Mostly because I had to take a couple of bags of handmedowns to the secondhand store, and that led to me looking at their furniture department, which led to me finding the perfect new bedside table for The Husband, who has been longsuffering-ly using a red cube thing we got when we were first married that is much too short for his side of the bed, and that tended to get rearranged every day by the kiddos, who found it the perfect height for mayhem.
Anyway, this is Maundy Thursday. We're supposed to think about Christ washing the feet of His disciples, and hopefully later tonight we'll have our own little session with warm washcloths and lotion, but I found myself translating the service idea already today as I wiped certain chubby, wiggly little people up during morning diaper changes. This motherhood gig--really can be means of sanctification. Sigh.
Which is not, of course, to say that automatically sanctification has to be unpleasant, or that everything unpleasant is necessarily a means of sanctification. But it at least lends an aura of greater meaning to the drudgery tasks--the picking up of dirty socks that you already picked up, that someone threw on the floor because they wanted the laundry basket for a boat, or washing the dishes, again, or vacuuming the floor, again, or changing the sheets you just put on the bed yesterday, only the baby puked on them...
Ah, yes, everyone has drudgery. Doctors, pastors, mothers, factory workers, even, I imagine, fashion models (it can't be entertaining to have to stand in place for three hours, being told "now widen your eyes. Alright, now look to the right. No, my right.") The drudgery is the place where we can choose.
We know that we're supposed to be joyful in suffering--I think a lot of Christians would make a fine showing if Red Dawn happened and suddenly the commies were lining people up in the street and demanding they renounce the Lord or get shot. (Seems like a lot of trouble to go to, by the way, when you've already got a high school football team militia running around the hills, yelling "Wolverines!") No problem. I'm only a bullet away from eternity, and I know what I'm supposed to do in this situation. Likewise, it's not hard to do the right thing when we're having mountaintop experiences--when we're at a moving service, when your child looks at you and whispers "I love you, Mama, you're a good Mama", or when you get to be in on a person's conversion.
But it's very, very hard to do the right thing, and think the right thing, when you're scraping spattered bits of tomato sauce off the inside of the microwave. Again. And you're not being so demanding--all you want to do is get a FEW MINUTES away from the tomato sauce (or the annoying, talkative neighbor, or the pile of incoming papers to grade) to do something completely inoffensive that you like. Knitting, maybe, or writing, or brushing your hair all at once. It's very easy, in the midst of drudgery, to think resentfully, and (what's worse) to think that it doesn't matter what you think at that moment. After all, it's just an ordinary, average, less-than-ideal moment.
The truth is that ordinary moments make up most of our lives. Relatively few of us will, probably, be called to stand in the streets and choose the Lord at the cost of a bullet. A relatively small portion of our spiritual lives will be taken up with experiences of emotional sweetness and supernal enabling. Most of it will just be work, and a percentage of the work will be, I hate to say, drudgery. So unless we can get in the habit of seeing our drudgery as service to the Lord, well, we'll spend most of our life thinking wrongly.
Which is something to remember when your son has the Epic Poopout of all poop-outs. (It was even between his toes. Wow.)
Service, baby. Christ didn't have to do it, but He did it, and in the humblest guise imaginable. Now if I can just remember this for the rest of the year.
Cheers,
Breanna
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