I am working on a new book which I plan to title Home Is for Hospitality. If all goes as planned (which it rarely does for books, I know), it should be available in November.
Here is an excerpt for you from the first chapter.
What is your home for?
I get tired of folding the laundry and bored with making dinner when I lose sight of the point of it all. Why wash dishes and sweep the floors and make yet another meal? Why do I clean the bathrooms and go grocery shopping and vacuum the crumbs off the couch? It all seems to be dull, repetitive, and monotonous when we see ourselves as the family’s housemaid.
The default messaging of our society is that we women only do the housework when and if we drew the short straw and didn’t stand up for ourselves. The kids, our husband—other people—have made a mess and someone has to deal with it, because they sure won’t. I guess I’m the only one who cares, so I’ll take care of it, but it’s not fair.
How many times have I been indignant as I surveyed the mess surrounding me after a day of 7 people living full-time in our home, a day when the only time anyone left was only to go into the backyard to track in more mud? Many, many times. I feel indignation because it seems like my dignity itself has been offended. If people respected and cared for me, if I was valuable in their eyes, they wouldn’t do this to me. By not noticing the messes left in their wake, they are not noticing me.
However, housework is not undignified work. It is not minimum wage menial work that we should hire out if only we could afford it. Hiring help is fine in itself, but it can be done because we disdain the work or because it’s the best current use of our various resources. Hiring cleaning help is best when we’re doing it to extend our own and our household’s capacity, knowing the value of the work we’re delegating. When we dislike and disrespect chores, we will disrespect and devalue whoever is doing those chores, whether it’s us, our children, or hired help.
The solution to despised chores is not to outsource them, but rather to learn to love what must be done. It is possible, however far-fetched it may sound now. What must be done is different from what I’d like to have done or all that could be done. We can love what must be done because we understand and appreciate the must.
I must do my upmost to keep a welcoming house brimming with life. Why must I? Not because my parents brought me up that way. Not because my husband demands it. Not because I’m oppressed by societal expectations. I must because it is the duty and the calling assigned to me by God when He gave me a family and a home.
God says to us, “Here, you can have a place where people are made.” A husband and wife make people from scratch, raising them in a home. A home can also be a place where people are made more human because they are loved and treated like people and not robots or accessories. A home is a humanizing place, and all people need a home to develop into whole, healthy, happy humans.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The business done in the home is nothing less than the shaping of the bodies and souls of humanity.” Our homes shape those who experience them. The question is how will our particular home shape the people who enter it. People—ourselves included—are shaped by the way the house is kept, not only by the decor and style or by the food and fellowship, but also by the clutter and grime or lack thereof.
Homes are places where the most important investments of all are made. People of every age and background and future require investment if they are going to be happy and productive, and such investments primarily happen in homes.
Our homes, then, are a talent that our Master has given us. Some are given a larger home with more resources, and others are given small apartments with meager means. God doesn’t demand we all do the same thing, but He does give us good gifts and the ability to magnify, amplify, and multiply those gifts in faith.
Instead of imitating the faithful servants, we are often the servant given a single talent; we think it’s unimpressive as we look at what others have. We are not walking by faith or stewarding our gifts; our eyes are on only ourselves. The work of turning this thing into something more, into something productive, baffles us. It seems too hard, too risky, too scary. So we do nothing with our talent but keep it “safe” by our own definition.
If Jesus were to come and ask us what we did with the gifts He gave us—life itself, a family, a home, people with potential all around us—would we turn and say, “Here, Lord, I didn’t burn it all down”?
What if the work we do to clean, organize, and manage our homes was an investment not in ourselves as a pet project, but an investment in the very mission of God Himself? All throughout Scripture we see that God delights to take small and insignificant people and efforts and turn them into something effective and glorious.
God Himself is stewarding this world into a place that brings Him more and more glory through people who enjoy Him. Jesus Himself ascended into Heaven after He rose again in order to prepare an eternal home—a mansion with many rooms—for us. Homemaking is not a side gig for those who couldn’t do anything more interesting with their lives. Homemaking is work that inherently reflects the nature and glory of God.
Women make homes
God loves homemaking so much that He invests half of humanity with this opportunity to reflect Him directly within the world. He says that when women manage their homes and love their families well, “the word of God may not be reviled.” (Titus 2:5) Homes were God’s idea, begun with the creation of Eve, and God delights in them as much as Adam did when he received his bride.
God created women with homes built-in. Baby girls already have a womb by nine weeks gestation. Whether or not a woman ever becomes a mother through childbirth, she is made for motherhood. Motherhood is a deeper calling than giving birth. Paul, in Romans 16:30, tells them to greet Rufus’ mother, “who has been a mother to me as well.”
Even the dictionary gives the first verb definition of ‘mother’ as “to bring up (a child) with care and affection” and the definition of “give birth to” is also listed as meaning “to produce or give rise to.” Women have a productivity all their own, peculiar to our own nature. One way or another, to someone or something, in one cause or another, women are caretakers by nature.
My husband and I gifted a small baby doll to our granddaughter on her first birthday. She knew instantly what to do with it, even though she had no siblings yet. She cradled it; she hugged it; she smiled at it. Yes, she also poked its eyes and explored which parts of it fit in her mouth, but these too were expressions of delight. Girls are by nature, not only by nurture, maternal. Maternal instincts should be honored and cultivated, not silenced or squashed, as if they are only necessary if and when a baby comes into the picture.
The maternal instinct is part and parcel of being a home, being a place, in and of ourselves as women. It takes a woman to turn a house into a home, because it is her presence that gives the home a center and a root. Part of that being within a house, turning it into a home, includes those tasks we tend to dismiss and wish away. Yet even the despised chores are part of the work of nurturing, growing, and loving people.
The Creation & New Creation Mandates
We are not at a loss or left to ourselves to figure out a mission for our lives. From the beginning, God gave man and woman the task of taking dominion, of filling the earth and subduing it. It is a task, God said, that the man could not do alone. Each in their own capacities and natures, both men and women fill and subdue. Together, they also produce more people, yet another way of filling the earth, one with a multiplying effect as those new people, in turn, grow up to continue filling and subduing.
Before ascending to heaven, Jesus reinstituted a new creation mandate for the new creation of the church, His bride: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” This, too, is a calling for both man and woman, each to obey in keeping with their natures.
One way women work out the Great Commission is through their homes. Jesus is teaching us that our mission is to raise up people – from the womb or just over a single meal or front porch visit – who love God and are as invested in living out their faith as we are. We’re not to merely fill the world and subdue it, but to more specifically fill the world with disciples and subdue ourselves, others, our homes, culture, and all else we touch to obedience to our Lord.
God has created us, saved us, and told us to make disciples who obey His Word. This mission involves 3 duties. First, we must know His word. How can we ourselves obey it much less teach it to others if we don’t know what it says? Second, we must obey God’s word. Obedience flows out of gratitude from a heart and will radically transformed by God’s grace. A transformed heart will result in a transformed life. It doesn’t work the other way around.
When we start by knowing our Bible, we’ll know that God saves us and then makes demands of us that He Himself equips us to live out. Third, we must teach God’s word to others. Even living as a faithful Christian wife is proclaiming the gospel, whether or not anyone recognizes it. Mothers disciple their children and housewives insist upon love and manners under their roof. The law of kindness, the law of God, is to be on our tongues. Your home is not merely a place where people eat and sleep, but also a home base for day-to-day disciple-making.