The House That Talks
Does your house ever talk? Do your kitchen appliances try to have conversations with you? Is the bed constantly screaming at you that it is bare and needs to be made? Is your garbage can a gaping hole of endless waste and leftover food, that no one finished, stinking up the kitchen? Are your floors crunchier than the sand on a beach? Does your vacuum have more hair than all of the hair on the head of each family member combined? Do the dust bunnies hop around on shelves and knick-knacks, completely content within the dusty meadows of your home?
Let me tell you I'm there. Now I'm not crazy, and I don't talk to the things in our house, but the tasks of being a housewife become extremely overwhelming some days. The things that need to be cleaned stare me down until I feel so guilty I get elbow deep in dirty laundry and yucky dishwater. The stains in the toilet bowl embarrass me to no end. The garbage is overflowing with dirty diapers, and being on a third floor apartment with two blessings makes it hard to empty the garbage during the day when it’s just me. When our second blessing was born, we had so much stuff from the hospital and gifts from various people, our apartment looked like a shipping center for UPS. Boxes and boxes and boxes. Everywhere. All day every day my house would scream at me and tell me all of the stuff I needed to do. Clean the sink. Wash the dishes. Fold the laundry. Make dinner. Make your husband’s lunch for work. Dust the the entire house, even the walls. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and hide from my house that never gave me any peace. That’s when God spoke a very important truth to my heart: “You will always have housework to do, but your children only grow up once.”
Well, that hit me like a ton of bricks. God is okay with my house not being clean all the time? I thought cleanliness was next to godliness, right? Literally, that was the thought that crossed my mind because I am such a clean freak to begin with, and I thought the biblical equivalent of a good housewife was a clean house. A clean house is a very small part of the much bigger picture. God slowly showed me over my first few months of being a stay-at-home mom that nurturing the hearts of my husband and children are more important than having a clean house 24/7. I can have the cleanest house in the entire world, but if I have failed to love and nurture the hearts of my family toward the One who created them, I have not succeeded in my role as a spouse or mother.
My family does not need me to be perfect. They need me to be there, ever present within every experience they go through to help and guide them to the straight and narrow way of God. An imperfect person nurturing and caring for imperfect people will obviously have hard moments. Moments of hurt and misunderstanding because, hey, it’s part of being human. But God is able to show His perfectness and grace through our imperfections and hard moments.
Next time the house tries to draw me in with its many demands and list of to-dos, I will let it know that it does not define me as a housewife. And that truth was a great burst of freedom indeed.
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