Friday, April 25, 2008

Clean shower=clean heart??


Do you ever have great thoughts while doing mundane things/tasks? Some of my greatest thinking times are when I'm in the shower or washing dishes or hanging out laundry. Of course sometimes I forget if I've shampooed my hair or I leave some food on the dishes or drop undies or socks on the ground--well, actually that happens even when I'm not deep in thought. At least one thing from every load gets dropped and most times put into the basket to get washed with the next load. Anyway...

I was combining two tasks this morning, showering and cleaning the shower, and had a great thought. Part of it I've thought of before--Cleaning my shower is like Jesus cleaning my life. Now, before you think I've gone crazy and call Josh and tell him to shoot me, think about this. My normal way of cleaning the shower is waiting until it is absolutely disgusting to take a shower in there (sooner than you think thanks to QLD humidity and mildew) and then getting out the big guns, namely my steam cleaner and some really nasty hold-your-breath-while-you-clean shower cleaner/mildew remover. Then you wonder if you should actually take a shower after using that. Anyway, most times that I clean like that I think, "If you would wipe this down after every shower or at least wipe it down once a week this wouldn't be so hard to clean." And then, bang, it hits me! If I let Jesus work in my life everyday and show me all the little things that need to be cleaned up then I don't need to wait until something big happens and try to get it all cleaned up at once. So often I don't take the time to listen to what the Holy Spirit keeps nudging me about. But then when communion time comes at church (every two weeks here) I try to spend that minute of silent prayer thinking of everything I've done wrong/need to change/should've done different in the last two weeks. I promise to read my Bible everyday, not yell at the children, be a better wife, etc. And then I do it all over again two weeks later. Let me tell ya, it ain't working! So along with trying to keep everything clean and tidy in my house everyday I'm working on having my time with God and letting Him do the tidying up in my life.

Which brings me to my great thought this morning. I was cleaning my shower and it only took a couple minutes. Everything was still basically clean from last time I cleaned. And I thought, "you know, sometimes though you get a bigger satisfaction from taking a HUGE mess and cleaning it, rather than cleaning a mostly clean surface. " It made me think of my college days. We had Bible study on Wednesday nights in home groups. I went to the home group at Andy and Deb Hudson's home. They were my professors at college and I babysat their kids often. Whenever a new student came to the group they were asked to tell their testimony. I, and so many others, said things like, well, I don't have a really great testimony or I have a rather boring testimony. Because we had been blessed enough to grow up in a Christian home and had never been on drugs/alcoholic/messed up, etc. We can all think of people with "great" testimonies of God's saving grace. How He picked them up out of the pit and saved them. Andy always said that any testimony was great and how our testimony was not that God saved us out of these evils but saved us from these evils. Anyway, all those thoughts combined to show me that being saved from those evils and not needing to clean up huge messes are much better and healthier for us.

And now as you go to worry about me and wonder if I've sniffed too much of those cleaning chemicals I thought I would give a little promo for the magic erasers. LOVE THEM!!! But I've also heard heaps of good things about METHOD cleaners and I actually found them in my store the other day. So I bought the pink grapefruit surface cleaner and the eucalyptus mint tub+tile cleaner the other day and am trying them out. Thanks for worrying about my sanity and for reading this whole post. =)

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