So far, we have discussed the need to read the Bible with our heads, hearts, and hands—but how about with our friends? For now, I’m not talking about evangelism (we’ll talk about that next time), but about community. Here’s the thing: even if we individually balance head, heart, and hands, we are not having the best experience possible. For us to fully exercise all three, we need community. No matter how smart you are, your head is not as sharp alone as it is with others. The Bible is too big for one person to grasp in its entirety; this is why academics who study the Bible have sub-disciplines and specialties. On your own, even if you are a very well-read individual, you are liable to come up with some inaccurate interpretations of the text based on your personal biases (we all have them) that the text doesn’t really support. When you study the Bible with living, breathing people, they have a way of drawing your attention to things that smooth out the rough edges of your thinking. They challenge you with a different perspective as they engage you in conversation. One of the best things I ever did for sharpening my approach to Bible study was to join the PUC Honors program, which at the time had a reputation for turning good Adventists into atheists. The entire philosophy of the program is that all questions are worth asking and that no subjects are too sacred to question. I figured that if I’m going to devote my life to teaching and sharing this religion, well, it’d better be strong enough to put up with that kind of pressure. While I wouldn’t recommend this course of action to everyone—there were some delicate moments that nearly broke me—processing my classmates’ questions alongside my own gave me a stronger (yet oddly humbled) faith in the Bible and greater confidence in the intellectual soundness of Adventism’s doctrines. No matter how wise you are, your heart is not as whole alone as it is with others. On one level, of course, I’m talking about the special companionship that comes from enjoying the Bible with someone else. We all need that relational connection. The Bible studies I do on Zoom with my church members right now really brighten my week. On another level, the Bible’s emotions run the entire range of human experience, and we need to spend more time with other humans to engage with more of the Bible’s emotions. Also, if the emotions in a passage are outside our experience, hearing how someone else connects to it can make it more real for us if we’re connected to them. On still another level, some of us have heavy emotional baggage with certain passages that can only be ironed out in community. Paul’s writings were a sore point for me for a long time. For as long as I could remember, I had heard Paul’s writings used as a hammer to tell me, as a young lady, what I shouldn’t do: shouldn’t wear jewelry, shouldn’t dress in certain ways, and certainly shouldn’t do what God told me to do and become a pastor. Meeting other women who had already dealt with the trauma caused by the misuse of these passages made a big difference for me. My intellectual issues with Paul were solved by study, but my emotional ones were healed by interacting with women who had found peace with their calling to ministry. Words cannot adequately describe my respect for the generation of female pastors, most of them now middle-aged or headed towards retirement, who took up ministry with far fewer living role models. No matter how righteous you are, your hands are not nearly as effective alone as they are with others. The Bible explicitly says, over and over, that we really need each other and that even the most powerful leaders need teams. My favorite parts of Paul’s writings (to balance my expression of frustration earlier in this post) are the ones where he describes the Body of Christ and how a grand variety of people are necessary to accomplish the work of ministry. Living the text of the Bible requires community, given that it contains such lofty commands as, “Go into all the world, baptizing and making disciples in My name.” On a sheer practical level, this is impossible for one person to do. If Jesus needed twelve core disciples and many, many others to accomplish His mission, how much more do we need others to continue this mission? Like most Americans, I struggle with our culture’s spirit of rugged individualism. When cross-bred with poorly-understood Christianity, this individualism creates a toxic martyr. A toxic martyr is someone who thinks they have to prove their Christianity by carrying the heaviest burdens and shouldering all the responsibility on their own. Along the way, they wear themselves out unnecessarily and deprive others of the joy of doing ministry. I’ll confess my own sin here: I do this. A lot. Sadly, I’m not the only one. This is a common issue in nearly every church’s most dedicated leaders and volunteers, and God never asked it of us. There is godliness, not weakness, in acknowledging that you can’t do everything and spreading the joy of ministry around. I’ve been very honest and open in this post for a reason: community is at its most helpful when people can be real with each other. A gallery of performance Christianity is not a real community; it's a show. The term “hypocrite” that Jesus uses so sharply in the Gospels literally means “actor.” When acting replaces honesty, it creates an arms race for the best performance that shames people out of seeing and dealing with their issues. Whether these issues are personal or relational, they cannot be dealt with properly if they are hidden under layers and layers of acting and avoidance. Honesty can be terrifying and must be used delicately, but it saves so much time in the long run--especially with new believers. Next time, we will explore this in more detail, but this week you can start practicing by making an effort to be more honest with yourself. In the process of practicing that honesty with myself, I have recognized that I desperately need a break for my own long-term good. For that reason, there will be no new posts here until at least June 12. Until then, I wish you the best!
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On Monday, we talked about how persistence is worth the trouble when it’s based on our values. The things that matter to us are worth the effort. The trouble is that many of us live our lives either unsure what our values are or constantly sacrificing our more important values for less important ones.
A while back, I crawled off of a long-haul international flight, into bed, and then right back out into a 6-hour meeting I was forced to attend for work that was meant to help me discover what my values were. Jetlagged, cagey, and crabby, I was not happy about being forced into 6 hours of serious introspection. In this workshop, we had to make timelines of the most significant events in our lives, reflect deeply on our “calling,” and answer small group questions to refine what really matters to us. In that moment, what actually mattered to me was sleep. Crabby and tired though I was, it was interesting to see that one unique value of mine emerged anyway—apparently, I really care about people who are grieving the death of someone close. Even if I’m half-awake and cursing the Wright brothers for inventing air travel, I still care about people who are going through the excruciating pain of losing someone they care about. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs states that you can only think about more refined concepts once you’ve satisfied your basic physical needs like food, water, sleep, and shelter. If something matters to you more than those things, it really matters to you. It’s a value. For most of us, there’s a bit of a gap between what we think we should value and what we really value. Our actual values are revealed by how we spend time, money, and mental energy. To get really meta about this, the fact that I crawled into the six-hour meeting in my beleaguered state shows that I value keeping my appointments more than I care about keeping my brain and body happy. I’m not saying this level of commitment is always a bad thing, but if I live my entire life making those kinds of choices, my body is in for a rough ride. Commitment isn’t a bad value, but I need to teach myself to care about my body, too. These days, quite a few people are taking advantage of the social distancing time to clarify what their values really are. With slightly fewer distractions around, there’s more space to think about what really matters to each of us in this life. So if you have not already done this, or are open to repeating the process, here are some questions to get you started: What are you passionate about? My senior pastor asks me this so often it’s nearly annoying, but it’s a good question. If absolutely nothing immediately pops into your mind, it could be a sign of burnout or depression. There’s little room for passion when you’re in survival mode, and you may need to tend to more basic needs before embarking on this particular quest if that’s where you are. What makes you angry? Anger is a fabulous indicator of values because we only get mad about stuff we care about. If you’re never angry, you don’t care about anything. Even God gets angry. Think back to the last time you were really angry about something. What about the situation angered you? That anger reveals your values, for better or for worse. What would you do if you didn’t need to work to survive? The connection between our paying work and physical survival can mask what matters to us because naturally, physical survival matters a lot. The values we have outside of physical survival become more apparent when we consider a world in which that is not so worrisome. I love the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof because it shows us what matters to Tevye—making a good life for his wife and cultivating a deeper relationship with God (as well as, of course, a few more shallow concerns like being well-respected in the community and having a higher status). If you could have everything that money could buy, what would still engage your interest without the high stakes of survival? What makes you anxious? Anxiety reveals two things: that you care what happens to something and that you’re not sure what will happen. No one gets anxious about complete certainties. If the anxiety is centered around something inevitable (like death or taxes), it’s not actually about the event itself but our own ability to deal with it. It’s normal, for example, to be anxious about death if you’ve actually had a brush with death in the form of mortal peril, losing a loved one, or receiving bad news from the doctor. If you worry about death a lot just because it’s out there and will get you sometime, look deeper. Why does it worry you? It could be people you care about, plans you have for the future, or even salvation anxiety. These things are more interesting to look at from the perspective of values than the universal fear of death. If you want to skip the self-interrogation, of course you can just write names of values on slips of paper and arrange them into a list by order of importance. Either way, this is a process of getting to know yourself in a way that the ordinary hustle and bustle of life doesn’t ordinarily allow. It’s worth doing, though, so that when life gets busy again you can make choices based on what actually matters to you, rather than what most easily hooks your attention. Your values will shift in order of importance, so if you haven’t done this in a while, check in with yourself again. Life is too short to waste. During this pandemic, I have been fascinated to watch how people deal with their various challenges. When life throws an obstacle at one’s plans, there are several ways to deal with it: give up, adapt, or plow on ahead. Not every situation calls for the same approach, but I admire those who, at the very least, persist in the spirit of their plans even when the plans themselves are no longer viable. One day I couldn’t get out of my townhouse complex because there was this fabulous parade of cars festooned with balloons, streamers, and signs saying, “Happy 6th Birthday!” In the driveway to my right, I saw the six-year-old in question looking at all of this with really big, astonished eyes as each car deposited a gift in front of him. His mother (I assume) was filming the whole thing on her phone, grinning ear to ear. They couldn’t give this kid a traditional birthday party, but they managed to persist in showing him love on his special day. Persistence is all about knowing what matters to you and fighting for it. There’s a group of pastors I work with who decided about ten years ago that young adults are worth fighting for. They began with little to no money to speak of and very little formal organization. At the time I joined their ranks, there were three different committees—One House, Pheron, and SYYA (Senior Youth/Young Adult)—with a number of overlapping members trying to figure out how to do ministry for young adults despite the chaotic lack of resources and structure. Eventually, those three committees consolidated into something called One House: Senior Youth/Young Adult and managed to secure a small office at the Southern California Conference headquarters in Glendale. This small office was our beachhead. We had no dedicated staff, but persisted despite the difficulties. Several years later, we successfully managed to petition to become a fully recognized department of the Conference. When the pandemic hit, One House was just gearing up to do its yearly massive gathering of young adults in the conference. The theme was chosen (Persist), the venue was secured (Los Angeles Adventist Academy), and the speaker was reserved (Sam Leonor). Posters were made. Like everyone else, we mourned these canceled plans when social distancing came into effect. But we did not give up. Our leader, Iki Taimi, poured his energy and creativity into reaching out to our young adults online. Despite our stress and shock over all of the changes in the world, we decided not to give up, but to hold an extended online gathering anyway and to maintain a weekly online presence as well. This gathering, which began on Sunday night and runs through this Sabbath, is all about persistence. The workshop topics include relationships, finances, ableism, digital evangelism, and even an inside perspective from a nurse working in a COVID-19 unit. It will all be rounded off with an artistic celebration of persistent faith on Friday night and a special service at noon on Sabbath. It may not be the same as the wonderfully life-affirming large gatherings we’ve grown so used to doing, but at least we are able to say that young adults matter to us and that we will fight for them. I don’t know what value you are tempted to give up on because of the strangeness of the times, but I would like to encourage you to persist. If something is important to you, it’s worth fighting for even if it’s difficult, different, or not as great as what you could have done under the usual circumstances. A course of persistent action based on values will go much farther than living in fear based on performance. A smart person reads the Bible with their head. A wise person reads the Bible with their heart. A righteous person reads the Bible with their hands. Just as the body grows fat on even the healthiest food without exercise, ingesting Scripture without acting on it is unhealthy. While there is nothing wrong with the esoteric pursuit of nailing down the finer details of what we call “apocalyptic prophecy” (Daniel and Revelation), far more real estate in the Bible is dedicated to what we call “classical prophecy,” which challenges the way we live and speaks on challenging matters like social justice and true worship. There are entire books of the Bible that have very little story in them, but have plenty to say about the way we live our lives. The Bible is a very practical book, not meant merely to satisfy academic curiosity or to entertain us emotionally but to change the way we deal with ourselves, God, and other people. When we hear the word “wisdom” these days, many tend to think of secret or even mystical kinds of knowledge, but in the Bible, wisdom is about very practical matters. The book of Proverbs is a great example. These wonderful little gems cover everything from why getting drunk is a bad idea to why being fair to the poor matters. Somewhere in between, it has a good deal to say about having a good work ethic, choosing a spouse whose company you actually enjoy, staying away from adultery, and not co-signing loans, among other topics. These are not deep, mystical matters of highbrow philosophy, but the everyday stuff of life. (Conveniently, Proverbs contains 31 chapters that make it easy to read on a monthly cycle. If you’ve never read this fabulous book, it’s pretty easy to take on at a pace of one chapter a day.) One of the challenges of living much of the advice contained in the Bible is the historical distance between us and its original audience. Advice about allowing widows to glean in fields and regulations about how to go about marrying a captive bride ring strange to our ears now that most of us don’t work in fields and certainly don’t carry off captives in war. For such archaic things, it’s important to take the time to consider what the principle behind the advice was. In the case of allowing widows to glean, the principle is mercy towards those unable to provide for themselves without compromising their dignity. The regulations about captive brides were an important protection against violating, hurting, and humiliating conquered peoples. Another challenge in translating the Bible into action is how to treat the stories. All too often, people copy the actions of people in the stories of the Bible without carefully considering those stories in context. The rich complexity of these stories in portraying blessed but broken people should make one careful about which characters they copy and how. Context matters, and frequently these stories are more about what God manages to do despite the people’s sin than they are about the praiseworthiness of the people themselves. Some of the ancient advice contained in the Bible is easy enough to translate to today, but extremely hard to practice. When Jesus talks about the issue of lust, He doesn’t mess around: fantasizing about a beautiful member of the opposite sex is adultery. The Bible contains incredibly high standards that are impossible for an ordinary human being to meet. Even Moses, who God entrusted with the original Ten Commandments, had murder and disobedience in his track record. A full realization of the high standards of the Bible is meant to do several things. First of all, and most obviously, it is meant to inspire you to live better. Even though no one but Jesus could ever successfully follow the spirit of every piece of ethical wisdom in the Bible, every step in the right direction matters. Advice given in the Bible isn’t idle bluster, but truly practical stuff meant to make things better. Secondly, a full realization of the impossibly high standards of the Bible is meant to drive you to the foot of the cross. If we were capable of doing everything the Bible says to do, we wouldn’t actually need Jesus as our Savior. Examining our own hearts in comparison to the Bible’s high standards really should drive us to the conversion experience that comes from recognizing the enormity of our own sin and how badly we really do need God’s help. If you spend long enough with the text, you will realize just how selfish and deceitful your own heart really is, how badly you need the Holy Spirit to work on it, and how desperately you need Jesus’s sacrifice to save it. Finally, going through this whole exercise should give you a sense of genuine humility. When you have seen the enormity of your own sin, you do not judge it so harshly in others. You see more of it everywhere because you are now aware of just how many varieties of sin there are, but you do not use that knowledge as a weapon against others because you stand accused in the same way. Your sin is no less sinful for being less obvious and visible than someone else’s. As we experience the Bible with our heads, hearts, and hands, we will discover our personal limitations and our need for community. Two minds, two hearts, and two pairs of hands are better than one. Next week we’ll address why. It feels like we’ve had a very long journey talking about cleaning here, and I’m eager to move on to other topics. Before I do, it seems worth a post to discuss the fact that no matter how motivated we are to do our cleaning, actually doing it can be a very miserable and unpleasant experience. No amount of love for my cats will ever get me to enjoy scrubbing their wet hairballs out of the carpet, and I know my parents made a real sacrifice when my brother threw up all over my side of the room and they had to somehow pick that nastiness out of Barbie shoes.
Some messes are simply gross, and even routine cleaning tasks can feel monotonous or physically strenuous. When we move from simple cleaning into sorting and organizing as well, the strain can also be psychological. Sifting through items in storage can bring up all kinds of memories you don’t know what to do with and can uncover items you’re out of energy to sort. (Truly, wherever possible I would recommend leaving storage alone and focus on the actual cleaning. Save that nonsense for a less stressful time.) A certain amount of unpleasantness may be inevitable while cleaning, but it doesn’t have to be unbearably miserable. Here are some strategies to help make the unbearable bearable. For starters, pace yourself physically. We all have physical limitations. Even at the youthful, vigorous age of 17, I was sore every day for the first week or two of my job doing kitchen and housekeeping work at Camp Wawona. Even deep into the second summer in the best shape of my life, my body would wear out as I neared my day off. I was grateful for the “split shift” arrangement that allowed my body a few hours off to recover between 4-hour blocks of kitchen work. Be kind to your body. Try to avoid cleaning marathons. As important as cleaning is for beating the coronavirus transmission via surfaces, it is even more important that your immune system be strong enough to fight it if you happen to catch the virus another way. Keep your efforts moderate; if something in your body starts to hurt, find a good place to leave off your task and come back to it later. Sleep and good nutrition are probably more important in this war against COVID-19 than cleaning, important as cleaning is. Respect your immune system’s needs. To help you get through your most unpleasant cleaning tasks emotionally, pair them with something you enjoy. For many people, this involves good music. I’ll never forget my brother cheerfully singing along to whatever he was playing on his Discman while cleaning the bathroom. If you are cleaning with other people, a pleasant conversation can make it more enjoyable for everyone. When my husband and I hand-wash dishes together (will the repairman ever get the part to repair our dishwasher???), I enjoy the conversation that can otherwise be hard to make time for in the hustle and bustle of everything else. When I’m cleaning alone, I enjoy a good audiobook and I sweeten the deal with a cup of tea I sip from as I hit intermediate landmarks. In fact, I use sips of tea as a small reward/motivator for a lot of tasks, like reading long books. It has several purposes: it keeps my body hydrated, helps me out with energy (if it’s caffeinated; it isn’t always), rewards me for completing smaller chunks of work, and helps me to associate hard work with something pleasurable. You may sub the tea out for juice, coffee, or a healthy snack, but the principle remains the same—you reward yourself both physically and emotionally for the effort you’re expending. A more esoteric art I’ve used to survive long cleaning shifts is mindfulness. Not to be confused with Eastern forms of meditation that are occasionally lumped into this category, mindfulness is the art of being present with what you’re doing. You immerse yourself in the physical sensations and rhythm of what you’re doing. This is less about conscious thinking and more about feeling. Let’s say you’re doing dishes by hand. Mindful dishwashing would involve you noticing the warmth of the water, feeling the effort your hands are putting into the scrubbing, noticing the glints of light reflected off the droplets of water on the glasses in the drying rack, and smelling the faint aroma of dish soap. In this way, you can achieve the same sort of flow while cleaning that an artist does while inspired. If your mind is totally present with what you’re doing in the moment, it’s not wandering off into the dozens of areas that cause you stress and anxiety. I spent a good 6 hours on household chores this last Sunday (laundry, dishes, and large-batch cooking). All of it went surprisingly quickly because I was so absorbed in these tasks (and the audiobook I was listening to while doing them) that the time just flew by. Learning to cope with these things is practice for the larger stuff of life. The skills you build to make routine chores bearable ultimately help you build the stamina to make the rest of your life more bearable too. If you can find pleasure despite the grinding monotony of recurring chores, you can find it despite a several-month stay-at-home order. In both cases, the effort is worth it; you cannot afford to miss the scraps of joy you can make for yourself while waiting for circumstances to catch up. Treasure whatever small happiness you can find wherever you can find it. In my four years of college, I went through nine roommates. Some of this was by design—spending a year abroad automatically ups the roommate body count a bit—but the majority of the changes were because of my loyalty to a lovely old historic dorm almost everyone else was eager to leave. I learned a lot about sharing spaces with different kinds of people this way, and two of my nine roommates stand out in regards to cleaning.
My first roommate was from my high school and I was eager to get along with her. When she started cleaning my desk while I was working at it, I was a little too shocked and eager to keep her around to tell her I did not appreciate such meddling. One evening, I was already signed into an event when I received a message from her telling me she was rearranging our furniture. I signed out and met back up with her to make sure that I could still find my things afterward, and never told her how rude it is to do something that major without warning. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the roommate I received when I got back from Spain was very messy. This part didn’t bother me so much as long as she left a walkway for me to get to my side of the room, but she left raw, leaking meat in my shiny new refrigerator without asking. I wiped my fridge down and sent it home without ever discussing the matter with her. I was constantly frustrated by the food trash she would leave lying around, by the lurid details of her dating life she would relate over the phone, and by her leaving the notification sounds for her social media on all night so that it would beep at random intervals. I was miserable, but I never said anything because we had the biggest, nicest room in the entire dorm with the best views of campus. If I applied for a new roommate, I would lose my prize real estate. In both cases, there may have been dysfunction coming from my roommates, but there was also dysfunction coming from me. People who share a space need to discuss how to treat the space. When issues arise, they need to discuss these things calmly, like adults, instead of either simmering in silent resentment or passive-aggressively trying to force their standards onto others. Any pair or group of people who share a space need to communicate their likes and dislikes, lay down at least a few basic rules, and clarify responsibilities. Everyone arrives in a new living space with certain expectations about how that space should look, how it should be cared for, and who should do the caring. If each person blindly acts on this baggage without ever talking about it, resentments can bubble, fights sometimes happen, semi-parasitic situations occasionally emerge, and general chaos ensues. For example, even if one spouse is working and the other isn’t, it is not reasonable to assume that the non-working spouse will do absolutely everything around the house. In the mid-century arrangement that gave us the stereotypical housewife, men were still expected to mow the lawn and wash the car every once in a while. At the beginning of our marriage when I was in graduate school but my husband was still job-seeking, I still took care of our laundry because my clothing requires more precise care than most of his things. There is no one, perfect, divinely decreed way to divide up labor in a household. Because everyone shares the house, it is important to have a household meeting every once in a while, formal or informal, to discuss what level of cleanliness is expected and who will take care of doing it. This needs to be re-evaluated from time to time because things change. People learn more skills to help out (especially in the case of children), preferences or abilities to do different tasks change over time, and time commitments outside the home shift around a good deal. These outside time commitments need to be a part of the conversation so that the household can come to a fair division of labor. In the case of children, for a variety of reasons it is important to include them in these discussions as early as they are able to understand them. First of all, if they are not yet actively involved in the upkeep of the house, they need to understand the work that goes into it so that they do not take it for granted. Secondly, it is unfair to assign a child a chore without explaining how to do it properly first or without throwing at least a little praise their way from time to time to keep them motivated. If all your child hears about their efforts to contribute to the household cleaning effort is criticism, they will lose the motivation to keep trying. Also, you want to make sure you teach your child enough survival skills to make it on their own once they leave home, and deliberate discussions about these matters can remind you where they are developmentally for acquiring these skills. Finally, this is a chance for your child to talk about all of those external time commitments and pressures they’re dealing with that not only factor into the cleaning discussion, but also into your staying aware of their emotional health as their parent. If you habitually listen carefully to your child as they discuss their schedule and academic commitments, you can go a long way towards earning their trust and keeping the lines of communication open during the most delicate stages of the parent-child relationship. For all parties, private space and personal boundaries need to be respected. Common areas rightly need to be subjects of discussion with rules of engagement, but those things that only pertain to one person need to belong to that person. I do not meddle with my husband’s desk, for example—I consider it his space and do not touch it without his permission. Growing up, I always appreciated that although my parents would roll their eyes and make jokes about the messes in my room, they didn’t get in there and move stuff around. It would reach a certain level of messiness and then I’d clean it, starting the cycle over again. If they had interfered, it would have either bred resentment or taught me that I don’t need to take ownership of my own space. Cleaning together as a household can either be coercive drudgery or a positive, bonding experience depending on how it’s approached. Respecting free will, talking about expectations, and discussing task assignments are all key to making it more positive. The relational climate in your house is every bit as important as the level of cleanliness, if not more so. If you can keep the relational climate positive, you might find it easier to do even your least favorite household tasks. Last Wednesday, I mentioned Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts in passing. I discovered it a few years ago in one of those random research threads that I occasionally follow and purchased my own copy when I realized that I had found the most definitive housekeeping manual on the planet. This brick is 906 pages long—and I read the entire thing.
Most people shouldn’t read it all the way through. Some chapters legitimately lost me, like the one that explains the chemistry behind why some homemade cleaners work and others don’t. The greatest gift of having read the entire book wasn’t the information that I promptly forgot, but the underlying philosophy it adopts towards housekeeping: Housekeeping is about living well. A big part of why good cleaning habits can be hard to build is because we tend to see it as an externally imposed duty. What I loved about Home Comforts was its focus on cleaning not because others say you should or because you have a “standard” to meet, but because you want to enjoy your home. You want to live well, and living well doesn’t just happen by accident. There are two ways to build cleaning habits: routines and schedules. Both are intentional and can be adapted to changing circumstances. As a person with an irregular schedule, I find routines to be very powerful for the things that need to be done most often. For example, every day but Sabbath I have a routine where I feed the cats, refresh their water, do their boxes, and sweep the hard floors—in that order. Because it’s tied to something I can’t forget to do without loud, shrieky reminders (feed the cats), I stay pretty well on top of it. Before I tied these other tasks to feeding the cats, I had a really hard time reminding myself to do the cat boxes, and lacked the willpower to do it if I went too long without doing them. Sweeping made sense to add to that routine because the floor that needs it most often has a cat box on it. To be honest, I cheat a little to help myself out by using a handy little app called Habitica for accountability. It’s a game in which your character levels up and defeats monsters when you do your good habits and get stuff done but takes damage if you don’t. (You can rest your character if you’re sick or traveling, of course.) I find this helpfully motivational when I’m starting a new habit, but once I’ve been doing the routine for a while, I don’t need the external help anymore. Tying cleaning tasks to things that happen regularly is a powerful way to remind yourself to do them. Traditionally, Adventists (and long before us, Jews) clean house on Friday afternoon to be ready for Sabbath. Some seasons of the year, this is unrealistic because you will not get home from work before sundown, even though you got off of work beforehand. In my case, Friday can be crazy if circumstances keep me from preparing properly for my Sabbath work earlier in the week. Now that most of us are working from home and it’s summer anyway, this is a little easier to do. I would not recommend placing all the week’s cleaning on Friday afternoon, though: you’re tired from the week and you want to enjoy the Sabbath. Do just enough on Friday to be able to enjoy Sabbath when it comes. For me, this tends to mean at least zeroing out the dishes, and I really ought to be cleaning one of the bathrooms while my husband is vacuuming, rather than cowering in a quieter part of the house like a twitchy cat. As a pastor I see homes in a variety of states of cleanliness (or lack thereof), and the home that impressed me most was a family of two working parents with two young children whose place looked nearly spotless. I was astonished, and took a risk to ask about it. One of the little ones cheerfully told me, “Oh, we clean it every Sunday!” I like that. On Sunday, you’ve had a day of rest (unless you’re an essential weekend worker) and you’re not in quite as much of a hurry as you would be on Friday afternoon. Ever since college, I’ve been doing my laundry on Sundays or, in the case of the odd busy Sunday, as early in the week as possible. That way, I don’t have to worry about finding clothes the rest of the week. This is also a great day for making large batches of cooking to eat off of during the busier parts of the week. For tasks that don’t need to be done every day or every week, scheduling is useful. My editor mentioned to me her parents’ strategy for regular deep cleaning that I think is kind of genius. Once a month, they schedule a day to deep clean a room together and rotate through the different rooms of the house over the course of the year. I love this for a variety of reasons, but the one thing worth mentioning first is that if you keep walking past a mess you don’t have time to deal with (like the boxes in the garage or the pile of bills on the kitchen table), you’ll constantly have this burden of guilt nagging at you. If you schedule a time to deal with it when you know you will have time to do it properly, you don’t have to feel guilty as life keeps you too busy to deal with it in the moment. The other reason I love this strategy is because it involves communicating with the other people who use the space. When you live with others, whether it’s a simple room mate arrangement or a large three-generation household, cleaning is a relational thing. In our next post, we will discuss that piece of the puzzle. Before you drag others into it, though, you need to make up your mind that cleaning is worth doing to enjoy life on your terms, not just because of those other people you live with. This is not about drudgery to appease them, but about creating a space that you personally like to inhabit. This is about living well. When God designed the human brain, He gave it two hemispheres: a right and a left. The left side of the brain deals with logic and reason, as well as a number of other intellectual functions. The right side of the brain deals with feelings, spatial reasoning, and creativity. When my mother used to teach art, she would have her students draw a picture with their non-dominant hand. While the motor skills weren’t as good, the picture always turned out surprisingly well because it allowed the students to tap into the right side of the brain.
When reading the Bible, there are two extremes that are easy to fall into: passionlessly researching its contents solely out of academic curiosity or reading only for an emotional experience. Neither extreme is good; God deliberately gave us both halves of the brain because we need both. Most of us have a dominant side of the brain in which we feel more comfortable, but we all have a part of the brain dedicated to switching between the two. In women it tends to be larger than in men, but everyone can do it. When reading the Bible, everyone should. In general, the Adventist approach to the Bible tends to engage more of the left brain, even when people with a right-brain dominance are listening to or even leading the study. The beautiful part of this is that Adventist doctrine is very detailed, carefully researched, and internally consistent. However, the Bible was not written just to tickle the intellect. A brain can accomplish nothing without a heart and hands. Of course, a heart without a head is even more dangerous. With these matters in mind, once you start looking for emotions in the Bible, you’ll be amazed by how much is really in there. The Bible is a surprisingly raw book. The low-hanging fruit is to look at the emotions that the text actually mentions. The Psalms are full of vivid descriptions of very strong emotions, and many of the stories discuss them as well. Because the Bible is written very compactly, wherever it explicitly describes emotions, they’re likely to be the extreme forms of those emotions. Because emotions are learned experientially, it’s also worthwhile to put yourself into the shoes of either the characters in the story or the writer (in the case of poetry and letters). When have you gone through something similar to this person? How did that experience make you feel? If you’re not very in touch with your own emotions, sometimes it’s helpful to think of this with physical descriptions. The Bible uses them all over the place. “Were not our hearts burning within us?” the disciples on the road to Emmaus ask at the end of Luke. When have you felt that way? Have you felt that way? The tricky part of the experiential approach, of course, is that it’s limited by your experience. There are parts of the Bible I wasn’t able to grasp more than intellectually until I had lived a little more life. There are still parts of it that I’m sure I’ll connect with more later on in life. One of the tricky things about teaching the Bible to children and youth is this experience disparity. The exercise of doing that can be useful, though, because when you try to explain the Bible’s emotions to children, you are forced to dig deeper into the more simple, primal emotional experiences that are less idiosyncratic to your own life. For example, a child doesn’t really understand the complex emotions surrounding struggles with infertility, which play into a surprisingly large number of Bible stories. However, they do understand waiting for something they want but not knowing if and when they’ll get it. They spend much of their time at the mercy of adults whose world and decisions they do not yet understand. If you can remember how that felt, you can connect emotionally with most of the struggles the Bible characters have in understanding and trusting God’s ways. Another way of teasing out the emotions in the text is to ask, “If I were put into this situation, how would I feel?” This question is a little different from the experiential approach because it acknowledges that many of the stories in the Bible are there because they’re so incredibly unusual and outside ordinary experience. Otherwise, they wouldn’t warrant the attention they get in such a (relatively) slim volume. It’s helpful to acknowledge that weirdness and to let yourself imagine how it would feel to be there as part of that story. There are two great benefits to engaging with the text emotionally. First, you remember the text better. Memory is tied closely to emotions, and taking the time to feel the text actually helps you remember it better. Second, you look at the text more closely. The process of looking for the emotions in the text causes you to ask new questions and examine the text in even more detail. The process of doing this will slowly change you. Your way of thinking will transform. Naturally, you will start to change the way you make decisions and live your life; if you don’t, even this level of engagement is nothing but spiritual entertainment. Next week, we will talk about how to read the Bible for the transformation and practical wisdom that is necessary for spiritual growth. There are ways to clean anything and everything. You could easily spend your entire life eating, sleeping, and cleaning with nothing else to break it up. Because of this, it’s important to set priorities in cleaning so that you do not get overwhelmed and quit before you even start.
Because we are in a pandemic, the priority areas for sanitation inside the house are those that come into contact with contamination from outside the house. While doorknobs and steering wheels are an important part of this conversation, so are kitchens, laundry, and floors. Also, the more vigilant you are about washing your hands every time you enter your domicile from the outdoors, the less you have to worry about spreading contagions indoors. Discussions of cleaning these areas frequently refer to wiping things down. While it’s not as bad as it was at the beginning, some people may still be having a hard time finding cleaning supplies. While not every cleaning product can be replaced with it, I have a very easy-to-make all-purpose cleaning solution that works well for most surfaces. It’s just one part lemon juice with two parts white vinegar. It smells bad, but it works. While paper towels might be in short supply, old clothes can be made into rags that can be washed and reused. Many women don’t think twice about setting the same purse on a public bathroom floor and then setting it down on their kitchen counter, but if you think about it, this is really gross. For the same reason, you ought to think twice these days before setting bags of groceries directly onto your kitchen counter. While you probably don’t have the patience to wipe down every single item (I sure don’t), at the very least wipe down your counter after unloading the groceries. Moving from the kitchen to the laundry, any item of clothing that goes outside needs to be washed regularly. If you re-wear items from day to day, try not to mix your “inside” items for re-wearing with the ones that have been outside. The most important piece in this equation is your cloth mask. There are a number of good reasons to wash the thing regularly. Even if you were only wearing it as a fashion statement, the moisture it collects from being on your orifices for an extended time could be a breeding ground for bacteria if not properly washed or dried out. More importantly, if your mask nobly takes coronavirus for you, you nullify its effects by touching the outside of the mask casually and going about your day without washing first. The virus can live in shoes, which are hard to clean. For this reason, it’s a good idea to adopt the practice of not wearing shoes indoors and having a designated place for your shoes to be when you are not wearing them. I have a shoe tree close to the garage that serves this purpose, but even a designated pile (anywhere) is an improvement over randomly casting off pairs of shoes in random areas of the house. If you are from a culture that considers going barefoot indecent, consider separating your “indoor” shoes from your “outdoor” shoes. Along a similar vein, it’s important to keep your floors relatively clean. I sweep my hard floors every day, and my husband vacuums the carpeted floors each Friday. When I worked in food service, we swept the kitchen floor after each meal, the dining hall floor at the end of each day, and mopped both once or twice a week. In an industrial kitchen this matters because of how high-traffic this all is—these procedures are necessary to get and keep an “A” grade. Your home floors may not need that level of attention, but they certainly need some. In general, the key question to ask yourself is, “Did this item touch something that has been outside recently?” If so, it’s a good idea to at least think about cleaning it. Throwing the mail on the kitchen counter is a bad idea. I would not recommend microwaving it, as some are in the habit of doing (the plastic in some stationary would give you worse problems), but I would recommend having a specifically designated place for it while it awaits processing. My mail man and I talk from time to time, and his wife actually lets their mail sit for three days before opening it as an extra precaution. Not a bad idea, but I don’t have the patience. If you are already doing all of this and want to learn how to do more, great! Purchase Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson for legitimately high-level, scientifically-based wisdom on housekeeping and knock yourself out. If, on the other hand, what I’ve said here is overwhelming enough because your kitchen is full of dishes, your floor is covered in stuff, you have piles of mail all over the place, and you’re barely clinging to your sanity as you watch it all rise up around you, do not despair. Even the smallest actions add up over time. Building new habits takes a while, but it’s well worth it in the end. Soon, we’ll be discussing how to take those small steps. As most of you may know, my husband became very sick shortly after I wrote the original draft of this post. Suddenly I had to practice all of this with far greater urgency and care than I had been doing before. If I had cultivated better habits beforehand, it would have been less of a workload once it became an emergency. Because I am playing catch-up with these things, there may be some delay before I get back to this train of thought. When I do, though, I will have plenty to say about it. Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support. In a meeting last Wednesday, one of my bosses was reading topics that are trending and I was very pleased to discover that this blog has covered most of them, with one notable exception: cleaning. I think I know why this is. Anyone who knows me well knows that cleaning is not my strongest suit. It’s not that I don’t know how—I worked housekeeping at a summer camp in college. It’s not even that I don’t recognize the psychological value of a clean home. It’s just hard for me to make it a priority, and there’s a lot of all-or-nothing baggage in my psyche. Once I start cleaning one thing, I suddenly see the rest of the filth/messiness around me and succumb to the hopeless despair of my effort making a difference at all. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with this issue. After all, caring for home and hearth used to be a full-time occupation for most women. Those of us born after the era of full-time homemakers sometimes feel shame from being unable to meet the same level of sparkling awesomeness while working full-time that the previous generations were able to maintain. My first paid job was to wash windows every week for a woman who worked full time as an obstetric nurse but held herself to these old standards. Meanwhile, I’m not sure I’ve ever washed the windows in my current domicile. Last week we talked about the social mirror as it relates to finances, but it applies to the area of cleaning as well. If you feel smug when you walk into a house messier or dirtier than yours, shame on you. These days, the old standards and the aesthetics of cleaning matter far, far less than the sanitary benefits. In the area of cleaning, the social mirror does little good: it can give you a false sense of security, it can lock you into an unholy cleaning arms race of diminishing returns, or it can make you want to give up because you know you can’t keep up. Forget that! You don’t need all that drama. The famous chef Anthony Bourdain remarked in his book, Kitchen Confidential, that he would not eat in a restaurant with a dirty bathroom. Why? Bathrooms are easier to clean than kitchens, so if the bathroom looks sketchy, the food can’t be trusted, either. This is not about the way things look, but about safety. Clean is not the same thing as neat, and they are often confused. A Pathfinder tent is certainly neat right before inspection, but you better bet it isn’t clean, especially if it’s been a longer campout. Meanwhile, my office at church isn’t very neat (my poor custodian gets very frustrated at my thinking in piles), but it is extremely clean (because of that custodian’s efforts). The two issues can be related—my husband has to move my piles to vacuum—but they are not the same thing. You do not have to have your storage spaces sorted and labeled to have a clean house. As we discuss cleaning this week, we will not bog ourselves down too much with the more Marie Condo territory of sorting through stuff and throwing things out. We’re going to talk about cleaning for sanitation. We’re going to talk about cleaning to beat the virus. This will be a challenge for me, because I know my own house is not without sin. This does not disqualify me entirely, though: if you struggle with cleaning, would you rather listen to someone who naturally enjoys it as a hobby or to someone who, like you, has actually had to struggle a bit to get with the program? When cleaning for sanitation instead of for appearances, every little bit is an improvement. You may not reach the high standards of a previous generation, but you will have the peace of mind of knowing that you are reducing your household’s risk of illness. It matters less that you attain perfection than that you start somewhere and keep at it consistently. Where do you start? We will discuss that tomorrow. |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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