I hate cleaning. Some women find it therapeutic. I usually just find it irritating and discouraging. Because 2 minutes after the dishes are done, the sink is full again.
Fifteen minutes after the living room floor is picked up, it is full of blankets, toys, and socks.
And, don't you know the rule about mopping your dining room floor? If you mop in the afternoon, someone WILL spill a full cup of kool-aid at dinner that night.
Cleaning feels like my life is going from order to disorder, order to disorder. Constantly.
Here is my livingroom at 11am this morning. My sink, countertops and kitchen table were also overflowing with dishes. Disorder in its full glory.
Like many mothers, I struggle with finding purpose in the every day. "How is cleaning up those pointless messes actually promoting the work of Christ? Does this daily cleaning drudgery even matter to God?"
It is easy to wrap my mind around the fact that, as a mother, I am a giver of life, just like my Heavenly Father. After all, I carried my babies in my body and birthed them; I nurture my family every day with food.
I readily embrace my God-given female vocation as life-giver. But cleaner-of-messes? Can that job be redeemed?
It can. Not redeemed in the sense that I am super-happy about cleaning my house but redeemed in the sense that bringing order from disorder is an imitation of the work of God.
God formed the world from an order-less nothing.
He takes sin--the ultimate chaos--and replaces death with life.
He constantly takes our out-of-control thoughts, emotions, and lives and draws us back to his truth and his heart.
Again and again.
So in my daily dish-scrubbing, sock-sorting, blanket-folding, laundry-lugging, kool-aid mopping I am imitating God's work by bringing order and peace back to my home.
Again and again.**
It took exactly 17 minutes for me to get to this "After" picture, including folding the basket of laundry that had been sitting in the living room for 5 days. Ironically, the basket was full of cleaning rags and burp clothes, a testament of how I, as a woman, wife, mother, must constantly bring order back to my home.
Order to disorder?
No.
Disorder to Order.
Again and again.
A Mother's Divine Work.
**Note: This was not my original idea. I read something like this on a blog many months, maybe even years ago, but I have lost the link. I hope, though, that by reiterating the thoughts of another, I can encourage someone else. I know I need this truth daily.
