How Do You Keep Your Shower Clean?

Mess stresses me out. It really does. I can’t think properly when there is stuff everywhere. A bit of dust, I can handle. Dirt, fine – so long as I can’t see it. But mess? Totally can’t stand it. I can’t relax if there are things on the floor, dirty plates in the sink or washing which hasn’t been put away. Bleah! Needless to say, my house is always pretty tidy.

But look closer, and you’ll see the cracks. They're there in the thin (some places thick) layer of dust I keep telling myself will wait another few days (after all, it’ll just be back tomorrow anyway…) and the smudges on the mirrors and glass doors (I have young kids… enough said), the crumbs that escaped my cloth when I wiped down the bench and the pieces of Duplo waiting to be rescued from under my desk. Believe me, I’m far from the perfect housekeeper.

That said, I couldn’t help but laugh when I had friends over one day and one of them commented on my sparkling clean shower, asking how I managed to keep the glass so clean. The shower without a single speck of mould or soap grime or even fingerprints. I wish I could have told her it was my spectacular cleaning skills and taken all the credit. Instead I told her the truth – we don’t use it.

Now, before you think I’m totally gross and steer well clear of me thinking that neither I, nor any of my family, shower, we do. Promise. In the other one. The one with the soap scum perpetually on the glass no matter how many times I clean it. She was looking at the one in what’s basically my kids’ bathroom, the one that rarely gets used and probably is still as clean as the day it was built given my kids prefer baths.

It’s easy to keep things clean. Just don’t use them. Keep something in its box or wrapped up tight and it’ll be pristine forever. Get it out, use it, and after a while, the use will start to show. What gets used gets battered and broken, dirty and dingy. Never quite as perfect or as bright as it once was. Book pages yellow, paint starts to chip, bottles get emptied – because people use them.

It’s the same with humans.

When we open ourselves up to other people, we open ourselves up to getting hurt, bruised and sometimes broken. It might not happen. Perhaps they’ll be the people who will clean us and make us better, more beautiful.  But sometimes they won’t. Sometimes, we open up our lives to other people only to have their lack of understanding or compassion break us a little, or even shatter us. It’s a risk we take.

And yet, is it any better to not take that risk? To stay silent when we could speak, to keep our life separate from everyone around us, hiding the truth of who we are? We might remain perfect, unsullied by life, but we wouldn’t be doing what we were created to do.

Love God. Love people.

To be honest, loving people can get really messy. It can be painful, draining, confusing and sometimes even infuriating.

Yet…

It’s what we were made for.

When we allow God to use us in the lives of those around us, we open ourselves up to being battered and maybe even broken. But we also open ourselves up to being used by God in incredible ways we could never even imagine.

Toys were made to be played with. Appliances made to be used. Clothes made to be worn. That shower in my kids’ bathroom might be sparkling and clean, but it’s not exactly fulfilling its purpose. It might as well not be there at all. Clean, but useless.

Risky as it might be, I refuse to be like that shower.

It's not what I was made for. And neither were you.