The Intangibleness of HearthKeeping

Beauty

is a fresh from the oven pie,

is rising bread soon to be baked,

is a favorite song when your heart is heavy,

is gray, fluffy, dozing doves on naked branches,

is tiny, ordinary sparrows in the feeder,

is a quick, familiar, passing kiss,

is home, is home, is home,

beauty is.

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. 

We all need nourishment, clean clothes, and a place to sleep. We all need a home. But what happens if we stop there in our definition of homemaking? Is homemaking only these most basic of needs that, honestly, even some six-year-olds can fulfill? Do we need homemakers, really? What happens without them?

We lose an intangible, invisible, flexible workforce of hospitality.

After we sold our boutiques and I came home, I invested myself in my church. I helped with bulletin boards, conferences, quarterly associational meetings, weddings, and more. We hosted people in our home and engaged in all the church’s activities. How could I suddenly do that? One of the rich elements of homemaking is a certain amount of flexibility amongst women. Women who are practiced at cooking, beautifying, creating comfortable spaces, and warm environments. When we have jobs outside our homes that require our attention and time, we don’t have spare thoughts and spare hours we can set at the feet of our families and churches.

Jobs are, again, not wrong, but we must count the cost. Having women out in the workforce costs our churches, families, homes, and communities something. We must consider that price. Taking these invisible things for granted, no longer valuing them in the home, and not giving women room and time to practice them, costs something intangible in our churches and our culture.

We react to something super visible—anyone can wash sheets—and make a choice—it’s more valuable to have her bring in an income—without seeing that the family and community and church just lost a woman who brought beauty and warmth to everyone due to her flexible schedule and well-honed skills.

We see only the visible and ignore the intangible benefits HearthKeepers bring to the table.

I had a lady point this out at a wedding I helped with one year. She complimented me on my management and I told her about how being a homemaker left me room to help. She said that the world didn’t understand that when women left home for jobs we lost a huge volunteer workforce in our churches. I’d never thought about it that way, about my influence beyond my four walls and my ability to serve others being truncated by my full-time career as co-owner of a boutique.

Look at the world, the world is scrambling to get families to share a meal without their cell phones. They tell us it’s a necessary bonding element and needed for the proper mental and emotional development of children. They say it will help marriages last longer. We as a culture looked at the tangible—anyone can do women’s work—and reacted by pushing them all out—look! They’re producing members of society. Now we’re scrambling to find homemakers without calling them that, because we didn’t count the intangible cost.

HearthKeepers, having a job outside the home isn’t a sin, unwise, or useless. Building a career as a single woman or an older woman with grown kids isn’t sinful, unwise, or useless. You’re free to do that within the bounds of the law, your authorities, and your abilities. We have brains and skills we should be using. (Please read that paragraph again.)

But, just for a moment, consider the intangibles.

Consider the blessing to your own extended family it can be to have someone flexible to help with kids, meals, and errands. We have 3 sisters, parents, in-laws, and spouses all living within about a 10-minute drive of each other. That’s a lot of capable adults. But when we get sick, have car trouble, or want to tackle a major project, we suddenly don’t feel like we have enough homemakers in the family. One or two more would be helpful.

Think about how you can use your practiced hands to serve the church, beautifying the building, maintaining the building, and practicing hospitality with meals and more. You can do this for invalids, new moms, old moms, shut-ins, and just worn out women. There is an absolute wealth of intangible work to be done in our churches, extended families, and communities. Do you know who used to do all this work? Homemakers. Do you know who does it now? Sadly, often nobody. In many ways, this is like homeschooling. You have the tangible: math, reading, history, etc. But you also have the intangible things like real-life experience, everything is educational, learning to talk to those outside your peer group, self-control, self-motivation, self-education. Homeschooling teaches parents and children so much more than just math and reading. HearthKeeping is the same. The intangible elements are of great value. Just like living by faith instead of sight, you can’t only go by what you see. (And I’m not saying homeschooling is the only viable educational method. It isn’t. Each family must decide what will work best for them.)

A couple of balancing things:

First, young mothers, these intangible community acts of hospitality may not be something you can do much of yet. Don’t be discontent or chafe. Focus on your babies, learn, and develop your skills. There will be plenty of work left to shoulder when your kids don’t need you 24/7. Start small and blossom as you go.

Second, we don’t neglect our homes. Using our community needs to ignore our own work isn’t right. We have to focus on our families first and move out from there. Hand in hand with this is learning to communicate with our families the sacrifices required by them to serve. “This week we’re eating easy meals because we’re going to be helping at the conference at church.” If we’re going to focus beyond our four walls, we must communicate the joint family sacrifice of normalcy.

Third, we submit cheerfully to our husbands. They may not see the intangible and require us to work outside the home in a way that makes it impossible for us to do more than just work and tend our basic hearths. Submit cheerfully. We may love our jobs and he may ask us to quit so we can do more of these intangible things. Submit cheerfully. Communicate, but don’t complain or nag. Trust the Lord.

Maids—that’s you single women—you have a lot of flexibility in your life. Practice homemaking now. Join in at your church. Offer to babysit. Take a mom to Starbucks and develop friendships outside your peer group. Lend your hand to church activities. Visit a shut-in. Help in the kitchen, nursery, conferences, and ask what else you can do. Watch and listen to the older women. These intangible things are so important. If you can’t physically do things, memorize scripture and pray. Pray, pray, pray. What more intangible blessing can you be to the women around you than to pray for them?

Matrons—that’s you women in the thick of it all—sacrificing in a balanced way for your church and extended family is a huge benefit. Being available and skilled is a rich resource put at the service of your church and associations. Look for things you can do, while still balancing your life. The church and our families need matrons wielding their skill, their kids, their knowledge for all our wellbeing.

Crones—that’s you women on the other side of child-raising and possibly husbands—before you get a job, go back to school, or join all the clubs, none of which are wrong, freely and with a clear conscience enjoy them, consider how you might serve your family and your church by being the available, flexible one. I promise if you make yourself available you will soon be saying no because you have more people with needs than hours in the day or energy in your body. Our families and churches have elderly members that need care, ill people that need care, young families that need care, a church building that needs care, and projects that need care. Don’t take ‘retirement’ as deserved me-time any more than the maids get indulgent me-time. You have so much to bring to the table. So much worth and value if you will use it.

HearthKeeping is a lifelong study of the craft of homemaking and the domestic arts. Arts we practice in our homes and arts we use for the benefit of others. Don’t get discouraged by the ordinariness of the tangible and miss the glory and value of the intangible art we’re crafting.