Some of us are not gifted in the art of sparkling baseboards. Some of us are way better at juggling babies on our hips than laundry baskets. Some of us are better at delegating to people under our care. Some of us are shrewd business women. Some of us are absentminded writers (ahem). Some of us have a thousand crafts for our kids. Some of us fix gourmet meals for our husbands. All of us are uniquely crafted by God, not for lives of shameful cookie cutter goals, but for lives lived in full-hearted service to God and those around us.

My mom is in town this week, which hopefully explains the silence of this blog. She lives in Zambia, and I see her about twice a year, so I try to soak up the time while she’s here. She’s been tagging along with me to work (she watched me teach a 3-hour humanities class), to run errands (she watched me do my happy “under budget grocery trip” dance), and tending my little apartment.

She’s also been cleaning. A lot. Because she is the most organized person I know, and I’m the least organized person she knows. Yesterday, she took a look at my bookshelves — piled to the brim with the disheveled reading material -and shook her head. “These need to be organized.”

ANYONE CAN

Right before I got married, my mom pulled my husband aside and told him, “Remember, you can hire somebody to keep your house clean, but you can’t hire someone with her mind or her heart.”

She said this knowing that my bedroom hadn’t had a deep clean since early 2001.

If you’ve met my mom — with her nine kids and her sparkling clean house and her organizational structures on point and her days bustling with the endless chime of activity — you know that those words did not come lightly, nor were they meant to devalue the high calling of keeping your home. But they were full a Gospel-driven freeness that I think about so often.

Some days, the house is a wreck. Some days you’ll order takeout for the thousandth time in a row. Sometimes, that to-do list will fall by the wayside and you’ll swear the cast of Clean House is going to show up on your front doorstep every time the doorbell rings.

I would welcome the cast with glowing praise.

THE LAW OF THE TIDY HOME

I’ve often been guilty of making my housework a law I must live by. If I’m honest, shame has driven my desire for organization more than anything else. I’m “supposed” to have a pristine home with sparkling floors, an always-made bed, and organized bookshelves. Because THAT is what womanhood is.

But I’m coming out of the shame haze. My identity is shaped by Christ, not by the state of my kitchen sink.

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