Holidays break routines. This is a good thing. Broken routines don’t become ruts. Holidays help you see the routine. Holidays give you a break from the routine which helps you appreciate it more. Don’t we all just love January when things get back to normal? Holidays help us appreciate the normal by charging into the middle of it and making a mess. As HearthKeepers, if we see this we can appreciate it, embrace it, and use it.

When our lights are low and the window is large, we look to women who have kept burning. We look for women who have passed through the trenches. We look to the old Sergeant, not the raw recruit, if we want to live through the battle of loving our husbands, loving our children, and keeping our homes.

Attitude change: how about being thankful for a morning that starts with simple things? Take the quiet as a sign that your family is well, fed, and off to face the day. You never know when you might wake up and spend your whole day, or several days, in a hospital watching the people you love face major health issues.

Struggles abound in this work. Thistles and thorns scratch our hands, rip our clothes, destroy what we have built. That too starts in our hearts and minds and can diffuse like smog, like killing gas, into our homes, choking, blinding, breaking. Calm may evade us. Anxieties haunt us in the night and join hands with the siren song of complaining during the day. We have eyes only for what is demanded of us and never for what has been done for us. A world never at rest weighs us down, and all we see is work, work, work, and never the seasons, never the hymns, never the slumber.

Whatever your heart song is, I believe it will point you back to your hearth and with such diversity as to enrich our world. Our diversity is a gift as much as our heart songs. The rich tapestry of our interwoven lives is one of the great beauties of God’s creation. We’re all similar and all different.

If we want to encourage each other and be an encouragement to other HearthKeepers, we have to embrace the idea that this is where we want to be, that this is worth it, that this is beautiful, and that this is hard work. How can we do that?

We’re all in a fight against sin and what may outwardly appear all the same, may inwardly be sinful or may not. Stay in the fight. Dishes have to be done, but they can be done with grace, love, and humility or pride, complaining, and laziness. Only you and the Lord know where your heart is. 

We don’t become instant Pinterest-worthy, book-worthy, blogging-worthy, Instagram homemakers at the moment we make our vows to our husbands. This isn’t expert-level achieved in 4 years. Homemaking changes too much for that and has too many parts. It is a massive job that becomes more massive the longer you invest yourself in it. You can’t perfect it in a year and you’ll still be tweaking and changing it as long as you’re a homemaker.

The world tells women to band together, that we’re a sisterhood, that we should go out and change the world, abandoning our homes before we’re relegated to only kitchen and nursery work, but reality tells me that the most amazing women I know are busy in their homes. This is sisterhood. This is where we bloom. It is here that we have flexibility.

When I gather at something like a baby shower, with a group of moms all talking about mom things, I feel like a fraud. I can’t seem to untie my tongue to talk about what is so very important to me: homemaking. I feel invalidated by my childlessness.

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.

Homemaking is no more about being perfect than life is about being perfect. We don’t walk around saying we can’t discuss or share our Christianity because we’re still in the fight against sin. We don’t refuse to let our kids eat because they don’t have refined motor skills. Why do we treat our homemaking this way?

How could washing the sheets be important when my life is falling apart? How can cooking a yummy and nourishing meal be important when our families, extended families, and churches are facing great struggles?

I love the image of a candle in the window, the light shining bright and warm in the cold, dark gloom. I once read that in the past a candle was placed in a window to show those who were away how to get home. It was both practical—keeping your family from getting lost in the dark—and symbolic of safety, warmth, and love. A Candle in the Window.

Are we calm? Do we understand the physical and spiritual good of what we’re doing? Are we cheerful in our work? Or are we distracted, angry, rebellious, mean, snapping, or bored? How do we handle interruption? Do we find elements of homemaking, not necessarily all of them, but elements of homemaking soothing? Can we tell when our family is anxious and distraught and calm things down by our wise work? Are we creating a space around us that is both personal and welcoming to others? Are we examining our systems and sharpening them? Are we engaged?

HearthKeeping came because I wanted a strong yet feminine title. I love homemaker, housewife, tending hearth and home. All these terms and ideas needed to be included but with a tomboy feel, a woman in the Old West, gun in one hand, a horse at her back, tending her food in cast iron while she actively waits for her man to come back kind of word: HearthKeeping.