Buried Under a Pile of Housework

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you just can’t keep up with everything?  This week is mine!  It all started when I got sick.  Horrible sore throat where it hurt to swallow, runny nose, aches, headache and the list goes on and on.  When your body is fighting against sickness, you don’t feel like doing much of anything else.  So my nights have consisted of rest and not much else.  

The house is in bad shape!  Dishes need to be done, clothes need to be picked up, laundry needs to be done, the whole house needs to be cleaned and now disinfected! 

It’s so easy when the house gets to this point just to leave it that way.  Do these things ever cross your mind? There’s no way I’m ever going to catch up. Who cares what it looks like anyway.. I’ll wait to clean it until I know someone’s coming over.

It’s so easy to become lazy again.  But even the Bible tells us that laziness is a harder way to live.  

Proverbs 15:19 (ESV) "The way of a sluggard is like a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a level highway."

The longer I leave it, the more it will pile up and the harder it will be to complete.  Maybe it would be easier to complete it I had a different attitude about the work.

A friend of mine sent me a link this past week to an article online.  The man being interviewed in the article works for a cleaning service.  I like what he said to the question of how does your work reflect some aspect of God’s work:

As an image-bearer of God, how does your work reflect some aspect of God’s work? I haven’t always intuitively classified my work as image-bearing, but as I’ve thought about it, I’ve seen that bringing order out of chaos reflects the image of God.  When I get to a job, it can be filthy everywhere. By the time I leave it, though, it’s clean. I make clean what is filthy.  We see God doing that all over the place in Scripture.  In creation, he creates order out of chaos by speaking creation into existence. As sinners, he takes the chaos of our lives and makes order through Christ.  At the end of a job, there’s a great deal of satisfaction knowing that God has used the work of my hands to make clean and new what was once dirty.

(taken from http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/bringing-order-out-of-chaos-one-dirty-job-at-a-time)

Maybe if I thought about my own housework as being image-bearing work, I wouldn't be so reluctant to complete it!

Now that I finally have some energy back, I think tonight I'll try to catch up on my housework after the girls are in bed and keep in mind that in my own little way I am reflecting the image of God!