"And housework of all kinds is increasingly relegated to the fringes of lives filled with other things. In her book The Time Bind, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild documents the increasing prevalence of homes in which every adult member of the household works full time for pay outside the home and no one bears explicit, dedicated responsibility—even part time—for tasks inside the home.The result, she says, is homes so chaotic and unstructured that all the adults in the household would rather be at work than at home. After all, at work people know what their jobs are and can take a break when they’re done; at home all anyone knows is that it is a mess waiting for someone to clean it up.

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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.

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Even now, in a culture in which it is commonly expected that both men and women will work for pay outside the home, some people (usually men) expect to come home from work to rest, and other people (usually women) are expected to come home from work to more work. It is certainly true that the needs that housework serves do not take a day off. Every day, people need to eat. Every day, they need clothes to wear, a roof over their heads, a floor that is clear enough to walk on. But this does not mean that it is one person’s job to labor incessantly to provide these things for everybody else. Sharing the work of the household, for those of us who live in shared households, is a way of allowing all members of the household to keep sabbath, to rest from their labors even as God rests from his."