Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

Living in the Mess
By Sheryl Bane

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I'm a little bit of a liar.

Every time someone comes to our door unexpectedly I start making excuses and embarrassed, I try to make a joke about the state of our house. "Please excuse the living room, it's a war zone." Or I'll say, "the kitchen is not USUALLY this messy, everything just seemed to land here and I haven't gotten to it yet." But the truth is, my house is ALWAYS this messy. Even if someone comes over at an appointed time I will clean as much and as best I can but it usually ends with me guessing what rooms of the house the guests won't go in and leaving those for last (for instance, the upstairs bathroom and my bathroom and bedroom will not get cleaned but the doors will get closed as if to say, "Do not enter").

It eats me up to imagine what people might think of me when they walk in our home and see the mess.

Even now I'm tempted to tell you that it's not as bad as I make it out to be but that would be a lie because it's much worse. Sometimes I even tell people of when we lived in FL and how our house was so clean all the time. You could have come to our door day or night unannounced and eaten off of our floors it was that clean. I would have left out the part that our two older boys were in school at the time and we had a cleaning lady and I was pregnant with my fourth baby and nesting so badly that nothing would do me until I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed our tiled floor. It felt so good to me, to have our home so tidy. It felt like I was excelling as a wife and a mother.

Lately it's been bothering more and more. It seems like people are always seeing our house in this state of mess. The repair guy, the neighbor collecting her children, a friend, whoever. I find myself always trying to make excuses and studying the faces of people to guess if they are judging me or if they are living in a mess themselves and will be understanding that they have to step over toys and clothes and food chunks when they walk through our house.

I realized that this worry is probably not something that the Lord is very happy with, so I took it to Him in prayer, asking the Lord to help me find time to keep the house cleaner, to be more organized. I reminded Him that He has put this calling on us to homeschool our children and that He is the one who gave my husband this job where he works from home which is all wonderful but that means that all 6 of us are in this house 24-7 using up every square foot and that I am only one person!

Then He told me that He is the one that called us to homeschool our children. He reminded me that He is the one that gave my husband a job where he was home all the time. He told me in that still small voice that these times are a gift. He showed me a time when we were not all in this house messing it up and what an enormous waste it would be for me to spend my days in frustration instead of enjoyment and gratitude. I knew then that I don't answer to other people. I have to answer to The One who has given me my directions for this life and they are not to have a house that looks like a magazine cover or to care about what people might think of it.

My cup runneth over. In other words, we've got spills and stains here but it's a gift and I'm thankful for it.

Sheryl Bane is the mom behind the blog at www.peanutbutterandjellyboats.com, although lately her devotion has been homeschooling her oldest two sons and working with her husband to plant a church in NW Indiana. She is the mother of Ben, Luke, Ethan and Aisling and the wife of Scott, Next-Wave's editor.

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