Less Selfish / Inspirational Bonus Post

To keep myself humble, I give you this (a really awesome email from some missionaries our church supports):

Washing the dishes. Cutting the grass. Taking out the trash and recycles. Grocery shopping. Cooking. Washing the clothes, hanging them out to dry, then folding them. Vacuuming. Dusting. Ordinary stuff, right?

I've often thought of them as necessary evils, with emphasis on the evil part. But as I prepared some Bible studies on Genesis 1 this spring, I read some comments that made me think about being in the image of the Creator. God's work in creation follows a pattern: after he created the original earth it was dark, formless, and empty. but he began immediately to glorify it, shining the light of his presence in it (before there was a sun or any stars), shaping the land and the sea, and filling them with glorious creatures of unimaginable variety and beauty. He took chaos in his hands, reshaped it, renamed it (birds, air, fish, sea, cattle, land), and judged it all good. Very good.

Then he made man in his image, male and female, and placed them in his garden to work it. And working a garden is, like washing the dishes and folding the clothes, ordinary stuff.

But this ordinary stuff is really quite glorious, isn't it? We take chaos in our hands (a pile of dirty dishes or clothes, a shaggy, dandelion-covered lawn), reshape it into an ordered stack of clean dishes or a neatly trimmed lawn, and then call it "good." It's simple, yes - but you can see in this simple work, if you look closely, the dim but clear reflection of our Creator. No other creatures under heaven take this kind of care - because no other creatures under heaven were made to reflect the glory of the Creator as his images.

Well, thinking this way can change your perspective on your "ordinary" cleaning and maintenance. It may not make you into another Brother Lawrence, communing with God among your pots and pans - but it could transform your chores from something to get done as quickly as possible into times of quiet, regular celebration and thanksgiving, that you could bear the image of the One who made the world and everything in it.