The Story: from “After many days…” at the very bottom of page 400 to the bottom of 405
“God has made it clean.” Acts 10:15
OK, I’m going to admit, this is a stretch as a devotional, but it fits my life perfectly today! And hey, God had me write a post on dishwasher gunk and this is right along those lines.
The kids have been home from school on summer vacation for 4 days now. Over the winter, being shut in for the majority of it and then all the construction this spring, the house has gone downhill fast especially their rooms. And we’ve all been working hard for the last month or two to really get things spiffed back up. Now, there have been many occasions when I’ve talked about my obsession with perfection and neatness and how I’ve had to deal with things not being precisely perfect. Case in point, last night I noticed that my hairspray, mousse, and getll all have varying levels of “hold” from 2-4 and I had to resist the urge to put them in order. And just as I decided against rearranging them into ascending order I noticed they were already in descending order, and I brathed a sigh of relief thinking, “that can be good enough”.
Yes, I really am that particular. Sad isn’t it? It took months for me to allow the spoons and forks in the drawer to NOT spoon together so that someone other than me could put them away. And lets not even get started on the left over container drawer!
It’s all about control and order and me allowing the other members of my family to have some. Here in our house we emphasize teamwork. But if I’m the one doing all the cleaning while they’re doing all the messing that’s not a very good team. We ALL live here, we all make the messes, we all clean them up. I’ll admit, it’s been extremely difficult giving up my OCD ways in order to have an imperfectly clean house, but it’s been worth it. I mean seriously, think about it, what’s more important – that the spoons all face the same way or that they’re all clean and put away?
As my children have aged and life has shifted from changing their diapers to shaping their hearts I’ve had to change my ways and how I do things. For years I did it all myself – mostly because I had to. (And developed quite a few “particulars” because of it.) But that’s not the case now. They’re seven and (almost) twelve, they need to learn how to empty a dishwasher and do their own laundry, how to clean and organize a room and to, yet, even clean a toilet. We’re a team and as a team we all work together to make our home an enjoyable place to live in… instead of a hazardous waste dump.
So! On Monday I gave the children the “we’re a team” speech and handed them a (short) list of chores that had to be done before the TV came on. And for the last week or so I’ve been pinning things to my “Home” board on Pinterest to get inspiration for a fun chores list for them to track their progress. And this is what I’ve done.
First I made a list of all the things in our home that need done every week, leaning heavily on the items from the lists that I had pinned earlier so that I wouldn’t miss anything. Then I took that list, divided it into fourths and made a master list for each member of our family. They look something like this:
Tamar Knochel 