Look at your Dirty Laundry!

I hate doing laundry. What a way to start this off. But seriously I can’t stand it. I don’t know what it is about laundry that makes me crazy. Perhaps it’s my complete inability to be patient while it’s going. Or it could be that my beautiful bride has a high standard of perfection doing household chores and while she folds each and every piece of laundry, I attempt to shove it all in one drawer kicking it triumphantly closed while shouting “TIME!” as if there were imaginary judges with stopwatches that were only concerned with the time it took me to “complete” the task. Either way it’s not something I enjoy (and thankfully I have a wonderful wife who does it for me) but it is a necessary part of life. Reading this post, I promise you, won’t seem like a revelation to better your life, but I hope that what I write today severs as encouragement for you in some way. I use this story of laundry to explain that there are things that we absolutely can’t stand doing in our lives; however it always seems that these things are completely necessary or rather unavoidable. Laundry being one of them. My wife puts our dirty clothes basket right by our washer and dryer which happens to be in the hallway leading to our bedroom. The funny thing about this is, when laundry needs to be done we both know instantly. The signs are there. The basket is FULL… imagine that. My first instinct is to step over the basket and continue along with my day pretending as if never saw it. But I know, deep in the recesses of my consciousness positioned somewhere between my eternal search for purpose in a relationship with an infinite God, and the discussion with my inner self about which Mexican food dish I would rather have this evening, lies the gnawing thought “the laundry needs to be done".

I have found that when you are FORCED to fulfill your responsibilities in this life, whether that be at work, as a student, or as a parent, your anxiety for that responsibility will increase drastically. Just imagine your at your workplace at your desk and you KNOW that you need to get a certain task done by the end of the week. that’s your job, that’s what you’re paid to do, it’s in your job description, and it’s expected. Wednesday rolls around and you still haven’t done it. Now Thursday comes and you feel you’re too busy. Friday your boss comes in to check on that task and it’s still not quite finished because you’ve been avoiding it. Now he or she is there to MAKE you do that job. Time is short, you’ve avoided it all week, trying your best not to look at your dreaded “to do” list hoping that if you don’t see it maybe by some miracle it won’t exist anymore. Now you have to do it and it feels terrible.

We do this more than we realize with our own lives. Our avoidance is constant. Take this last example since Christmas just passed. How many of you have a poor relationship with someone in your family? Maybe it’s your parents, siblings, in-laws, you name it! You avoid that relationship and avoid attempts at bettering that relationship because it would take an enormous amount of work. You won’t even look at that relationship as you try to push it out of your mind and yet, there it remains pestering you. Now you HAVE to see that person at Christmas and instead of trying to heal a relationship you are seeing a therapist about how to set firm boundaries and different coping skills you can use while continuing to avoid that “dirty laundry” relationship. Sometimes you have to willing to look at the things that need doing, no matter how awful they may seem at the present. There is a verse about this in scripture if you look for it. Matthew 16:24 says “24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” There is a willingness in this verse to LOOK at the things that cause us the most suffering, to voluntarily take them on, and (much like a bull) continue the uphill battle of life one step at a time. My encouragement to you is to willingly look at those things that you know are troubling you and voluntarily take them on in an attempt to heal.