Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Friday, April 25, 2014

The Home: A Place for Transforming Souls

Love this! Let's aspire to make our homes into just such a place, ladies! What an honor and a most important job, wouldn't you agree?

"Household life is not primarily a sphere for cooking, keeping things tidy, sweeping and dusting, nursing and training of children, hospitable entertainment of friends, and the thousand things that must be done each day. It is a sphere for transforming souls into radiant Christly beauty!" 

~J.R. Miller, The Shining Light

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Confessions of a "Know-it-all"

As noted in my first blog post here at Hargraves Home and Hearth, I began my life in the blogosphere   at the age of 15 with my first blog, By His Grace and For His Glory.  While I still fully support and endorse many of the posts which were written for that blog, others I could not stand by now in good conscience. Looking back at my 15 or 16 year old self, I can see what a know-it-all I was at the time. Not only that, but I can now see areas where I was just plain wrong and definitely erring on the side of legalism in some of my beliefs. In a few of the future posts here on Hargraves Home and Hearth, I would like to address a couple of those topics and share with you what the Lord has been teaching me over the past year or two. These issues include the following ideas:


  • The false belief that it is Biblically wrong for a woman to wear pants and that in order to be feminine, a lady must wear only skirts and dresses

  • The false belief that it is wrong for women to have any sort of job outside the home

  • The false idea that in order to live Biblically between graduation and marriage, a young woman  absolutely must live at home with her parents 24/7, should not attend a college campus, and should not hold down any kind of job outside the home

This post is a little hard for me to write, as for years, these issues were extremely important to me and I fought tooth and nail on my old blog to defend them. But while I wholeheartedly embrace Biblical femininity, teach Biblical roles for women, love to wear skirts and dresses, believe a woman's primary sphere of influence and responsibility is to be the home, embrace the idea that an unmarried young woman would do well to consider remaining at home with her family as she prepares for marriage,  that women would do well to pursue home businesses and higher education at home, etc. etc., I no longer espouse the legalistic stances that I once did in these areas. While this is difficult to post for several reasons, I believe it to nonetheless be a very, very important post to write. The Scriptures alone (and not man-made laws which misconstrue those Scriptures!) are to be our sole basis for our faith and practice. We are not to add to nor take away from anything in Scripture, and it is a serious error on our part when we do so. Problems follow when we take a wonderful Biblical principle and run with it, adding to it our own boundaries and limitations. For this reason as well as my past experience in legalism and the realization of how miserable one can be when stuck in the web of legalism, I desire to address some of these ideas in the near future and pray the Lord will see fit to bless you through those future posts and to bring you closer to His heart and His Word alone.

Blessings!

Mrs. Rebekah Ann Hargraves


Friday, April 11, 2014

A Different Kind of Woman.....

Several years ago when I really began to more actively study the topic of Biblical womanhood and what it means to be a godly woman, Elisabeth Elliot became one of my favorite authors. She can sometimes put things into words as no one else can. What follows is one of my favorite of her quotes. I pray it inspires you today to be different. To be set apart. To be salt and light.


"The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman."


For more encouragement, be sure to check out her book, Let Me Be a Woman. It's great!

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Hi there, blog world!!! :)

Wow, to be back in the blogosphere again! Or is that back in the saddle again..... Ok, never mind. ;)

Anywho, some of you may remember me as Miss Rebekah Ann S. from www.byhisgraceandforhisglory.blogspot.com. I began that blog at the age of 15 and faithfully posted on it for a few years. In more recent years, life got busy (read, my problem with procrastination grew! ;)) and I would go 6 months or a year at a time without posting anything. Due to this, when I finally went to sign back in to my old blog today (the blogging bug has started to bite again!), I discovered I couldn't even remember my old blog password! I know, I know, pitifully sad, right?

Well, long story short, that issue combined with the fact that I am no longer Miss Rebekah Ann S., but rather Mrs. Rebekah Ann Hargraves (eeeep!), caused me to think that it is time to begin anew. New life=new blog! :)

For those who were familiar with my blog before, you know that my passion was to educate and edify young ladies to be all they could be as Christians, as daughters, as sisters, and as unmarried young women hoping to be married one day with families of their own. The majority of my posts were centered around homemaking, marriage, Biblical womanhood, femininity, the issues with feminism, doctrine, etc. My hope was to inspire young ladies to read up on all these topics, to study the issues of the day so that when they might find themselves getting married and beginning homes and families of their own, they would not despair or feel inadequate to rise to their new tasks. It was (and is!) my firm belief that if we aspire to be godly, wise, strong, industrious, educated wives, mothers, and homemakers, it should be our life's work when we're unmarried young women to do all we can to prepare ourselves for those noble roles and tasks.

Well, now I'm on the other side of things! :) No longer am I the 15 year old girl dreaming about future home and family life, preparing to be married and to run a home of my own. Now I'm a 21 year old woman, married for 3 weeks (yeah, I know, only 3 weeks! ;) ), and working to make our house into a home. I am now a wife, helpmeet, and homemaker-those things I dreamed of being not all that long ago. And, let  me tell you-I do not for one second regret any of the study or preparation I put into becoming equipped for this life! As any of you who read my old blog know, I purposefully chose to not go to college or begin a "career" following high school graduation. Because I felt it was more important for me to prepare for the life's work that I felt the Lord would one day call me to. I spent the nearly 4 years between graduation and my wedding day babysitting; trying new recipes; studying nutrition; immersing myself in history and theology studies; advancing my home business; learning what the Bible had to say about Biblical womanhood and the blueprint the Lord has for us as women; discovering that wives are called to be helpmeets to their husbands, to care for their homes and make them a haven, to delight in, embrace and practice hospitality, and the list goes on. It was my desire to not just sit around pining for that time of my life, but to actually prepare for that life that I so longed to live out. And so, 3 weeks into my marriage, I (and my husband, I'm sure! ;) ) am reaping the benefits of all that study and preparation. If any of you young ladies happen to be reading this and have chosen that uncommon, unpopular path to spend your after-highschool years preparing yourselves for the blessed callings of wife, mother, and homemaker, then take heart! It is hardly all for naught! You will reap the benefits of that choice, I promise you. Because of the preparation I put myself through following high school (and even before that, really), I was able to come home from my honeymoon not dreading homemaking or wondering how on earth I was supposed to feed my husband or trying to figure out what the word "budget" meant and what to do about it. This is not to say that you ladies who entered marriage not really knowing how to do these things are any less than. Not at all! We're all learning new things each day of our lives (or should be! ;) ), and none of us has ever or will ever "arrive". I mean, take me for instance-I may feel at home in the kitchen or behind a sewing machine or when choosing color schemes for my home, but you try to put me behind a drill or screwdriver and tell me to put up a fan or light fixture.....well, let's just say you better have the fire department on speed dial for that one! So, take heart! I say all of this to simply encourage women-young or old-to delight in the roles God designed for them. To desire to be all you can be while living out those roles that were uniquely given to us as ladies.

I have to say, writing this post is so surreal for me. I remember the countless hours sitting in front of my computer screen in my room at my parents' house typing up blog posts for By His Grace and For His Glory, dreaming of the day when I would get to put into practice some of the things I was writing about. And now, here I am sitting in front of my computer in the home I share with my wonderful husband beginning a new blog to go along with my new life as a wife, helpmeet, and homemaker. Isn't God good? I'm reminded so often these days of the beautiful verse in Psalm 37, 'Delight yourself also in the Lord, And He shall give you the desires of your heart.' That verse is so true! And I am living proof of it today.

So, today, as I embark on a brand-new life in blogosphere, I welcome you to join me. Come along on this new journey and discover along with me day by day the riches there are in Christ. The beauty of loving and serving your husband. The joy found in making your house into a home where family, friends, and neighbors alike can come and find themselves refreshed. On this blog, there will be a ton of topics covered. Everything from Christian living, doctrine and theology, Biblical womanhood, marriage, homemaking, cooking and baking, diy projects, health and nutrition, feminism (and what's wrong with it! ;)  ), what it looks like to be a helpmeet, posts on our daily life and happenings at the Hargraves House, and the list goes on. And, of course, there will be plenty of articles directed solely at young, unmarried ladies, as well. Because my passion is still to come along side girls and encourage them in the ways of God.

I don't know about you, but I'm excited! I'm ready to begin this new journey with all of you, and I thank you for choosing to join me in it. I pray it will be a blessing to you!

In Christ alone,

~Mrs. Rebekah Ann Hargraves~

Note: For a little more about my former blog, check out this post.