Look for the Tenders

I’d like to start a new section here, similar to the educational section where I post as I find things, called “Looking for the Tenders”. I want a section to share homemakers when I stumble across them in art and media, because our role is so undervalued in our feministic, career obsessed, communistic culture.

Mr. Rogers said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” I have always loved this advice. It helps us look for beauty, grace, and good in the middle of difficult times. It reminds us to be thankful and courageous. I think this same idea suits looking for tenders. It can seem like the world is passing us by, that we’re forgotten, not even acknowledged, often treated as leeches on society, a society trapped in the communistic idea that only your paid vocation is valuable, that value is only measured by monetary worth, that only career is important for both men and women, all else is secondary or pointless. Ladies, that is Marxism right there.

Work is good for the human soul. God made us to work and to enjoy it. But work isn’t only your earned income. Obviously that is important, but it is not everything. Unpaid work is priceless. Home, family, rest, and recreation all support and enrich vocational work. They give it purpose. They give the “why” to the “what”. But our world has lost this, twisted a good work ethic into an ‘only work’ ethic and look around us! Chronic health, mental health, loose morals, whole generations cut away from all structure screaming for help in the dark. The government can’t help them. The more people who need help, the more people there are who aren’t working, will find that sooner or later the government will start to shed these undesirables.

Then there’s us. What are we but the lights, quietly, gently tending our hearths, reaching for those lost souls.

I want to highlight the tenders because we aren’t all warrior women (they’re actually rare and more often coated in flour, wielding wooden spoons). We’re not simply men with boobs. We’re our own thing, made by God because Adam couldn’t do this alone and neither can our men.

To give us our own heroines, to give us examples, and to infuse our labors with courage and hope, I present to you, the tenders!

First up are Mina Harker and Lucie Darney!