Homemaking and Humility
Jesus fed the hungry and clothed the naked in service to His family long before His public ministry. In this, He teaches me how to be a better homemaker.
Homemaking dominates my daily existence and much of my thoughts. I’ve been blessed with my husband and seven living children born to us, ranging from a rambunctious two-year-old to a growing-into-manhood fourteen-year-old. I’m indebted to the dishwasher, the washing machine and dryer, the vacuum cleaners, and other modern tools that expedite the work that feeding, clothing, and nourishing our family of nine requires. But so-called modern conveniences don’t erase the work that homemaking requires, and I often struggle to love my role as a homemaker even when I know how important it is.
Invariably, when I meet someone new and the topic of family comes up, my self-description elicits a “wow, you have your hands full!” kind of comment. There’s no denying that this is true, and true beyond what even I can communicate. The daily tasks and duties do not end, and I daresay they can’t actually be fully completed by any one person, namely me, even if I didn’t sleep at all. Occasionally the counters are completely clear, and once, many years ago, I finished folding all of the laundry and had nothing to wash or dry—until someone dropped soiled pants down the laundry chute eight seconds after I’d celebrated being finished. It’s funny, and it’s exhausting. Our big family is work. And I’ve slowly, and sometimes painfully, learned that this is good for all of us, and good for me.
In eighteen years of married life, and especially nearly fifteen with children ex utero, my experience has been far different than that of women whose careers have been the central significant descriptor of their identities. The daily, ordinary work of caring for others dominates my waking moments and, despite the opportunities to let my mind think on other things, my tasks usually command my thoughts, too. The necessary demands of food and clothing and shelter, and so many other needs thereof press me; they literally, viscerally weigh on my body and my mind because they are my physical realities and those of my family. We are real, fleshly, needy creatures.
The vast majority of the time, homemaking tasks are my priorities, and writing is not. Frankly, I’m one of those people that can only skip homemaker chores rarely to write instead. The glaring needs of our large household with many children just can’t be ignored often, or we will all drown in the detritus and chaos that follow fast and furious upon our eating and drinking and wearing and living. So I don’t go ahead and write unless I’m fairly certain I can spare some time away from the tasks around here that never end—meaning thirty minutes of writing won’t mean four days of trying to catch up on the rest. I exaggerate, but only a little.
The self-sacrifice this requires isn’t easy for me. I think of three to five new topic ideas every day, and lacking the freedom of time to put them down in words can be annoying, and if I’m honest, even highly frustrating. But I have slowly learned over the last fifteen years some hard truths. First, I will not die if I do not immediately drop everything and write. My spirit survives intact without me physically taking the time to order and reorder my thoughts. Second, the world will go on turning if I do not write down my burning ideas for posterity. The same is not the case if I decide to write instead of, say, to make dinner. People in my house will literally melt down if they don’t eat a semi-square meal at a reasonable time. Frankly, I won’t do well, either. Both of these truths, but especially the second, have been humbling for me to realize. And yet they are both true. The vast, vast majority of the world neither reads what I write nor requires my writing for much of anything, including sustenance. My pride hurts at this, but it’s a meaningful truth. Because it leads me to another truth, one that our culture far too often ignores or belittles. That is this: that a very small portion of the world, but a vital, growing portion needs me—and primarily me—to fulfill tasks that we all need to survive. They are simple tasks, necessary tasks, and loving tasks, and these are precisely the tasks God has given me to do.
I recently read Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday, a thoughtful meditation on Christian home life by some Roman Catholic women. I found the numerous references to saints in the book interesting but not particularly helpful; I am a confessional Lutheran, after all. But one part made a point about Jesus and the humility of His home life that I’d never considered before.
There is a counter-productive modern conviction that disdains the ordinary and anything that reeks of it. Ours is a culture in search of cheap distinction. Christ subverts this fashionable wisdom in the way he lived his life, a life which, as measured by time, was spent overwhelmingly in anonymity within the very ordinary spheres of work and family. He was not constrained to those spheres, nor was this time marked as just waiting for his public ministry. We can imagine he spent day-in and day-out, hour after hour, with small missions like building furniture for someone in the village. He chose not to be a famed scholar, earthly ruler, or even in active ministry those thirty years. He didn’t even choose to be a widely known carpenter (at least we don’t have any indication of that). But he would have given himself fully to his work without grumbling or half-heartedness. About these years, we know little, and even that says a lot.
Before reading this, I’d never thought about the quiet decades Jesus spent in home life. I’ve heard pastors preach about the Biblical silence surrounding Christ’s childhood, but I’ve not heard much of anything about the fact that He chose home and family, and countless, unknown tasks, over a visible, respected role prior to the beginning of His public ministry. He lived as a child, as a teenager, and as a young adult in His family. That He served them is without question. And that He did so with not a whisper mentioned about it in Holy Scripture speaks to the incredible self-sacrifice He embodied. God lived in a family for thirty years, and He did not ordain that the service He gave there should be shared. This doesn’t mean it was irrelevant. It means that His humility and His work in His home were meant to go together.
This puts me to shame. I love my family, and I would not trade my years as a homemaker. But I have complained and resented and whined innumerable times as I have served my family. Being a homemaker is hard not because the tasks are particularly difficult, but because the work seemingly never ends, and homemakers are selfish for their own time. And family members, especially children, often take homemakers and their service for granted. Sinful homemakers resent that, too, and want full credit for the work we do.
And yet here I see how incredibly humble our Lord is. He did chores, likely much more backbreaking and dirtier than mine, and He did so without complaint, or without grasping for Himself the time such chores took, or righteously reprimanding his family for failing to appreciate His service for them, or even asking for any recognition at all. He didn’t even speak any words meant for the rest of the world. Though we can’t know exactly what He did in those years before He was thirty, we know that He served others, primarily His parents and His brothers and sisters. I take new heart in thinking on the mundane work He likely did and the homemaking role He filled long before His baptism, His temptation in the wilderness, and His first public miracle at the wedding at Cana. We know Jesus in His public ministry bore countless sorrows and pain. I can’t help but think that His three decades of anonymous, domestic service must have prepared Him to love and serve others in a way that literally no other kind of service would have.
During Lent, we think especially about the burdens that Jesus carried as He strode toward the cross. He knew He could not shirk His duty, and He would not, either, and that included bearing millions of small acts of service in family life in this fallen world. Christian humility is, by its very nature, a kind of tacit silencing of the self to love others. I can’t be perfectly humble or anywhere even close to it. But Jesus could, and He was. And that He was for so long, in the small quiet of His family home, teaches me more about the goodness of both humility and homemaking than I can say.