Time to be Clean

While often times I feel that I am good at getting the “important” tasks in my life completed, it is often the “little” stuff that goes undone. While I often can find the time to prepare diligently for public speaking engagements and meet deadlines at school, or even remember to send a long lost friend a birthday card, I’m not so good at things like . . . keeping up with receipts from meals and transferring the amount into my checkbook (my wallet is always a disaster), remembering to keep up with yearly appointments (I would scare you if I said how long it is since I’ve been to the dentist), and being on a schedule for housework. Yeah, housework is just not my thing (sorry, Kevin if you were looking for a stay at home woman). Although clutter can drive me crazy, I’ve never been one to see the joy of spending all morning mopping the floor. Isn’t there someone who needs to talk to me? Or needs an email?

However, I grew up in a household where cleaning was never an option. My mom and I would get into our biggest arguments as I would refuse to joyfully do my share of the weekly Saturday chores. And when I was made to clean, I would often do them half-heartedly (which of course would get me into more trouble). While my sister, Emily would regularly win the “super star cleaning award” in the Evans home, I would brush off her enjoyment of this activity as completely absurd. And, it wouldn’t be until I lived on my own in college that I would discover that there are some corners in life that you can’t completely cut and cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen is not one of them. If you are going to live on your own, then you must learn to clean.

But as much as I would now like to have a clean house, time to do this never seems to be on my side. I put "clean the bathroom" on my to-do list and often find it not crossed off. There always seems to be a big project of sorts swarming around me and people I think I need to attend to. I’ve gotten so comfortable with my style that I’ll still invite people over, even if I know the house is not as clean as I would like it to be. I figure if they are good enough friends, they can take the mess. But, you can’t live in a mess forever….

So, enters the motivational tool coined: “Evangelical Cleaning.” This is a fun activity that my roommate and I conjured up this year to motivate us to take time out of our crazy schedules to attend to our living environment. Evangelical Cleaning means that we devote at least an hour to the kitchen, bathrooms and living room while listening to loud evangelical music of our childhood and teenaged years. Selections that are always high on the play-list include Michael W. Smith’s Change Your World album, Point of Grace’s Greatest Hits, and anything by Avalon or Carmen (I HATE Carmen, but Abby gets it out from time to time to torture me). Sometimes we substitute (as we did during yesterday’s version of Evangelical Cleaning) old school Christian music for an episode of Gilmore Girls playing in the background (Abby owns seasons 1-5 and it is never a bad time to watch Gilmore).

But, beyond viewing cleaning as game, I now have other motivation for taking the time to clean. It is in fact, a spiritual discipline. Reading Kathleen Norris’ book: The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” really helped me at this point last year (when it was assigned to me in Introduction to Pastoral Care two years ago). The thesis of the book revolves around the idea that women and men MUST do the small tasks of life, those like laundry, taking out the trash and the dishes because their repetitive nature reminds us of the rhythms of life. No matter how important we think we are, we stay grounded in having to do our dishes at night, just like everyone else around the world. And, house chores can also been seen as a means of prayer. In the spirit of Brother Lawrence, sometimes our most significant moments of communion with God can come as we walk up and down the isles of the grocery store, fold laundry, or rise dishes after supper. We must stop to consider God’s work in the little things. Kathleen says it better than I can. Hear this exhortation:

“I have come to believe that the true mystics of the quotidian are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily routines that can consume the self” (70).

And, God knows there is a lot of noise in my life . . . so, yes, I need to stop some Monday mornings like I did this week and clean. Maybe my mother was right about her weekly Saturday dates with the broom. So, for now, I’ll keep up my Evangelical Cleaning dates with my roommate, hoping that somewhere in the midst of it I will be reminded once again of my dependence of on a God who lives in “little things” called today. The smell of bleach in the bathroom might just be a good thing….