Book Review: Love the Home You have
Sarah Gabriel, who manages the HearthKeepers Facebook group, wrote this review of Love the Home You Have. I think it's a beautifully written article and I hope y'all enjoy it. I have already ordered the book, and I'm excited to read it.
“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”
-Frederick Keonig
This is the quote that blogger Melissa Michaels of The Inspired Room chose to open Love the Home You Have, and it set the tone for the entire book. I discovered this book quite randomly, after I ran across a quote I loved and couldn’t get out of my mind. In backtracking the quote, I found its author, who happens to be a Christian, and her works, one of which was at my library. The quote that peaked my interest?
Our home should be life giving and soul refreshing, a soft spot to land on a hard day and a beautiful place to recharge and rejuvenate.
“A soft spot to land on a hard day.” The words stuck in my head and I knew I had to read Michaels’ work in hopes of finding more like these. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. But it was still worth it.
The book started out a bit rocky for me. I don’t often enjoy reading blogs, bloggers, female Christan authors, or Christian “self-help”. (I know – picky, picky.) This book, despite the fantastic opening epigraph, began exactly the way I dreaded. Perky, chatty, bubbly, and otherwise weak. The way many female blogger-authors and writers of Christian lit compose their work you can hear the exclamation marks even where there aren’t any. And just in case you missed the implied ones, they make sure there’s at least two in every paragraph, even where they are completely inappropriate. I think this is an attempt to modulate their writing voice when dealing with hard topics so they don’t come across “too harsh”, or to make it feel more like you’re sitting with them for a conversation over a cozy cuppa. But when dealing with heavy topics like sin and contentment, or subjects I’m attempting to take seriously like home management could we forgo the exclamation marks?
Writing style aside, I also struggled with the content of the first few chapters. She began with an overview of their living and home history since marriage: six different homes. As she unfolded the story of each house, its pros and cons, how she made each home, and each subsequent move, I grew more and more annoyed with certain attitudes that were coming out in her stories. Entitlement, discontentment, and the restlessness of the perpetual house-hopper (her word, not mine) who constantly leaves one home in pursuit of perfection. It took me a few more chapters of feeling frustrated with her (and honestly rather judgmental toward her) to realize I was reading it wrong. What I read as home history in a décor book by a spoiled woman, was actually open, vulnerable confession of sinful attitudes in a book on practical contentment by an admittedly fallen human. She is retroactively viewing her life as wife, mother, homeowner, and interior design blogger, and sharing what she’s learned from where she went wrong. And reading it this way, everything changed. I went from annoyed to moved.
Melissa Michaels has many excellent thoughts to offer for all women to chew on. And I did just that…chewed on it. At a certain point I was wishing it wasn’t a library book, because I needed to write in the margins in order to really work out my thoughts on what she was saying. In summary, she tries to get her reader to see that the most imperfect home can be made beautiful by the attitude you bring to it. She encourages the reader to dream about their ideal home, then parse out why is that their ideal, in order to introduce that lifestyle into their current imperfect home. Don’t wait for someday. Don’t wait for the perfect house. Don’t dwell on “if only there was more space, more money in the budget, less this, more that.” Instead give thanks for what you have, take ownership of it in your heart and mindset, put that into action by living well and making the best of it, and all these things begin shaping your heart to love of that imperfect home, in turn shaping that imperfect home into something ever more beautiful, more like the dream.
As she writes about contentment, she makes it clear that it is not a passive, purely ideological thing. It is active and practical, and it takes action based on that heart-attitude of contentment.
Another viewpoint I appreciated was rather than dealing with the home from a post-mil viewpoint of redeeming the world, as many Christian hospitality or homemaking books do, she handles it more as a support to the ministry. She does so in two ways. Firstly, through hospitality, opening your home to your church and others who may need comfort, support, a haven. And secondly, as a place to retreat to, recover, be refreshed from the weight of the world and work in general. A safe place of healing and comfort to the family, so that we can have the spiritual, physical and emotional energy to go at the work.
She also does a good job of balancing the need to do less against the need to have good time management. Both are necessary. For instance, are we really too busy, or just not managing our time correctly? Is it going to less important things than what we say are our priorities and goals? As she admits, “As much as I thought the problem was my lack of time, the number of kids in my care, my particular job, or whatever excuse came to mind, I realize now that the real issue was the way I managed my time.” But on the side of busyness, she knows a busy life. A working mother, kids in school with all the accompanying time commitments of that, and a pastor’s wife, she knows. And she knows that there will be a price for that busyness. She brings in a subtle message of counting the cost, and admits, “We aren’t lazy – we just tend to do too many things.” She knows well that with all that busyness, and even with simple work outside the home, there is a price to pay – you need to see what that cost is and if you’re willing to pay it, and if your family can afford it.
In discussing doing less (specifically around the holidays, and choosing not to follow the social rules around Christmas), she says, “I believe rebellion is the first step toward sanity.” Beautiful. Okay, so maybe there was a quote almost as good as the one that led me to her.
Either way, I was very glad I read this book, and I would highly recommend it to any and every homemaker, whether you think you need a contentment check or not. Even if your contentment is where it should be (and honestly, who among us can say that), it was amazing inspiration to take deeper ownership of your home, push further up and further in when it comes to our craft as Hearthkeepers. I may or may not have decluttered, moved furniture, and changed décor because of this book, and I look forward to buying my own copy to mark up.
