Porches should truly be considered rooms in our homes. They’re one more place we can gather and tend our families. They’re one more place we can help our people rest and regenerate. They’re one more place we can offer to friends and family to enjoy.

Sunday becomes the center point around which our homes flow. From that small stream grows a river of being stalwart members of our churches, fellow soldiers who remind others to hold the line no matter what.

Bedrooms can be an interesting element in our homes because they’re utilized as places of privacy. But that privacy or training ground of privacy doesn’t remove them from our overarching responsibilities. We need to make sure we’re not neglecting these spaces, but embracing them!

True safe spaces don’t belong out in the world. They belong in the home, centered around truth, and they’re most often found around the family table sharing a family meal. We all need to take the table and this room seriously. We all need to delight in harnessing the power of this space and clothe it with beauty. 

If we ever need something to elevate what we do, to show us how important what we do is, we should think of ourselves as the gatekeepers.

Let’s not take our laundry rooms for granted, nor disrespect our helpful machines that call that room home. It’s fine that she’s not a glamorous place like the entryway or a cozy place like the living room, but that doesn’t mean the laundry room should be ugly or mismanaged.

Let’s strive to be good stewards of our pantries. Let’s strive to watch our flows, our backstocks, and our decorating so that we bring order and wonder to the little corners of our worlds.

It’s not us who wax eloquent about the ‘magic’ of the kitchen in praise of God’s provision, in praise of daily bread. It’s the pagans. How is that even close to appropriate? We of all people should be profuse in our thanksgiving for all that the kitchen produces for our families.

There are times we have to use our main space in unique and creative ways that move beyond gathering places of rest, recreation, recuperation, and casual conversation with friends and family. I want to open up the discussion to some of the other ways this room does double duty by examining two other options: Libraries and Playrooms.

Our Living Rooms are wonderful tools in our tool chest for gathering our people together, calming everyone down, replenishing and growing imaginations, enjoying stories, fellowshipping, and being together.

The master bedroom is a key room in the house. Often it gets our last gasp of effort when it should get our first, because, single or married, it is the inner sanctuary of the home.

These two things—doing something to ease tomorrow and a solid, thought-through backstock—can help your home stay in a state of calm functioning even in busy times, sick times, or when chaos abounds.

We, homemakers, are the hearts of our home, and we do spend a fair amount of our time at the kitchen sink and in the kitchen. Make it a place you like to be

This virtue is how we balance between the chores that need doing and the people that need our attention. Indulging in one or the other will make our homes chaotic. Balancing rest and work, play and chores will raise wise children and honor the responsibilities our husbands have delegated to us.

We don’t deny that the world is full of risk, darkness, and death just waiting to rend apart our homes and our people. We don’t deny that at all. It’s true. What we deny is its power to intimidate us into panic or apathy. We look it squarely in the eye, our candle gleaming brightly in our hands, and we endure.

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.”

It’s very easy to see what a handmaid prudence is to the homemaker and what a disaster a lack of prudence brings.

You have poured all this labor into this glorious food. Enjoy it! Let the tastes and textures thrill you. Rehearse those well-trod paths of old stories and memories. Get loud. Sit for five minutes. Observe your happy, content people and be thrilled, oh tenders, at the feast, all the feast. From start to end, planning, cooking, consuming. Enjoy the feast!

Setting goals and managing projects in the home requires us to leave behind concepts of corporate management and masculine expectations. We are women managing homes. This ultimately means that we must take into account the big picture of tending when we set out goals and plans.

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.