The other afternoon, I found myself standing at the ironing board with a small stack of vintage linens beside me. Nothing particularly important was happening. The house was quiet.
There was laundry to put away and a basket full to wash, dinner needed to be figured out, and a half dozen other things I could have been doing. But there I stood, pressing the wrinkles from old fabric that someone before me had once cared for enough to wash, fold, keep, and eventually pass on. I found myself thinking about the women before me, the legacy they left, and about the work of homemaking.
When you think about it, so much of homemaking is filled with ordinary tasks. Dishes were washed, only to be dirtied again. Laundry folded only to return to the hamper in just a few days’ time. Meals to be planned and prepared three times daily. Beds made and slept in. Floors swept and walked across. Counters wiped down only to have someone make a sandwich ten minutes later. There is very little permanence to the work. I think that is one reason why it has become so easy to dismiss.
We live in a world that likes measurable accomplishment. We celebrate things that can be achieved, completed, promoted, sold, posted, or checked off a list. Homemaking doesn’t work that way. Much of the work we do within our homes will need to be done again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. I wonder if we have been measuring the wrong thing.
The work is never really about the actual task. The purpose of washing the dishes isn’t ultimately to have an empty, sparkling sink. The purpose of doing the laundry isn’t to admire neatly folded towels. And the purpose of preparing dinner isn’t simply to put food on a plate. These simple tasks are a small part of something much larger.
We are creating a place where the people entrusted to us can come home and rest, refuel, recharge, and become strong enough to go back out into the world. That changes how I think about homemaking.
A home can be a place where bodies are nourished and minds are shaped. Where emotions are steadied. Where character is formed. Where faith takes root. Where someone can walk through the door after a difficult day and know that this is the place where they belong. So much of that happens in the middle of ordinary days.
It takes place around the dinner table, while folding laundry, driving to the grocery store, sharing a cup of coffee, having a conversation while preparing a meal, and while saying prayers before bed with little hands. It’s in all these small, mundane things that do not seem important enough to remember, that all of a sudden become a life. This is home and this is where we prepare them to go out.
I think sometimes we misunderstand what it means to create a home. The goal isn’t to create a place our children never want to leave. It is to create a place that gives them what they need so that one day they are strong enough to go. We feed them so their bodies become strong. We give them rest so they can work. We teach them responsibility so they can carry responsibility. We allow them to fail so they can learn how to get back up. We correct them because character matters. We surround them with beauty so they learn to recognize what is good. We teach them to serve because life isn’t only about themselves. And most importantly, we give them a foundation of faith so they know where to turn when we are no longer standing beside them.
Physical strength, mental strength, emotional strength, spiritual strength, and then, eventually, we open the door. We send them into work places, marriages, churches, neighborhoods, communities, and homes of their own. And they carry something of the home we made with them.
Yes, we long for the day they return with small ones in tow, when the home we once made for our children becomes a place of belonging for another generation.
That is something I think about more and more. The conversations held around our tables don’t necessarily stay around our tables. The values taught within our walls don’t stay within our walls. The faith practiced quietly in our homes can travel far beyond them.
There is Kingdom work happening here.
For the homemaker, home is not a retreat from meaningful work. Home is one of the places where meaningful work is done. There is kingdom work happening in ordinary homes every day. Not because the laundry itself is holy, and not because God is particularly impressed by an immaculate kitchen. And certainly not because a woman’s worth can be measured by the cleanliness of her house. It can not.
The significance is found in what all of that tending makes possible. A meal creates an opportunity to gather. A reasonably ordered home gives people a place to rest. A guest room says, There is room for you here. A pot of coffee can invite a conversation. A kitchen table can become the place where wisdom is passed from one generation to another. A bedtime prayer can plant truth in the heart of a child that he may remember decades later.
These things seem small because they usually happen quietly. But small does not mean insignificant. Jesus often spoke about faithfulness in small things. He washed feet. He broke bread. He welcomed people to tables. He noticed people others overlooked.
Christian life has never been limited to the grand and visible. Much of it happens in the quiet places where one person chooses to care for another. And home gives us countless opportunities to do exactly that.
Homemaking is not perfection. I think this distinction matters.
To value homemaking does not mean we need to recreate some romanticized version of the past. I believe it lies within gratitude. I am grateful for my dish washer. I will happily buy bread from the grocery store. Sometimes dinner comes from a restaurant. There are clothes in my house that will never meet an iron. And there are days when the house simply is not going to be tidy. Convenience is not the enemy of homemaking. Quite the contrary, as I strive for better time management, it is the very modern day convenience that helps make that possible. Perhaps the problem comes when convenience convinces us that the work has no value.
There are things our grandmothers did that we no longer need to do, and I am perfectly content to leave some of them in the past. Because the answer isn’t that we need to do everything our grandmothers did. We simply need to remember why they did so many of those things in the first place.
Care. Stewardship. Resourcefulness. Service. Creating order from chaos. Making things last. Feeding people. Welcoming people. Tending what had been entrusted to them. These things are timeless.
I have come to believe that homemaking is less about maintaining a house and more about creating a home that serve the people well within it. And there is a difference. A house can be spotless and still not feel like home.
A home can have dishes in the sink, shoes by the door, laundry waiting to be folded, and people who know beyond any doubt that they are deeply loved there.
Of course, caring for our surroundings matters. Beauty matters. Order matters. Cleanliness matters. They serve us. But they are not the mission. People are.
For the homemaker, the mission field may sometimes feel small enough to fit around a kitchen table. But its influence can reach for beyond our lifetime.
The child sitting at that table today may someday sit at another table with children of his own. He may repeat the words he heard here. Prepare the meal he remembers eating here. Offer hospitality because he watched someone offer it here. Pray because prayer was constant here. Create a home where someone else can rest because he once knew what it felt like to have a place like that himself. We rarely get to see how far the influence of a home will travel. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t.
And so the ordinary, everyday work continues.
I will probably never love every load of laundry or every sink of full dishes. I don’t think that is required. But I am learning to see those things differently.
When I stand at the ironing board, prepare another dinner, straighten another room, change another set of sheets, or put another load of laundry away, I am not simply maintaining a house. I am tending a home.
A home where people can be fed. A home where they can rest. A home where they can talk. A home where they can learn. A home where they can fail and begin again. A home where they can be reminded of who they are and more importantly, Whose they are. A home from which they will eventually leave.
Someday, the people we have cared for within the walls will carry pieces of this home into workplaces, marriages, churches, communities, and a home of their own. And maybe long after the dishes have been washed, the laundry folded, and those old linens carefully pressed and put away, the work accomplished here will still be bearing fruit.
That is why I believe the ordinary work of homemaking still matters. It was never really about the dishes or the ironing. It was about the people we were preparing to send out into the world.