How to best Utilize HearthKeepers

If you look back, you will see this article about our group goals. It talks about why this group exists, why I idealize homemaking, why we talk about homemaking vs childrearing, and why I constantly bring up our homemaking in a church membership context.

What I want to talk about here is how to use this group. If you don’t use it correctly, you may run into some nasty pitfalls. Please note, I’m not saying you won’t enjoy or get anything out of this group if you don’t use it in the way I’m suggesting. You can still find a rich community to engage in without putting this group to its best use. Simply downing a salad will get you nutrients but learning to make lovely salad dressing will feed your soul as well as your body.

So, how do you use this group?

Articles

Each Monday a new article about homemaking goes up. I write these every week, and Sarah Gabriel edits them. (THANK YOU!!!) These articles are my experiences and thoughts about homemaking that I share to help us all grow and engage. With my physical limitations, there aren’t a lot of hands-on things I can help with, but I can use my gift as a writer, so I seek to do that. These articles aren’t shared with any authority. They’re shared with a heart of love and coming alongside. And they’re shared with a desire for feedback.

I can’t stress enough how discouraging it is to work and think and polish and edit only to get crickets back. No article is written without a point or goal or encouragement. Writing these articles has helped me be a happy, content, on-top-of-things homemaker (most of the time) and I want to share what I’m learning, what is bothering me, and the challenges I’m facing because I think we probably all deal with the same things.

I want to use my gift as a writer to encourage you as a homemaker.

This group will be a shallow pool of mild encouragement and education if you don’t read and engage in the articles. I don’t even mean you have to comment, but at least read and ponder, I beg you. Even if you disagree, read and ponder. I do try to keep them short enough to be read in five or ten minutes. I know all of you are busy women, so I try not to bombard everyone in a way that requires constant social media presence. But, please do try and read them.

If you can, engage. Join in the comments and comment on the article itself. Discuss what you think, how you feel, what you gained, what you don’t understand, what you wish was talked about more, where you’re struggling, and yes! what you disagreed with. 

Skipping the articles will affect the effectiveness of the prompts, and might even lead you to misprioritize parts of your home.

Not only do I highly recommend reading the articles each week, but I also suggest re-reading the articles. I continuously read them. Every day I can, I stand outside at the rising of the sun, with my feet in the grass, and read one of the articles. It sets my focus properly. It helps me engage in my work. It reminds me to light the way back home. The articles are the deeper magic of the group.

Prompts

We have prompts every week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. The goal of these prompts is to help you think seriously about your home and your home management. They often point back to things discussed in the article. Engaging with the prompts will help you step back and take a big-picture look at your home.

Sometimes we homemakers have weeks we can’t discuss in the group. There will be family struggles, marriage difficulties, and multitudinous sins that should be kept private that have made homemaking a struggle. That is fine. You may not publicly post about your difficult week, but it is still wise to think about it.

The other goal of the prompts is to encourage delight. Homemaking should make us laugh, should make us happy, should make us warm and fuzzy. Yes, it is hard slogging sometimes. It is frustrating. It is never-ending. It is work in the toils and snares of life. But it should also thrill us, awe us, and engage us in rewarding expressions of love.

The prompts seek to remind us to delight in the home. Delight!!!! If we can work with calm cheering strength and merry durability, even the hard things will be manageable. Do your work for Christ’s sake and love and warmth will fill your home.

Look at the prompts as an encouragement to see your home and delight in it, week in and week out.

Personal Posts

Women are naturally relational. We are all about how people interact and influence each other. Please feel free to post about your home. This group is here to encourage and build each other up in our work because so much of what we culturally imbibe knocks us down. Share meals, decorations, tips and tricks. Ask questions. Share wins. Share struggles…without complaining.

This work isn’t meant to be done alone. Engage with your fellow HearthKeepers.

Remember, this isn't a place designed to discuss homeschooling or child-rearing, though those things might come up in broader conversations. Not all the women gathered here have children, homeschool, or have a family. Maids, matrons, and crones should all feel like they have something to bring to the table, even if it is just questions. Also this isn't a place to complain about husbands or homemaking, though if you need help, or are struggling, please ask.

Homeschooling, child-rearing, and husbands make up most of our homes, yes. They are the biggest things sheltering under our umbrella of homemaking, but this group’s focus is to talk about the umbrella. So yes, these things will come up. How can they not? Just remember to discuss them within the context of homemaking. If you have homeschool questions there are many, many groups out there dedicated to talking about homeschooling. If you have a question about homemaking as a homeschooler, please ask it here! You’ve come to the right place, my dear.

Remember also, that this group is about the purposeful, intentional, prudent, and discerning management of households coupled with a delight in the domestic arts to create homes as safe refuges in the dark world, AND to purposefully, intentionally, prudently, and discerningly develop the next generation of HearthKeepers. Please take time to talk about the next generation of homemakers. These are our daughters. There are many places to talk about child raising as a whole. This is a place to talk about how you are engaged in training the next generation of homemakers. Ladies, I see women all the time who struggle because their mothers never taught them even the basics of homemaking. Don’t leave your daughters to figure it out, and don’t teach them these are just simply chores. Teach your daughters about the wonderful gift of being a homemaker and being called by God to home management! Teach them by word and deed that homemaking is a wonderful job!

I want everyone to get as much out of this group as possible. I want every woman here to be engaged with tending to her people be they husband, children, family, extended family, church family, or friends. I don’t want us to tend for our sake but for the sake of our people. I want us to engage in active encouragement because so often our work is treated as the least important of jobs. I want us to intentionally go to war against the lies of the feminists in how we raise our daughters.

So come in close to the fire and join the sisterhood of HearthKeeping. Join a place for women who love and adore being homemakers.