This is the conclusion of the Bloggy Cliffhanger I left you with last time. I know, you've been checking hourly to see if I'd finished the cabinet cleaning story yet or not. Sorry about the suspense. : )
As I said last time, Saturday when I was scrubbing 40 years worth of nasty grime off my kitchen cabinets, I was pondering the spiritual significance of what I was doing. That is what I do when my hands are working and my brain isn't. (Which, notably, constitutes a large part of my days.) I was cleaning off some gunk that I had thought would never come off... which is why I had never really tried. When we moved into the house there was SO much else to do (like cleaning up after the guy who had been living here before we bought it) (which is why, I now understand, people buy NEW houses!) I scratched a bit at the cabinets and surface cleaned them, but didn't really work hard at the grimy stuff because I thought it wasn't possible to remove it w/o removing the finish coming off in the process.
So anyway, in preparation for our party Sunday, Lowell had asked me to clean the cabinets and like usual, I got carried away and started really working on them and realized it WAS possible to get the stuff off without destroying the finish. I had just never tried hard enough before. So the spiritual significance here??? Well, I was wondering how many things there are in my life that I've never really thought could be changed, so I never bothered trying or letting God work on it.
Unfortunately, I didn't come up with any good answers, but I was getting annoyed at myself for THINKING so much about it!!! When my brain gets going like that, it's hard to stop it and sometimes it seems pointless. I honestly get TIRED of hearing myself think and b/c much of my thinking lately takes the form of how I would write a blog post about it, I start wondering about whether or not anybody else is getting tired of hearing me think as well. (But, thankfully, if you are... you can just stop. Just click the little red X up there in the corner. J)
But here's the thing I ultimately decided/realized as I kept cleaning. GOD MADE ME THIS WAY. "Normal" people don't see spiritual significance in stuff like grimy kitchen cabinets. But I do. In this I AM study I'm doing, she was talking about Moses and how he was put where he was at just the right time and I realized that one of the reasons God had me born in 1972 was so that when I was 35 and thinking thoughts like this, I could have a blog and write about them. And it's not (for me) about how it impacts you. Having a place like this where I can learn to think and formulate my thoughts and not be afraid of what people think and let my family know more of the real me has been a very significant thing for me.
And as a bonus, here are some of the spiritual conclusions I came to yesterday as I was cleaning the refrigerator. J
The fridge and cabinets can't clean themselves! In the same way, I am not capable of cleaning myself. God has to do it. Just like HE saved me by his grace, He is the One who will complete the work HE has started in me. Yes, I have a part to play in cooperating with Him, but I am changed by His grace, not by my effort.
Once one area is cleaned up I notice other areas that need cleaning up. All of a sudden, they look bad next to the clean areas, whereas before I had never even noticed them. When God is at work in me, I start noticing worry and pride (or whatever) in my heart I had never noticed before, even though it's been there a long time. I'm thankful I don't see all the work there is to be done--it would be overwhelming!--and that God is also not content to leave it, but is always working on me.
Just like the fridge gets new smudges on it and the bookshelves gather new dust, my heart's purity needs to be maintained. God's job is to clean me... My job is to cooperate. And there will always be new things to work on as long as I'm alive and God and I will just keep working on them. And I'll probably keep on blogging about them, too. J
Thanks for thinking with me.
You're not the only one who thinks about how something would make a good blog post. I find myself thinking that way all the time and usually I get the ideas in clusters. When that happens I'm stuck trying to answer questions like, "Do I write all those ideas in one big blog or do I try to break them into smaller pieces? And how many blogs are too many to do in one day? "
ReplyDeleteBTW - I like your new signature - How did you do that?