Housework

Today's agenda:

laundry
dishes
homeschooling
cooking

not necessarily in that order, probably all intertwined with one another...

The laundry that I got caught up on last week has piled up again, and so I find myself in the same position as last week - lugging baskets of laundry up and down the stairs, switching load after load from washer to dryer to basket to drawers.

I found this encouraging this morning; it brings my household tasks from the mundane to the spiritual:

..." 'for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me...Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' 

"There is a tendency, I think, on the part of those of us who are well fed, clothed, and housed to imagine that the needy people to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25 are people we don't know--the sort of people who are served at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, at which we ought therefore to volunteer at least occasionally. But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of all that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed.

"There is undoubtedly more to the merciful service that Jesus describes in Matthew 25 than caring for the daily needs of the members of our own households. Housework is a beginning, not an end. But it is a beginning--not a sidetrack, not a distraction, but a beginning, and an essential one at that--in the properly Christian work of, among other things, meeting the everyday needs of others, whether those be our fellow household members, our near neighbors, or people more sociologically or geographically distant from ourselves."

(from Keeping House, The Litany of Everyday Life by Margaret Kim Peterson)