There aren’t very many mornings I get to sleep in, but today was one of them. A list of chores and to-do’s jotted down last night on a piece of note paper awaited me on the kitchen table this morning. On the top of that list? Wash and iron my kitchen tablecloth. Well, you know how it goes…
Pretty soon all the windows were washed, the ironing was done, I cleaned behind the washer and dryer, got up on a stool and washed the ceiling fan, wiped floor boards, scrubbed bathrooms, washed toilets, shook rugs, vacuumed, cleaned door wall tracks, and on and on. You get the picture. After a three-hour deep cleaning, my home smells really good now.
But my biggest accomplishments? 1) I never touched or looked at my cell phone. 2) I removed all of the couch cushions and vacuumed, something I hadn’t done in… well… awhile.
Something really DOES happen when we don’t look at our phones for an extended amount of time. We actually have an opportunity to THINK straight. And reminisce. Work things out in our hearts and minds. And so, I thought… and reminisced, and worked things out in my mind and in my heart.
I thought about how glad I am that I only have 1000 square feet of home to clean. I remembered back when my kids were really, really young, and we lived in a mobile home, and my biggest worry besides the fact that we lived paycheck to paycheck, was that I may never be able to provide my sons a house to live in, one with a big backyard to play in. And I worried about all of the other things that every single mother worries and stresses about, but there isn’t enough room here, or time in the day, so I’ll move on.
When I was little and my family traveled back and forth each year to Nova Scotia, one of my favorite places to go was Aunt Gerty’s. She lived in a small mobile home. It was charmingly quaint, and every little nicknack was perfectly in place. I loved curling up on her couch because it was just such a warm, welcoming home, and she always had cookies or danishes for us. Perhaps my love of sweets today are a result of those visits. My two biggest childhood goals I hoped to achieve as an adult some day were to 1) be an Avon lady, and 2) live in a charming little home just like Aunt Gerty’s.
My Avon sales career was short-lived back in the late 1990’s, and I did, in fact, live in an adorable little mobile home for five years. We then we moved on to a condo, and now I’m back in another very small 1,000 square foot condo that smells like Mr. Clean right now as I sit here on the couch cushions I just painstakingly took apart to vacuum almost an entire granola bar’s worth of crumbs out of this morning. Mission accomplished.
But as I was vacuuming underneath all of those cushions, my mind wandered to the state of my heart. For the past few months, there’s been a struggle that only my closest friends know of, that I’m sure they were more aware of than I was when they saw the ugliest parts of it – and they oh, so obviously prayed for me, because as as I vacuumed, I thought of them, and I thought of their prayers, and how those prayers helped to transform a little corner of my dusty, dirty heart that has become glaringly obvious even to meeee. My heart needed the cushions taken off, beaten, and vacuumed 😉
And then I realized, the “renewing of our minds” can, in fact, include a good housecleaning and lack of cell phone availability, giving us an opportunity to interact with our Savior.
Sometimes, you just need to enlist some friends to pray, white-out every single thing on your calendar for a few months, and put your phone and all other distractions out of sight. Then, add a little routine to your morning time with God by renewing your mind while folding some towels, scrubbing a floor, washing windows, or standing in a pair of sweats on the front porch and shaking the living daylights out of your rugs – regardless of what any passersby might think.
To my friends who’ve been praying… I love you.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2 ESV
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