Housework: Futility or Faithfulness?
Housework: Futility or Faithfulness?
Housewives may complain that “a woman’s work is never done.” Whether they prepare meals, sweep floors, or dust shelves, they do it in the knowledge that they must do it all over again every day and every week. It is then easy to dismiss such work as menial and insignificant. Therefore I greatly appreciate this passage from Margaret Kim Peterson’s book Keeping House: The Litany Of Everyday Life, a compelling treatise on the doctrines of... housework. Yes, God has plenty to say about even that.
Work is also providential. God’s creative activity did not issue in a creation that lives on indefinitely with no further involvement on God’s part. On the contrary, the very creatureliness of the universe requires the continuing presence and activity of God in sustaining all things in being. We recognize this readily in certain spheres of human activity. Everyone knows that a garden, once planted, does not thrive without the continued work of the gardener in weeding, mulching, fertilizing, pruning, harvesting, and beginning the cycle again in the new year.
A home is not much different from a garden in this sense. If you don’t take care of a house, it devolves. This is true of the physical structure itself—We have all felt a twinge of sadness on seeing the sagging porches and peeling paint of a house long abandoned. And it is true of the internal workings of the household as well. A household has to be tended if it is to flourish and grow. Housework is never “done” in the same sense that gardening is never done or that God’s providential involvement in the world is never done. Housework and gardening and God’s providence itself are exercises not in futility but in faithfulness—faithfulness to the work itself, to the people whose needs that work serves, and to the God whose own faithfulness invites our faithful response.
For more of the same, see my previous post Rejoicing in Repetition.
Painting: Wash Day. Martha Walter.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010