderful, the magic, the grace, and the glory filling our lives because Christ rules and God is good and He has made us alive. Suffering and struggles pull us down into the bloody mud until we are filthy fighters, but delight and thankfulness, good cheer, are hope clawing her way back into the sunlight because we have faith! Hope pushes up out of the mire and plants her flowers even in Babylon.
Someone on Twitter described hope like this: People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.
So yes, we pour our hearts out, first to the Lord in prayer over the struggles of raising children, loving and respecting our husbands, living and dying in this bloody awful mess of a world. We pour out our tears to our husbands, close friends, and as is appropriate, our churches and communities, and then for the love of all that is holy (Just think about that phrase a moment, for the love of all that is holy! Out of love for all that is truly right and good.) plant a flower. Don’t let the struggles and the darkness win!
Don’t let the darkness overcome our people, our homes, or our hearts.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”[1]
“Folk in these stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and It’s worth fighting for.”[2]
“I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living! Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!”[3]
“…as merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.”[4]
Maids: Practice, practice, practice. Start now by developing a rich prayer life. Complain, in the right way, to the Lord. Look for opportunities to make prayer a habit and take your burdens to the Lord. This will see you in good stead in the long watches of the night as a homemaker. Start now developing a rich life of thankfulness. Make a list if you have to, but fill your prayers with thankfulness. Memorize scripture and uplifting and true poetry and prose. Again, when you are tending to the sick, the young, and the old, when you are making meals and cleaning, they will elevate your labor far beyond the mundane. Go to work now.
Matrons: Watch your inner thought life like a hawk. If you keep an inner monologue of worry or frustration over your people or home, it will bleed out into all your work. Nip. It. In. The. Bud. Replace it with laughter and correct thinking. Be a woman of merry durability and cheering strength. Demand of yourself an honoring perspective of your husband, children, home, and church. When those disdaining, mocking, frustrated thoughts fill your mind, do the hard thing of replacing them with love, true, covering love.
Crones: Light the way for us. Don’t spend your last days entirely focused on yourself. We need you. Come alongside us tangibly where you can and in prayer where you can’t. Help us to see the shortness, richness, and delight to be found in our labors. Fight bitterness in yourself and the lies that you have wasted your life, then come to our doors with bread or a bottle of wine or maybe some bourbon, and help us in our labors to find the magic of it all.
Oh, my dear HearthKeepers, it takes no effort in our day and age to say it is hard to be married or raise children or manage the housekeeping or be a faithful church member. We are daily encouraged to acknowledge the struggles inherent in them. The real challenge, the hard thing we must do is express amazement at marriage, children, housekeeping, and church membership. Our hearts are Babylon, and we must plant flowers there and wait on the Lord. We must do the hard thing of rejoicing in the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and dishes. We must find the delight in the opportunities that sickness provides to closely tend. We must be thankful, even joyous in the grief, burdens, and exhaustion. We were made for this and we do the hard things.
Cultivate, garden a heart of happy, cheerful, calm, delighting defiance. Do the hard thing of communicating to your people, your church family, and to yourself the laughter of life. It will change everything about how we look at life and manage our homes. Dishes become an act of love. Not bubbly romance, but true love. Meals become hope. Not some wish, but the armed, bloody, bruised hope that refuses to stop thinking about the future. Every level of our homemaking becomes an act of rebellion against the darkness that would tear our people apart. Face it with laughter because Christ came, suffered, and rose again and He is our King and we are His daughters. We do the hard things. Let’s do it together!
