when the normal becomes hard

This was me all Monday: 

Don't wanna do dishes one more time. No more loading/unloading the dishwasher. No more stiff, smelly rags. No more food-gunk in the strainer. No more sore knees from standing on that floor so long...no more wiping down the counters and chipping dried stuff off the stove. Grumblegrumblemurmurgrumble.

I felt completely justified in launching this all-day pity party. Mostly because our kitchen goes from this:

(ok, blogger fail. I neglected to snap a pic of our kitchen when it was clean this week. Just imagine a tiny, warm, farm-style place.)

to this:

in about 5 minutes on any given day. It's fast. and it's total. It's gross. and it doesn't evolve into something better if left alone. 

Trust me. 

This frustration eclipsed my entire day. Couldn't focus on work. Couldn't think of anything else to write about (obviously). Couldn't revel in anticipation over this awesome recipe for tofu nuggets I'd downloaded for supper. Couldn't, because I was hating on my kitchen. (now, my frustration was with the kitchen, not the lovely people who share it with me. I would not be writing this post if it were otherwise. Trust me.) 

I dreaded this monotonous task until I was faced with doing it, and every minute of the many it took to restore my kitchen to presentability. And when I glanced at the clock, I hated this kitchen for swallowing whole most of my home-after-long-workday-and-grocery-shopping evening. It wasn't til much later in the evening that I remembered. Remembered what I'd written a friend just a few hours before:

'Study at the feet of Christ. Bow your head and out loud, invite Him to labor over your books with you. Mix fellowship with God into what you do. In the end, this is more important than knocking out an amazing grade.' 

Yep. Conviction of cosmic proportions. I had divorced my normal from my spiritual. 

Yet. Again. 

I do it all the time. Put certain activities under a spiritual heading and others under everyday life. But I think Satan rejoices in that. Because it's not the truth. Truth is every moment of a believer's life can be a spiritual one. One of speaking/listening to God. One of worship. One of abiding. 

And it takes something more than just 'going with the flow' or sheer determination to live every day spiritually. It takes a dependence on the Lord. Takes faith. Takes a filling of His Spirit. Takes intentional asking, seeking, and knocking. The Word dwelling richly in us. Without Him, we can do nothing. But through Him? You know the answer to that. 

A woman named Lydia Baxter understood this. If her online biography is correct, she spent the majority of her adult life sick and bedridden. Normal monotony for sure. Yet at age 65, just four years before her death, she penned this well-known hymn text:

Take the name of Jesus with you,
Child of sorrow and of woe;
It will joy and comfort give you,
Take it then where’er you go.

I fell asleep Monday night praying for this. To seek the filling of His Spirit before the mundane tasks. For conscious abiding in Him as I go about my normal. To take that precious name and all that it means into the crooks and crannies of everyday. 

Whether they need scrubbed clean or not. 

Beth