Last night I went to take a bath, which is my stress reliever or my reward for a good day. I looked at my bathtub and realized that it needed a major scrub down. I had obviously ignored it. Before Mark was laid off we had a housecleaner. At first it was every other week, then every three weeks and in the end it was once a month or every five weeks. When we moved into this house she stopped calling us to come, I think she knew that we were in financial distress. Obviously since we have lived here I have done every ounce of cleaning myself, which I fail at most days. When I do clean I work harder on the downstairs areas because that is where our guests usually spend time. I really abandon cleaning our master bathroom even though all five of us use it every day. When I do clean it I only do a basic cleaning, after all I have always had someone else do the really deep clean. When I started cleaning the tub last night I noticed that there was a thick layer of grime all around it. From far away you couldn't really see it, which is why I obviously justified not needing to clean it that hard before. But it was the kind of grime that doesn't just wash away with Scrubbing Bubbles and so I spent the next hour literally on my hands and knees scrubbing harder then I have ever scrubbed before, trying to scrub the grime away. I'm not going to lie, it was gross.
Why am I telling you this? While I was cleaning I was thinking about some really serious issues that related to what I was doing. First, I was thinking about how we often just let grime build up in our lives. We ignore it, we refuse to do it, we blame others for it, we keep thinking that pretty soon someone else will clean it up for us and then we blink our eyes and realize that we are the only ones who can get rid of it. And so we face the daunting task of trying to scrub it away. I have grime in my life. I see it in the form of laziness, filthy words, gossip, the way I treat others and bitterness. I know you have grime in your own form too. Eventually we all have to clean up our grime if we want to keep on growing. The longer we wait to clean it, the harder it will be to clean it up. Grime doesn't magically disappear. Ever.
Another issue that I was thinking about while scrubbing is that we have many people in our lives that help us. In my case I was thinking about the cleaning lady Maria who cleaned our house for a really long time. Yes, I paid her and said thank you but was I ever truly appreciative of her? Was I grateful that she cleaned our grime for us? That she was a blessing to me? No. I remember complaining to Mark that she didn't clean the baseboards or that her sister had done a better job, but I never said how thankful I was that she blessed our family with her amazing cleaning abilities. I should have. People may not meet all of our expectations, but we still need to be thankful for what they do for us and we need to let them know that they are a blessing in our lives. Truly. How many people bless your life that you don't adequately thank? Probably a lot. Other people often do the dirty work in our lives and we need to be more compassionate for their role. We need to see them for what they do, not what they don't do.
I hope that someday I can have help cleaning my house again. I think it is actually the one thing that I miss the most. I do know that if we get to a place where we can afford it, I will never take that help for granted again. I will try harder to acknowledge the blessings people pour into my life. If we cannot afford it I will not let the grime build up. I am also prepared to take a look at all of the different kinds of grime in my life and start to scrub them away so that I can be a cleaner and more responsible version of myself.
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