Tend Your People

What are homes without souls but houses? Bits of shelter, bits of storage, bits of nothing that important. What are meals, cozy nooks, decorated mantels, art on the wall, and clean floors without souls? The world tells us that HearthKeeping is an unimportant job. They tell us homemaking is easily accomplished in a few minutes in the evening and a few hours over the weekend. They tell us housekeeping is just being a glorified maid.

All this is true.

All this is true if you are doing it only for yourself.

Tending is an unimportant job if you do it selfishly.

Tending is easy if you do it selfishly.

Tending is a waste if you do it selfishly.

All this is true.

But!

If you tend for your people, if you tend souls, then you are doing the most important job in the world. If you are tending souls, you are doing one of the hardest jobs in the world. If you are tending souls you are essential.

HearthKeeping, homemaking, home management, housekeeping, all of these things are the tools we women use to tend to our people. We’re the tenders.

Our Chores

The challenge we face, day in and day out, is focusing on the specifics of our work while forgetting our people. We clean, cook meals, and do laundry every day. The monotony of these never-ceasing labors can trap us in bitter frustration. We take food dribbled on shirts and grass stains on knees (not necessarily only on our children’s clothes) as a direct attack on our work. Any critiques about a meal builds our martyr’s complex. Sticks, grass, leaves, and dirt drug inside brings us shrieking down (actually or at the very least mentally) on the offender.

It is vital to our tending to remember that these things—the cooking, cleaning, and laundry—are never going to stop needing to be done. Humanity as a whole has always and will always engage in these three things without ceasing. Allow that to loosen your white-knuckle grip on them. They and their sisters, dishes and the handling of money, will never be completed. It isn’t the nature of those jobs to be finished. Quit trying to swim upstream to an imaginary world where they stay done for longer than three seconds. If we keep them in the right places our hearts and homes will settle.

If they were to stay done, that would be a tragic sign of no people.

Think about that for a minute. If the dishes stayed done, that would mean no husband, no children, no family, and no friends. Is that really what you want? Yes, it may sound appealing for an hour or two, but not as a way of life.

We manage these labors for the sake of the people in our lives.

A word of balance: Our world has no problem abandoning chores to play with kids, but it rarely suggests abandoning chores to spend time with our husbands. Ladies, if so blessed, our husbands, our marriages, should be our first thing. Some of us won’t have children, we’ll lose children, and even if we can build lasting and loving friendships with them, they will go on to have their own homes, Lord willing. Our husbands are our priority. We need to make sure we make time for them. Make sure you see him. If you want your home to be sweet, be sweet to him. Spoil him. Tend him. Help him.

If you are blessed with children, you will need to balance between play and chores. It is good for kids to fend for themselves and it is good for you to spend time with them. It is good for kids to help with home management and it is good for them to run around outside getting dirty. Your kids should have work they do in the home. Nothing makes them appreciate the work going into something more than having to do the work themselves. Family is a team effort. You do your children great harm when you don’t demand that they engage in the labors of the home. You do their future employers and spouses great harm when you don’t demand that they get in there and get to work. It is your job to teach your children to work and to appreciate workers.

Part of tending is finding the balance between our work and our people. The first step in finding that point of balance is remembering that we do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry for the people. We do it for the people. Fill your heart with the delight of washing the clothes of the people you love. Let the warmth of feeding your souls, the souls that belong to you, infuse your cooking. Clean for them. Don’t clean against them constantly irritated that they get everything dirty. Clean for them. Create clean places for souls to dwell.

Our Beautification

For most of us women, beautification is our favorite part of homemaking. Nothing gives us more happiness than houseplants, decorating, crafts, fabrics, textures, candles, diffusers, flowers, and throw pillows. Changing out the look of our homes for the seasons, remodeling a less-than-pretty space, new furniture, art, knickknacks, holiday decorating, and family pictures are thrilling. Organizing spaces, decluttering, and efficiency management are our jam.

Most women don’t need to be told to do these things. We do them naturally. Most of us have to be told to stop. No, we do not need the latest and greatest thing from Target. No, we do not need new dishes, curtains, blankets, or throw pillows.

Even if these tangible expressions of our feminine natures aren’t as important to you, I promise you, if you’re a woman, you do some sort of nurturing management somewhere in your life. You organize your life and the lives around you so that everyone is getting what they need. You are beautifying chaos into order because you know it is good.

Where this beautification stumbles is when it moves from service to tyranny.

Beautifying our homes is an act of service, but how quickly does it move in our hearts to a demanding right? How often does our homemaking become entirely focused on the beautification side to the exclusion of husband and children and friends and family? We become so focused on every tangible element of beauty being just right that we create inhospitable homes. No one can come over because they might mess things up. Husbands are unwelcome because they might break things. Children are a nuisance because they might get things messy and dirty.

The truth: they will. Friends and family will spill food and drink on the couch. They’ll knock things over. They’ll destroy the beauty of your home. Husbands won’t notice what you did. They’ll put things back where they don’t belong. They’ll leave their boots on and stomp through the house. Children will be clumsy. They won’t see what you love and they’ll break it.

Hold your beautification loosely while holding your souls tightly.

It is all just stuff.

Is it important? Absolutely. We serve our people by making beautiful spaces in which to dwell. Just try having a cozy home without working at making it cozy. It’s hard to be cozy in a harsh, cold environment that no one seems to care about. It’s hard to grow any level of intimacy between friends, spouses, or children in a cold, artless, empty house.

But beauty is our handmaid and we direct her to the service of our people.

A word of balance: It is your job to teach your children beauty and to appreciate the work of beautification. Get them involved. Teach them to tend plants and pick up throw pillows. Give them space to decorate their rooms so they can practice. Never make the decorations more important than your children while also teaching them to respect and notice the work put into the decorating.

Listen to your husband. We often make beautification the most important part of our homemaking, but he may not see it that way. Respect his leading, both spoken and unspoken. Talk things over with him calmly and wait on the Lord. Your husband may not find these things important because you are putting too much focus on them and he’s trying to help you. Your husband may not see the importance of them and you may have to quietly wait on the Lord for years before he becomes thankful for them. Show him some love and respect by waiting quietly, doing what you can where you can, and trusting the Lord. Your husband is more important than all the stuff in the world.

Maids, Matrons, Crones 

Homemaking is for people.

This may be our husbands, children, extended family, church family, and friends. No matter the current situation we find ourselves in, in many of the diverse ways God brings people into our lives, we tend for the people.

Our culture is in love with the idea of the “found” family. Do you know why that is? We told homemakers their job was worthless and they should go do something more important. Women did that and now we have the loneliest and most lost generation of people. They are stumbling around in the dark, grasping for any sort of familial connection because homes became houses, just places to get out of the elements and store stuff. We no longer have homes and women dedicated to the management of those homes. People are hungry, dirty, and naked wondering how to connect with other people. People are alone.

HearthKeepers light the way back home.

We do this by being home.

We create places of beauty and order not for beauty and order's sake but for the sake of souls. My dear, dear women, if I could only tattoo this into our collective hearts so that we don’t lose it first thing in the morning as soon as our husbands and children wake up, I would. If it didn’t constantly sift away through my fingers the first time my husband needs me when I’m in the middle of something, this job would be such a blessing.

This is our battlefield. This is what we must constantly guard and garden in our hearts.

We tend the people!