“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed.”
— Proverbs 31:27-28 (ESV)
Dearest Daughters,
It is universally understood that the word home does something inside our hearts and minds. For me, it’s almost a painful tugging, like home is part of my DNA, as if it’s inscribed in my bones. After a long trip or a hard day, or a visit to the relatives, all I can think about is, Let’s get back home.
The feeling is actually so powerful that feels almost magnetic. We think of Christmas; we want to go home. We remember loved ones or childhood memories, and we want to go home. It’s a feeling so universal and so understood that the word homesick has been invented to describe it. This word was created just for the ache of having been away from home for too long.
When we’re away from home, our memories become sharper, and we suddenly recall the laughter around a dinner table, even the familiar, comforting routines of wiping down a sink, making a bed, the smell of dinner bubbling on the stove or the way the pictures and decor on the walls compose the story of family.
Home is where we feel secure and where we belong. It’s where we’re most ourselves, where we “let our hair down.”
But today there’s another type of homesickness in my heart. It’s a grief over how the calling of homemaking has come to be viewed in our modern culture. If home is such a sacred and vital place for human existence, why is it that so often, in the culture surrounding us, the word homemaker spoken of with such discomfort or even disdain?
This grieves me, because I believe that a real homemaker, the way God intended, is one of the highest and most beloved callings.
Other callings and vocations have not been demeaned in the same way. If you tell people that you spend 2,000 hours a year in an office cubicle staring at spreadsheets, they’ll approve of you. If you say that you wear a paper cap and rubber gloves and press the buttons on an X-ray machine eight hours a day, they applaud you. And if you clean the teeth of strangers all day, every day, everyone around you will commend your education and contribution to society.
But the discovery that you’re a full-time wife and mother and a keeper of the home always brings an awkward pause into the room. Sometimes you’ll even see a shadow of pity flicker across faces. Oh, she’s a housewife. Only a homemaker? People believe that you’ve sort of given up on a “real” life when you choose to be a just a homemaker.
But please do not believe this, because you actually have taken up a wonderful calling. You haven’t given up!
I say this because I love the role of being a woman. I love being your mom. I love creating beautiful places for peace, belonging, and welcome—a home. I love the constant behind-the-scenes work of nurturing little lives given to me by God. What could be more precious than the molding of little souls that He created? I believe with all of my heart that this task, when done in faith and love, is an awesome and sacred calling created by God.
So I am proud and delighted to make recovering the calling and beauty of womanhood a mission in my life.
I believe that in this life, family and community were composed to be a symphony, we women have been given a profound role in the anthem that God is conducting. We are privileged to bring His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and that can start in our kitchens and in the way we nurture our children. We should feel honored to keep that flame burning day and night so that family and home do not die but can truly be sustained in a fragmented world.
I don’t believe anyone truly despises the real calling of homemaking and motherhood, but rather the caricature that society has painted of it. It is a wicked distortion and counterfeit that turns biblical submission into repression and portrays homemaking as a dull, repressed place. These lies from the enemy shrink a once beautiful place into drudgery, and that is what we must wage war against.
I pray that you will make your home a sanctuary and that it becomes a training ground for God’s love.
We as homemakers should be ambassadors for heaven on earth, making each home heaven’s embassy.
It is no small task to nurture and create a home with love, joy and wisdom, and thus you should never allow it to be demeaned in your heart. You have been chosen by God for this beautiful legacy and a mission. You have the chance to bring His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. We as women can do this one home at a time!
So let us join together to redeem the word homemaker with a vision for God’s kingdom. Let’s lift it up where it belongs and show the world that a woman who loves her home, who makes it beautiful, who keeps on serving through all the laughter and tears with a joyful heart is not demeaned or repressed.
She is worth more than rubies and more than the world or any earthly culture will ever understand.
May that joy be rediscovered and shine through you, and may everything you do in and for your home and family be radiant with God’s love.
With all my love,
Mom