Throughout our nearly 6 years of marriage and sharing a home my wife has learned many things about me, but perhaps none more important this: I’m an angry cleaner. I do not say that with any amount of pride. It’s merely a confession. Maybe it’s the thirteen thousand bobby pins Carol leaves around the house or the fact that I can’t find the bottom of a hamper for my clothes to save my life, but whatever it is cleaning always seems to have the same effect on me: despair. Which makes a gift Quinn recently got from her Uncle Sock and Aunt Kate particularly ironic. They bought her a play broom and dustpan. And get this: she loves it!
Weird, right? I mean you think that watching her mother and me run around the house frantically putting everything in its rightful place, wiping down surfaces, and sweeping then steaming then mopping every floor would have had a negative effect, but Quinn is always more than ready to add a helping and a joyful hand. And it’s not just with the cleaning. She thinks cooking is fun, too. (And between you and me, if I’m the angry cleaner, Carol might be considered a less than enthusiastic cook). But there is Quinn slaving over her kitchen set preparing cups of microwaved milk for her dollies… with a smile on her face. The kid loves it.
Which makes me wonder, what happened? When did sweeping floors and boiling water stop being joyful and start resembling agonizing work? Now for those of you joyful cleaners out there who just can’t wait to get your hands in some rubber gloves and half your body in an oven, this devotion isn’t for you. It’s for the rest of us, because I think there is a lesson that needs to be learned. In a relationship where I try to teach Quinn everything she needs to know, in this case she is teaching me. Just because God ordered our lives full of work, does not mean that God intended that we shouldn’t enjoy it. In fact, quite the opposite. God calls us to lives of work, and hopes that we can live and work in them with the enthusiasm of a 2 year old.
Don’t believe me? The book of Ecclesiastes says, “So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot;” (3:22). So often when we talk about “our lot” it is in negative terms. We talk about ‘our lot’ in terms of an abundance of stress and suffering coupled with a scarcity of time and rest. We never use the word enJOY. And yet that is to what the Bible calls us. The Bible calls us to enjoy our work and our lot.
And you know what I think that looks like? Play. Like a toddler who joyfully pushes dirt in circles and puts metal in her pretend microwave. It looks like kids who dress up like doctors and police officers and construction workers because what those people do looks like fun to them. May it look like fun to us again, too.
I may always have some “angry cleaner” tendencies, but I hope I can start taking lessons from the wisdom of the Bible and from Quinn. I hope that I may begin to find joy in my lot. And I hope that you do, too.