Dirty Little Secret

I've been avoiding writing this post for a while. I have a whole backlog of other things I want to write on, but for some reason, I felt like God was keeping me from writing them...until I wrote this one.

*sigh* This will not be my favorite.

I have a confession to make - a nasty awful, sincerely gross confession:

I hate to clean bathrooms.

Blech. I don't like to clean my own dirt. Add someone else's dirt (or multiple people's) on top of that, and let me tell you...it makes me cringe.

I don't mean this is something I just don't like doing. It's almost a phobia. I dread it deep within my soul. Do you hear me? Dread.

Or at least I used to.

It was my dirty little secret. Well, probably not so secret if you ever dropped by my house unexpectedly and saw my heart drop through the floor and my eyes widen to anime proportions.

I was ashamed...but apparently not enough to fix the problem. I just swept it under the proverbial rug.

I would clean or straighten ever other area of the house, but that one area...I just couldn't seem to get around to it. Or I would make excuses about it. 

I told myself over and over and over that it would be done the next day...but guess what...didn't happen.

And you know what? It got GROSS. The kids' bathroom is the one most people use when they come over, and I would try to make sure they kept that somewhat straight and clean, but I had a hard time with that, too. It felt so hypocritical to enforce strict bathroom cleaning rules on them when my own was a wreck. 

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,

while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.

Proverbs 13:4

I was totally being a sluggard.

And then...God started to work on my heart. I wish I could tell you exactly when the revelation hit me or when I had my breakthrough moment, but I just can't. Slowly, bit by bit, God convicted my heart until I understood very clearly what He was trying to say to me.

"Alissa, sweet girl, you keep telling me to let you go and do big things for Me. You keep begging to let you loose to speak truth for my kingdom, and I want to let you do it! But how can I set you free to do the big things when you're not being obedient in the little things? It's time, Alissa. Obey me in this, and then we'll work from there."

Here that? That's God speaking conviction to my soul...not shame, but conviction that leads to repentance. However, I wish I could say that it led to repentance sooner.

I still lollygagged a bit.

I printed out a cleaning schedule from Clean Mama, and she has bathroom cleaning first thing on Mondays. I put the cleaning schedule on the fridge, and it sat there for about a week. 

Then my dad popped by for a surprise visit on Memorial Day weekend. 

It was a fantastic surprise, and I was so happy to see him. As always, he was super helpful in and around the house. He chose not to go with us to dinner on Sunday evening over at Josiah's parents and surprised us by mowing and weed eating the yard instead, which was a HUGE blessing because Josiah's been working so hard elsewhere that he hasn't had time to get to it (and even pregnant I wouldn't mind mowing, but I have a hard time getting the darn thing started). 

On Monday, he decided to replace the kitchen faucet for us (that we'd already bought, but didn't really know how to put in), and to replace the shower head in the kids' bathroom because they had NO water pressure in there. But because of that, before we went to Lowe's, he wanted to shower in my bathroom.

NOOOOOOOO!!!

I, of course, said that was fine, but I needed to clean it first. He just laughed a little and shook his head and said, "Nevermind. I'll take one in the other bathroom."

"No, no, no!" I said. "Today is Monday, and we're supposed to clean bathrooms on Mondays!"

He laughed at me and called me a liar, at which point I pulled the calendar off the fridge and said, "Nuh-uh! See? I've been meaning to start instituting this cleaning schedule and it says I clean bathrooms on Mondays! I'll be done in just a bit."

So that's what I did. It was Monday, and I cleaned the bathroom...and I felt fantastic. It was like cleansing out my soul...but let me tell ya, that was a nasty soul cleansing.

Since then, I've cleaned my bathroom without fail, almost obsessively. I'm so proud of it. The rest of the house might get messy with the kids all over the place, but my bathroom is clean, and it feels so good.

I almost look forward to it.

Obviously, that's not because I look forward to the task itself...because it's still nasty. But I look very forward to the peace and calm that comes with knowing you're I'm being obedient to God...even in the little things.

"And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.'" Matthew 25:20-21 (emphasis added)

This has served as a great lesson, for both me AND the kids. Self-discipline isn't about doing things that are easy or that come naturally to us. Self-discipline means teaching yourself to do things we don't want to do or feel we're not naturally inclined toward.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant,

but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness

to those who have been trained by it. 

Hebrews 12:11

It's not easy folks. If it was easy, we wouldn't need Jesus...but we do. Oh we do. We can do all things through him.

So there's my dirty confession...and I didn't want to write it. I feed off of approval from other people (not a good thing), and I just knew this would shame me. I could hear my friends whispering to one another (or even just to themselves, "EW...Alissa's dirty" or "Good moms just don't do that."

I felt ashamed my by confession, even though my heart AND my bathroom are now clean. 

But guess what?

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,

who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Romans 8:8

That's right, Paul!! Preach it brother!

See, there's a larger lesson to be learned here. We all have our secret, dirty places. Maybe yours is a room in your house or maybe it's a corner of your heart. Let's face it, we all probably have more than one. 

Today, I would ask you to consider where your dirty little secrets lie. Where is God trying to clean up your act, but you're resisting, making excuses, and being hard-hearted? 

Give that over to God. Let Him help you clean out the grime, so you can be renewed by His presence and "yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness."

I promise, you won't regret it.