This afternoon, after lunch and before evening church, I went over to my mom's house to clean. She lives alone and my brother and his family are coming for a Christmas visit this week. As I was working on her home, I was laughing because there was no really visible dirt anywhere to direct the cleaning effort. I was wiping down counters that were not sticky or greasy, dusting things than seemed relatively dustless, and vacuuming a clean-looking carpet. While I was dusting the guest bathtubs (they had gathered some small dust bunnies for lack of use) I realized how different the cleaning is at my home.
Around my house, we have a cleaning schedule and we joke that "We clean the toilets every Wednesday whether they need it or not!" But with eight people running through the house every day, there is rarely a time that we have cleaned and it not be needed desperately. Most the time, instead of following our "ideal" schedule, we follow the sticky spots on the floor, or the strange smear of unidentifiable food matter on the wall, or the stairs which look like I haven't swept them in weeks when I really just swept them two days ago.
During my bathtub "dusting" this afternoon, the sentiment in Proverbs 14:4 was greatly illustrated to me,
Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean,
But abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.
When I was a new mom I had a sweet friend who would share this verse with me every time she could tell I was getting overburdened by my lack of being able to keep up with the tasks of running a home, or when she could feel my frustration mount after finally completing a chore only to watch it be destroyed moments later by a curious toddler. As this friend would encourage me, I would shake my head, I just couldn't see the abundant crop on the other side of my messy manger. Now I am thankful for my dear friend who shared the truth of God's Word with me in those early mommy days when I struggled to keep things together with my one little. Which became two littles. Then four littles. Then five littles, and six. More and more oxen, more and more manger cleaning.
Today as I worked at my mom's house, I realized the quiet there was almost deafening, so different from my never silent home. I thought about the giggles. I remembered the quarreling. I considered how my sweet children made me birthday cards with napkins and crayons, took peppermint candies and made a smiley face on a pecan pie to make it special for my birthday cake. I looked back at how welcoming the children had been to a little neighbor who comes down to play, even being willing to turn off a much anticipated movie to include and reach out to this child. It has taken awhile, but I am starting to see the abundance of the crop, fruit still maturing on the vine.
I smiled when I left my mom's house, fresh vacuum lines in the carpet, and returned to my home. The hallway needs sweeping, I narrowly escaped a Lego-induced puncture wound to the foot, closed my eyes to the three games laying scattered on the living room floor, and trying to ignore the baskets of clean and folded laundry already crumpled up by a child digging through to look for a set of pajamas. We have been abundantly blessed with a great number of oxen, and I am thankful for the encouragement of the Scriptures.
My manger will likely not be on the cover of Southern Living magazine anytime soon. I am trying to learn how to overlook the mess and love on the mess-maker. And, if you call and want to come over for a coffee, even on short notice, I will do my best to clean a spot for you on the couch. (This will be achieved by tossing my washed, yet unfolded, laundry onto my bed, or shoving all the things which have not been put away properly into an empty laundry basket and stashing it in my closet.) When you come over we can chat about keeping our mangers clean, if you want to, but I would prefer to encourage one another about how to better love our husbands and children. Will that be a Cinnamon Roll Latte or a Mocha?
