The Virtues: Justice
The morning is cold and wet with a chill that leaches into your bones, the kind that is hard to shake once it settles. This year, 2022, it seems to have arrived a bit earlier than expected. It came in the space leading up to Thanksgiving. And it’s wonderful to have the cold, to sense the seasonal changes, to see the nights grow longer, and to feel the sun’s warmth weaken. Then we came into December and December is best heralded with cold and dark because then the lights shine brighter and brighter. All the delights of the season are best showcased in the cold darkness. Lights on trees glow, blankets warm toes, fairy tales, silly songs, and the deeper magic of Christmas are right where we need them when we need them.
Justice is the next virtue we’re going to explore. So turn on your Christmas tree, get that favorite Christmas mug out, and let’s enjoy our knitting circle time.
While prudence is much a matter of our minds, even in its more practical application, justice is about how we treat people. It’s about treating people right. Justice is defined as “fairness, decency, conforming to truth.” The antonyms of justice are corruption, depravity, favoritism, and dishonesty. Justice is all wrapped up in how we react to others. Since tending our hearths and homes are all about tending people, justice is our handmaid indeed.
Justice and People: Homes are full of people. Without our people, we have no home to tend. If we want our homes to be cozy, welcoming, kind, and warm we need to stay on task with practicing justice. Justice is seen in how we treat others, and how we react to them regardless of how they treat us. It is seen in the level of behavior we demand from our children. It is also seen in our hearts and behaviors. Are we fair and honest in how we treat our husbands? Are we fair and honest in how we treat our friends and extended family? Do we have the courage to admit when we’re wrong and accept correction when it’s given? Do we scoff, manipulate, hide, and sneak? Do we know the difference between discretion and blunt-force honesty? Do we think fairly about our husbands, treating them with respect and not accusing them? Do we seek to uphold the family honor, or do we use it to manipulate to get what we want?
Never underestimate the depth of sin that you will be tempted to as you walk through this life. The daily ‘little’ sins are far more cunning than we give them credit for. We may think we would never leave our homes, no never! But we can destroy our homes just as fully by disrespect and manipulation. By being unjust to the people who live within the circle of the hearths we tend.
Guard your heart and garden your soul because we’re all prone to being unjust with our people. We all think loving our neighbor is about someone out there. It’s easy to serve someone out there. It’s much harder to serve day in and day out, giving our family their due with a happy heart. It is easy to overlook our sinful unfairness when it comes to those we’re closest to. It’s always easy to play favoritism with ourselves, excusing our sinful behavior based on other people's much more obvious sin issues.
I don’t know about y’all, but it is so shamefully easy for me to treat my husband unfairly. May I pull up the weeds in my own heart first!
Home Management Justice: I’ll admit, seeking to look at justice in our boots-on-the-ground home management was challenging. Justice is pointed most strongly at the interaction between the people in our homes as opposed to our cooking, cleaning, and laundry.
Communication is probably the best place to start. Communicating with our husbands about the state of our homes should be handled with fairness and truth. We need to fairly acknowledge areas of needed growth as well as areas of actual growth. We need to seek help when we’re struggling, fairly accept corrections, and fairly communicate errors.
We need to be just with our time. It is not decent to overwork ourselves nor to underwork. It’s not just to isolate ourselves, never leaving home, any more than it is just and fair to never be home. We should always strive to do our best. That is just.
We must acknowledge our responsibilities and do them. How grave of an injustice is it to want to be stay-at-home women, to be blessed with that opportunity, and then not see to our work? If we constantly fail to keep up with the most basic elements of homemaking, we’re not being fair to the men who make it possible for us to be home. This is a privilege that we should take soberly and seriously.
Side Note: I’m not saying this to burden anyone. When you have kids and are homeschooling, that will probably take precedence over the cooking, cleaning, and laundry being done smoothly. They still have to be done. I just don’t want anyone beating themselves up with false guilt. As long as you take your privilege seriously, that’s what is important. Also, don’t get wrapped up in the specifics. Some families divide up the chores differently, that’s fine. Just make sure you’re not acting as if what is just is you staying home period, as if you have no just responsibilities on your end. Honor the blessing of getting to stay home by taking your work seriously.
We need to be just with our comparisons, which boils down to: don’t make comparisons. There are many helpful ways our lives mirror one another, but it is unhelpful to compare your family situation with mine. We’re either doing one of two things, we're puffing ourselves up with pride or we’re burdening ourselves with false guilt. Both are unjust to ourselves and others. Both are sins.
Favoritism is another place in our home management that we need to be on guard against. Ladies, this means not loving our physical homes more than our people. That can be hard to balance. Yes, you want to be able to have nice things in your home, so you must train your children to respect the nice things – that’s just. But you also don’t want your home to be unlivable. You want a place for men, women, and pets. That’s going to bring a certain level of chaos, wear, and tear. We love the people more than the stuff, but that doesn’t make the stuff unimportant.
This also means not giving our kids precedence over our husbands. This is another area we can be tempted to injustice. And there are struggles both if your husband works from home and if he is gone for most of the day. Both have temptations and unique problems they raise.
We must not always serve others, showing them favoritism, while not serving our homes. Foolish women take care of strangers or even extended friends and family while their own home crumble around their ears. Yes, we are free to leave the dishes to go help someone outside our homes. Please do! But, we can’t always be doing that. It’s unjust. We must balance the two. Last, we must strive, because it’s hard work, not to show favoritism to the parts of our work that are fun, easy, pretty, or seem needier. For each situation, we should ask what is just, right, and fair prudently using our minds while not being led by our emotions.
Growing in Justice: The obvious question which should arise from all this is ‘how do we know what is just?’ Because this is a natural virtue that all humans can develop, we can start by remembering the Ten Commandments which God has stamped on all of us. We can look at the laws of the land as an obvious way of judging what is right and what is criminal. We can study and practice critical thinking. All human beings can be trained in basic right and wrong.
But we also must acknowledge that we live in a time where culturally and even in our law books, justice is often dumped down the drain or turned upside down. We, ladies, can’t just blithely tend our hearths while the world burns around us. Yes, we know that ultimately the world will burn when Christ comes again, and we’re not called to leave our hearths to go fix this world. Those cornerstone truths don’t mean we get to be fatalists. God uses secondary means. That’s us. We need to not only practice earthly wisdom, but we should be training our minds with heavenly wisdom. The best way to do that? (I know my answer will shock all of you.) Be in church to hear the preaching of the word!!!! This is the best place for you, your husband, and your children to gain true wisdom.
We are to have the ‘law of kindness on our lips.’ That’s justice ladies, and the way we’re going to know what that is, is by understanding God’s word. The way to do that is provided for us: pastors, preachers, and teachers. An excellent example of this is the sermon we had a few weeks back by a beloved visiting pastor who preached on the difference between empathy and sympathy. This is exactly the kind of confusing mess you will get from the world if you aren’t careful. We must understand the difference or we will ‘nice’ our world into utter destruction.
The other wonderful place to go in order to grow in our understanding of justice is our husbands. Talk to your husband. Get his thoughts, opinions, and guidance on what the just thing to do is. Men are so blessed with the ability to see clearly, to think less emotionally, and they’re not having constant hormone fluctuations. It is so foolish of us not to make use of them.
Justice. It affects all of our lives, even our homemaking. Let’s all strive to make justice our willing and hardworking handmaid. A just woman assesses the needs and priorities of each situation starting with her people and her hearth, then moving out from there to her community. Justice guides our priorities by helping us see what is fair and decent in the care of the people around us.
