In Praise of the Simple

Today I washed the kitchen floor. No seriously.

It's Sunday, but I didn't go to church this morning. While I had a good time at church last week, I have discovered that my home church, at least in the summer, isn't usually the kind of worshipful place I'm looking for right now. So this morning, since none of my family wanted to go, I stayed home. After some tense time with my mom (who for some reason was deciding to be annoyed that my dad and I didn't get up until around 9), I started doing some chores to hopefully lighten the mood. After some basic cleaning and a dismal attempt at mopping the floor, things got down and dirty.

Normally we only mop the floors with our Clorox mop, one of those ones where you put the pad on the bottom like a swiffer. Well, really, that thing is useless for cleaning any floor with any sort of texture, and the flooring we chose to put down in our kitchen when we remodeled it 8 years ago unfortunately seems to look kind of dirty no matter how well you clean it because it has so many little grooves and the tile itself is several shades of white and gray and light blue. So today I decided to really clean the floor. I made a water and bleach solution, got a scrub brush, and got down on my hands and knees and did some good old-fashioned cleaning. It took about an hour to get the whole floor done with this more thorough method.

About halfway through, though, I started thinking about servitude and a conversation Colleen and I recently had about being on earth as servants to God. I didn't used to believe that, but I think I'm starting to now. And as I was staring at the floor, scrubbing away, I was honestly filled with joy that I could be doing this, to better the home I've been given to live in. This also fell into place with a fight my mom and I had a few days ago in which she pointed out that I didn't seem very appreciative of all the help she and my grandmother provided in getting me packed up and out of my dorm in a timely manner. I realized that while I had been extremely appreciative those couple days, it really had fallen off of my radar pretty quickly afterwards. So I was glad to be slowly repaying my mom for all her help by doing some simple chores around the house.

I'm not trying to prove myself to be some golden child of redemption. Really. I'm just learning to appreciate the smaller - and sometimes dirtier - things in life. On that note, I think there's a bathtub that could use some bleach, too.