Day of Joyfully Irrelevant House Washing

What a gorgeous day. I smell of bleach and the great outdoors, probably because that's where I've been all day...the great outdoors, sloshing bleach water with Dad and Mom while we washed the house. "Washed the house?" you might ask, a bit incredulously. We do it every year after pollen season has passed (and I dearly hope it has). We aren't fanatics...our house is a log house, and aside from wanting to get rid of the alien green tint from all that piney fairy dust, we have to seal the logs with some sort of sealer each year. (Or maybe every few years; I can't remember.)

Hence the house washing. Mom commented how nice it was that I'm at home and can help with things like that (as opposed to being away at college or still in highschool buried under a pile of textbooks like my poor brother). The comment would have unsettled last year's me...spoken as I splattered through muddy bleach water in my carefree bare feet, wearing old baggy jeans and a bleach spattered t shirt, toting a sopping rag laden with cobwebs and little bugs. Slogging around doing random housechores wasn't what I would have considered meaningful, purposeful, or at all relevant. But today, I scrubbed away as irrelevantly as all get out, thoroughly enjoying the dazzling weather and even the chance to help out. It's been nearly a year since I graduated highschool, and I can hardly believe so much time has passed. I'm not in Ukraine; I'm not at college; I'm not even engaged in seemingly more "real life" activities such as a full time job.

But hmm. What if it were 100 years ago, or just 50, or even 35, maybe? I don't think there would be this sick pressure to go out and do something with my life. Maybe it would actually be normal for a girl to live at home with her family for another year after graduating...or more...and she wouldn't feel uncertainties and apologies rising in a nauseous lump every time she talks to another well-meaning aquaintance. Of course the well-meaning aquaintances are nothing but that...well-meaning...and most of them never mean to communicate the threats that loom in their innocent questions about one's future plans.

But now the apologies are sort of melting out of me and I find that I'm...happy. Happy being here, and able to laugh at the future, as Proverbs says an admirable woman does. I laugh with joy. I laugh at Ethan bundled in winter clothes in April to guard himself from wasps, I laugh with my sister and cousins over reading The Girl of the Limberlost and eating cookies under the oak tree out front. I laugh at the beautiful friendships I have and the perfect conversations that get dropped in my lap, I laugh at the prospect of new friendships in Ukraine, and at the prospect of fellowship forever and ever and ever in heaven with those I love and will love in the future...

Whatever I'm supposed to do or be or think or say is all wrapped up in Him. So I'm just following a bit recklessly and foolishly, and truly beginning to be ok with it. Nothing is wasted. Nothing. Not an hour staring at a blade of grass. Not a day washing a house. Not months of learning how to be a truer sister and daughter. Not a year of falling deeper in love with the God of the universe.

"I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may know what the will of God is, that which is good, and acceptable, and perfect."

Romans 12 something