When You Weren’t Here

I have been in a creative dry spell for a long while now. Not so much in my homemaking writing, but in my storytelling. It’s been good, but hard. I normally spend a large amount of time daydreaming. I build worlds, create characters, and test plots in my head while I’m doing the dishes, cleaning, folding laundry, and usually in the few seconds before I drift off to sleep. Of late, the voices in my head have been silent. I have tried to write new stories, but they wither and dry on the vine. I can edit past work, but coming up with anything new has failed. I was lost in a silent, desiccated landscape.

I was still reading a lot, but nothing sparked my creativity. I was still watching shows (that’s often how I feed the muse) but was finding none that I loved, not that sank into me and  watered my garden of dreams. Even my beloved war movies no longer sang to me. They felt empty and hollow. I felt empty and hollow.

Earlier this year, I noticed an online acquaintance, who I share a love of several mutual shows with, kept talking about this one show: Stargate-Atlantis. With nothing to lose, I decided to give it a try.

It was like a switch.

Out of nowhere, my creative wells refilled to bursting.

Winter blossomed into spring.

The rivers filled, the snow melted, and flowers bloomed.

My head flooded to overflowing with voices.

A new story took shape in my head and heart and started to run out my fingers.

Warriors returned to my soul.

A drop grew into a torrent.

I’m feeling like my old self again. So much so that I’ve watched all five seasons of Stargate-Atlantis twice and spent way too much time excessively overanalyzing each episode and each micro-expression of the characters.

In Season 4 there is a haunting episode called The Last Man. The main character, Sheppard, who is a soldier, gets sucked 48,000 years into the future at the worst possible moment in the war they’re fighting. He finds his base, his home, is nothing but an empty desert. The only thing waiting for him is a hologram of his best friend, left there long after his friend was dead to try and get him back. The rest of the episode isn’t filled up so much with the science of how to send him home to the past. It’s Sheppard learning all the things that went wrong for his friends when he disappeared.

There is a haunting line the hologram of his best friend repeats: We buried another empty casket.

When Sheppard wasn’t there, most of his friends died. They died in the war without even a body to send home. Sheppard wasn’t there to lead, he wasn’t there to save them, he wasn’t there to protect them. And his best friend gave up the rest of his life to the obsession of bringing Sheppard back. The whole episode is “when you weren’t here.” Because Sheppard wasn’t there, most of his team, his home, his people were lost, died in battles, never having the chance to grow old. And his best friend abandoned most of his relationships to find a way to get him out, another kind of dying. Another empty casket.

All you want, as you move through the episode, is for Sheppard to see how much he’s needed and for him to get back, for the mad idea his best friend had 48,000 years ago to work, so that none of these people have to die.

And this beautiful, heartbreaking episode made me think of homemaking.

You may be thinking to yourself, how in the world does this crazy lady get from a cheesy sci-fi show to homemaking?

Good speculative fiction exaggerates the ordinary so we can see it for all its wonder and beauty.

My home is a small structure. It’s not a ship on the edge of space, a city left under the ocean, or a castle that walks. I’m not banded together with my friends fighting to save the world and each other. But I can glean a tiny reminder of what is happening in my long-term friendships by watching a good show or reading a good book. I can be reminded that friendship is important and so is staying in the fight and being brave. For just a few minutes, good stories make our faith sight.

I know that I recently wrote about being indispensable and that I’m doing it again, but I believe it is important to think about what our homes, our people, and our churches would be like if we aren’t here.

We shouldn’t do this to puff ourselves up with pride, but to see the true, earthy, real importance of our work and our role. We shouldn’t let anyone tell us we’ve been ‘relegated’ to the kitchen as if the kitchen is a worthless place to be and we’re worthless to be there.

Ladies, if we’re not here, who will feed our families? Restaurants with bloated plates and expensive meals? People who don’t care what our children’s favorite way to have their sandwiches made is or our husbands’ favorite cut of meat? Yes, our families will still eat, but they will eat without love. If we’re not here there will be emptiness.

If we’re not doing the laundry, no one will be naked. But they won’t have favorite shirts to wear or ironed shirts for Sunday or clean sheets that welcome sleep. They’ll never have a chance to look back and remember a favorite hoodie because we weren’t here to clean it so it could be re-worn again and again. They won’t have nice beds because we weren’t here to pick out nice bedding.

It’s not that our families won’t survive without us, it’s that they won’t excel. They’ll be haunted by a not-right emptiness.

Ladies, if we’re not here, if we’re not in our homes loving the housekeeping, our homes become nothing but cold, rotten, dirty, smelly places to endure the rain and cold until we can all escape again to something different somewhere else. Our homes, with us gone, create sickness. Mental, emotional, and physical sickness instead of healing. (Just look at the mental health issues springing up all over creation for a generation with no homemaker in the home.) Healing comes from ordinary work—cooking, cleaning, laundry—done with love. Just like Sheppard kept the ones he loved alive by being there, we can be a powerful force for good in the lives of our people by loving them and doing the oh-so-ordinary things of housekeeping. Housekeeping creates, when done with love, homes. And homes bind people together.

If we aren’t in our churches listening, engaged in the preaching, praying, Lord’s Supper, and baptism, our churches will be empty. I’m not limiting God, but God does use secondary means and we are a part of those secondary means. Every moment, every bit of work we do in our homes directly impacts the church. If we aren’t in our homes, we won’t be in our churches, and if we’re not here, our pastors will be discouraged, our deacons will be overwhelmed, and all the little homey tending of all the people will drift away leaving empty caskets in places of people.

Do not believe the world when it tells us that homemakers are alone and what we do doesn’t matter and we have no part to play and the few people we tend aren’t important. Do not listen when we’re told that if we aren’t doing man things or building a career we’re not doing anything. Being here, being present, engaged in our homes and our churches is life-giving, life-keeping, hopeful, rebellious, screaming against the night, living by faith not by sight. Being home is true courage.

Side Note: Stories let us practice being brave before we have to be. We can find courage and encouragement in unlikely places if we will simply look for it. It may be a woman on the prairie or a soldier in a sci-fi show. It may be a war movie or a Hallmark movie. It may be a grown-up fairytale or a cheesy re-writing of history with magic in it. Good stories are gifts from the Lord that fortify us for life here on earth. Use them. Learn to see God’s truth in the stories you imbibe, and for heaven’s sake, make sure they’re good stories.

Where we have to preach to ourselves is when we realize that being friends and being here in our homes isn’t dramatic. It’s mundane and ordinary. I’m probably never going to hold a gun and stand between a monster and one of you beloved women of my knitting circle. My home will never be as sentient as the Enterprise, Atlantis, or Serenity. We are supposed to use the dramatic, the exaggerated to help us revive and refresh for the fight, not make ourselves discontent. The scary part is none of us are in danger of getting sucked through a wormhole 48,000 years into the future, but we are all capable of leaving.

We can leave physically. Let’s not pretend that thought hasn’t ever crossed our minds. We could get in our car and just drive away. The call to abandon our responsibilities and the grasping hands of our needy people can be almost overwhelming. We can also leave mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. That is the easier and more harmful form of leaving. We can go through the motions of housekeeping and homemaking with no love, with a dullness. Worse yet, we can do it filled to the brim with bitterness and hate, loathing, and rejection.

We can abandon our husbands because they don’t love us how we think we should be loved. We can abandon our children because they won’t give us a moment’s peace. We can abandon our work because it is boring and repetitive. We can abandon because we’re overwhelmed or underwhelmed. We can abandon because we’ve soaked up the lie that none of this work is important, that we’ve been forced into a corner by the men in the world, and if someone just listened to us everything would be better. We can abandon by only looking towards the day that our children will be grownups and our husbands will be gone and we can finally be free to be who we are. We can abandon when we think our pastors aren’t paying enough attention to us, or we’re offended by something they said, or we’ve just lost the emotions of worship and think a new church will revive them. We can abandon by letting the familiar breed discontent. We can abandon when we tell ourselves other churches would be more fun and more fulfilling and less filled with sinners. We can abandon when we stop coming to church, and stop making it a priority. Is it really that important? Can’t I just watch the livestream? Nobody cares if I’m there anyway. All this is ugly and it is all a form of leaving.

One step off the path of caring, one moment of letting down our guard, small habits that let our gardens go to weeds, and we will wake up one morning surrounded by empty caskets. Where once was community, fellowship, family, and home is suddenly a graveyard that doesn’t even have any bodies in it. Just hollow expressions of what was. These ordinary things require love, and love is shown much more strongly in what we do than in what we say. (Another thing I loved about this show was that was the hallmark of the main character. He didn’t often say I love you, but every single thing he did and choice he made screamed his love for his people.) Meals have to be cooked, people have to eat. But we, ladies, are the ones who do it day in and day out with love because we know, we know deep down in our bones, that a meal made and served with love to the ones we love nourishes body and soul. We know that all people have to wear clothing, but clothing washed, tended, and chosen with love covers nakedness while letting souls shine through with all of their unique beauty. All things have to be cleaned—this world is a disease and dirt-ridden place—but things cleaned with love find the right balance between safe and tidy and sterile. Believers will be in church, but believers in church choosing to love, choosing to be there out of love for the Lord and each other, not because we feel like it, often when we don’t, will warm a weary congregation. It will fortify other members’ faithfulness. Seeing you, seeing your faces across the room, at other tables, and in the next pew helps me be faithful. Helps me carry on. Helps me be there.

Let’s not leave. Let’s not not be here. Let’s not allow our homes and our churches to be empty. Let’s see beyond the physical and check our mental, emotional, and spiritual location. Are we here? Are we engaged even if we’re holding on by our fingernails? Are we showing our love with every act we take in our homes? Are we doing these things for people? Actual people? Are we showing love by participating in church? Are we loving other sinners because we are a sinner loved? Or are we hammering together one more empty casket because we weren’t here?

Big sigh. I know that was heavy. I have yet to work through this article without conviction and tears. But brace yourselves, ladies. The really beautiful part of all of this? God is so good, that “this work, this life, this care we’re engage in, heals us and not just our people.”[1] This was true in Stargate-Atlantis for Sheppard the broken soldier and it’s true for us in our homes. This work is used to heal husbands, children, churches, and us. God is good and does good. Let’s guard and garden our homes.

[1] Beautiful words spoken by Sarah Gabriel as we worked on this article that I decided absolutely had to be included.