As a mother, wife of a law enforcement officer, woman, keeper of the home and professional bookkeeper, it seems every single job I do is undone before it is even finished. More bills come in the minute I've got them paid, the house is dirty again before I even finish cleaning, my husband comes home from a long shift only to get called right back out again, and before I finish the laundry there are two more loads that have accumulated in the meantime. It seems unending. I love the satisfaction of finishing a project, but in the many "lines of work" that I'm in, no project is ever finished! This has been a very difficult thing for me to deal with through the years. Oy! What is a girl to do? There are so many spiritual lessons in this dilemma, for me at least...the most prominent probably being contentment and finding peace in these baby steps.
In our "greek" way of thinking (meaning: stemming from the days of Greek domination of the known world and the philosophies of that day -- most of which have carried through into modern society), we tend to be very "goal oriented." We want to start something, see it through to completion, and then immediately reap the rewards and satisfaction of a job well done. However, this is not how our omnipotent God designed the world to work.
God created a very "cyclical" universe. For starters, we are concieved and born, we live and mature and then we die, returning to our state at the start. The seasons are cyclical as we see budding in the spring, growth and maturity in the summer which then slowly dies into wintertime. Then springtime brings new birth again. Our bodies (more evident in women than men, obviously) have montly cycles, and so does the moon. We have the weekly seven day cycle and we have the daily cycle of the sun rising and setting. I have to constantly re-embrace this concept when it comes to the seemingly mundane activites of daily life. Every cycle brings the excitement or anticipation of newness (or at least a goal to work toward), it brings lessons to learn in the "doing" and lastly these lessons learned will, hopefully, bring us to some further state of maturity, at which point it will start all over again!
A dear friend recently reminded me of a verse that I really needed to hear, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." Gal. 6:9. It is this very thing that is my struggle. I want to reap the harvest but I don't want to do all the work necessary to get there! Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just skip all the little stuff and go straight to the reward? But alas, the JOURNEY is what it's all about. Finding peace in the storm and renewal in the cycle.
Maybe the meaning of that unending mountain of laundry to do is that there is always another hill to climb, but like folding each garment makes our mountain just a little smaller (after all, how many clothes can 4 people wear, REALLY? LOL!), each lesson in life brings us that much closer to our ultimate reward. After all, who doesn't enjoy that wonderful, fresh smell when you first pull a clean shirt over your head? Hmmmm. I'll work on that one.
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