Your cart is currently empty!
Today on the podcast, we are talking about getting your life in order. Specifically, we are thinking about the theology of cleaning. We normally relegate topics like cleaning and caring for our stuff to manuals and books for housewives. However, the Bible has quite a bit to say about how we care for what we own. Today, we are going to be focusing on how being a Christian impacts the way we take care of our stuff. Join us for some spiritual insight into cleaning, something that is as important as eating to human life. You may even feel motivated to break out the rubber gloves and get to work on your own space!
***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***
Hey everyone! Welcome back to A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast! I’m Cayce Fletcher, and this is Season 1 Episode 12. In Season 1 of the podcast, we are talking all about habits that lead to a strong and vibrant spiritual life. If you’ve been enjoying this podcast, please leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this podcast. This will help others find the show, and I would be so grateful for your support! Now, onto the episode.
I want you all to close your eyes and imagine back to your middle school and teen years. Think of all the crazy memories you had with friends, first loves and broken hearts, late nights and long days of school, homework, sports, and more.
And, now I want you to think about what your room looked like. For a select few, your room might have been pristine (whether that’s because you liked it that way… or because you were forced to keep it that way). But, for the rest of us, I’m sure you can remember those days when you walked in your room there was no place on the floor to even walk. Clothes were everywhere, dirty dishes stacked up, and who knows the last time you changed your sheets.
I remember those days. My parents were very organized and clean, but generally, our rooms were our responsibility. I was what I call a cycle cleaner. Everything would generally pile up until my room was completely trashed. Then, I would get annoyed and spend hours cleaning and rearranging my room. Only to have to go through the same process again just a few weeks later.
Cleaning is something that we all have to take part in. The care and ordering of our possessions is just a symptom of being human. Honestly, along with eating, cleaning is probably one of the most universal actions that we do. We all have to work at getting our lives in order.
But, somehow we’ve relegated this topic to the housewife and/or the maid. The rest of us do the chore begrudgingly, viewing it as something that we just have to hurry through to get to the ‘real living’ we must do. Others of us just don’t clean, and we live in a place that might be better described as the chaos of modern-day living.
So, today we are going to talk about the theology of cleaning and some best practices for decluttering and stewarding what you have. Importantly, we want to make our lives beautiful – and truly I think the best way to do that is to make sure the spaces around us are clean, ordered, and peaceful. You need to be working at getting your life in order. So let’s dive in.
Too much stuff will not help you get your life in order
In those middle school years, it really didn’t matter if my room was utter chaos. I survived, and I had the time to devote a few hours to cleaning a small space. As you get older, you start to shoulder more and more responsibilities. It’s why we see the utterly trashed rooms of college students. In the beginning, their parents may have gotten their rooms perfectly set up and decorated, but when they are on their own, they are the ones who have to take care of their space. Adulting is hard, and one of the more challenging things – other than probably sticking to a budget – is cleaning and cooking for yourself.
The routines of cleaning can be tricky to master, but hopefully, by the time you leave home to be on your own, you know how to do your own laundry, scrub a toilet, and keep the dishes under control (if not, you’ll learn sooner or later).
What I didn’t know was the importance of decluttering. I didn’t know the importance of getting my life in order.
Now, as a kid, I never had any trouble getting rid of things. I held on to a few things just for sentimental reasons, but I was always quick to go through and get rid of unwanted shoes, clothes, books, and toys. So, I never thought that I would struggle with decluttering. That it would be something that would be challenging for me.
Like I talked about in the last episode, our stuff – just like our pursuit of wealth – has a way of multiplying exponentially. Before you know it, we’ve spent our lifetime working to have money for things that are stuffed in a closet, that we don’t even really remember that we have.
I said this in the last episode, and I think it’s important to restate: Our stuff is like weeds – it multiplies and chokes out the good fruit that we can produce. It can cause stress and put pressure on our social life.
Why does our stuff choke out the godly fruit of our lives?
- It sucks away our time.
We spend so much time cleaning and taking care of our stuff. I recently went through and organized much of my stuff. Through that process, I also got rid of a lot of my things. I can attest that if you go through the decluttering process, it is so much easier to clean up a space quickly. You get your time back.
- It sucks away our focus.
If you are in a disorganized space, it draws away your focus and is distracting. We talked about noise pollution in this post here. Clutter can operate in the same way for mental processing by adding visual pollution into our workspaces. According to studies, clutter can lead to a ‘poorer working memory.’ I believe this is because clutter represents “open loops”, a concept popularized by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Open loops are just things that we need to get done that we haven’t yet. Every open loop that we have around us takes up mental space because it adds to our mental to-do list. Clutter creates open loops because it’s not necessarily fixed or dealt with (think of piles of papers that need to be sorted or stuff for a project that never got completed). It sucks away our mental energy and focus.
- It sucks away our resources.
The more stuff that we have, the more that we spend buying things to organize that stuff. We also can forget we even have the stuff and go out and buy duplicates of things because it is not organized. That’s a major waste of our time, energy, and resources.
Just like weeds suck away nutrients from plants and cause them to wither, our stuff if allowed sucks away vital things from our lives and causes our good fruit to wither. Our time, focus, and resources should all be directed at making God’s kingdom known now, as we talked about in Episode 8. But, when our lives are taken over by all of our things, we end up directing our focus on those things. Our things become an idol – not even really because we love them or want them – it’s because they direct our attention and thus our lives. You need to give yourself the direction to create space in your life for what truly matters.
Taming the Chaos: How to Start Getting Your Life in Order
So, what is the antidote to a life ruled by stuff?
It’s to have an ordered life, an organized life, and a decluttered life.
This is not a new concept. Several years ago, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up took the world by storm. For several years, everyone talked about how their possessions did or did not ‘spark joy’ in their life. I love a good home improvement show, and some of the most satisfying ones to watch are those that take drab, cluttered spaces and organize them into nice neat rows of matching decor and furniture. Updated. Neat. New.
But, is this really the antidote to clutter? In the last episode, we talked about how materialism can be an idol. If we exchanged a cluttered disorganized life for a life where everything must be new and nothing can be out of place, we are just exchanging one idol for another. The heart issue is still there.
So we have to strike that balance of cleanliness and disorganization without being ruled by our things. In our episode on technology, we talked about the importance of putting technology in its proper place. We also have to put our stuff in its proper place – both literally and figuratively. They have a term for this in cooking: Mise en place.
Basically, the five steps or principles of Mise en place are to:
- Know your recipe
- Prepare your ingredients
- Arrange your ingredients
- Prepare your workstation
- Arrange your tools.
This term was created by Auguste Ecoffier, a former soldier, who brought the precision and determination of military life into the kitchen. Not everyone agreed with him, but they found that it profoundly impacted the workflow of the kitchen.
Even if it feels unnatural to you in your life, bringing order into your life can affect your own workflow, also known as your productivity. And, when we are being productive for the sake of the gospel, we can do great things.
Living a clean and orderly life matters now… and it matters in light of eternity.
So, we must start with getting your life in order.
What the Bible says about Getting Your Life in Order
“I went past the field of a sluggard, past the vineyard of someone who has no sense; thorns had come up everywhere, the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins. I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw: A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.” ~ Proverbs 24:29-34
We read about the sluggard, or lazy man in the book of Proverbs. In these verses, the sluggard has neglected his house. Things that could be producing food and drink for him are destroyed simply because of the sluggard’s negligence. To put it another way, food and drink are what give humans life. It’s how we survive. But, in the case of the sluggard, the areas of his land that produced this were covered with weeds and fallen into disrepair. So the life-giving areas of his life are left to rot. Why? The sluggard was too lazy to take care of them. I can imagine him saying, “Well, I’ll get to that tomorrow. No worries. Today, I just need to relax because I’ve been working too hard.” But, the constant deferring of taking care of what he owned led to destruction. Destruction by omission yes (the omission of work), but still destruction.
Now, at this point, you may be tuning out. You may be questioning the relevance of this proverb to someone in modern-day America. Unlike Biblical times – where the produce of fields and vineyards was vital to stay alive until the next harvest, we don’t rely on our own agricultural produce. But, I think that this is true in a much more general and profound way.
We often ‘let things go’ because we don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it at that moment. But, years of making that decision to continue to neglect areas of our lives has major consequences. This goes back to what we discussed in our original discussion on habits in Episode 2. The small daily decisions that you make end up determining the whole course of your life. Every little decision adds up to something big.
When you neglect areas of your life, whether that’s car maintenance, a leaky faucet, or a crack in your foundation, you may end up with big problems down the road.
It’s important to recognize the dichotomy between the sluggard’s farm with its overgrown vineyards and crumbling fence and a productive farm. To get the sluggard’s farm going, you would need to do quite a bit of work. So, your attention and your effort isn’t going directly into productive efforts; it’s being spent doing what you should have done yesterday. Doing little actions every day to get your life in order will help you to be more productive. And, it will also eliminate the wasted time that comes with ‘letting things go’ and then spending days trying to correct it.
The Bible is clear. We need to take care of what we own. In theological terms and Christian circles, we use the term stewardship. When we are stewarding something, we are taking care of it for someone else. As we talked about in our last episode, we use what we own as tools to glorify God. We are given all of these things – our house, our ‘fields,’ our families, our wealth, and everything else – in order to glorify God with them. So it’s on us to make sure we are taking care of them well.
“Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?” ~ Proverbs 27:23-27
Projects vs. Routines when it comes to getting your life in order
This makes me think of my car. Now, I think there are two different types of people in the world. There are those who are generally neat with their cars. Their cars are generally washed and most of the time they are even vacuumed! Then, there’s the rest of us: the car is not vacuumed and there are several take-out bags lying in the back. If you have young kids it’s even worse with the crumbs, clothes, and random toys sprawled along the backseat of the car – or worse lost in the cracks or under the seats never to be seen again. Growing up, I knew a lady who used the back of her nice suburban SUV as a trash can. She would go regularly to McDonald’s and when she was done with the food and drink she would just toss it in the back. Every month (or two – there was a lot back there), she would spend a day just cleaning out the back of her car.
What I’ve tried to get in the habit of doing is regularly cleaning up after myself. So when it comes to my car, every time I leave my car I take any trash, cups, or kids’ stuff inside – even if I have to make an extra trip. Doing this means that my car never becomes a project. Yeah, there are times where I need to vacuum it to suck up the remnants of kids meals and dirt. But, I never have to spend more than 10 minutes at any moment cleaning my car.
Misty Winckler, of the Simply Convivial Podcast, talks about this. She talks about the difference between projects and routines in life. A project is something that takes quite a bit of time and mental effort. It would be something that you would write on your to-do list to check off. A routine, on the other hand, is something that you do simply because of habit. You barely have to think about it, much less write it down and put effort into completing it.
So, in the example about my car, if you have to spend a day cleaning out your car because of how messy it is, that would become a project. It is going to take a sizable amount of effort, not to mention time, to accomplish. But, if every time you leave your car, you take what you don’t need in the car out of the car, the mental effort of that action is going to be very small. In effect, the routine has become effortless because you do it out of habit.
This is how you can create sustainable cleaning routines. You don’t need to take a class. You create habits, or routines, out of things that you use to categorize as projects. Technically, you may not be spending any more time on cleaning if it is a project versus a routine. 10 minutes every day over the course of a month totals up to 300 minutes. But, the amount of effort you put into it is different. You will be more likely to keep up with the routine, which means you will feel like your life is under control. That your life is ordered.
On Having a Perfect House…
Quick caveat: Sometimes we are ruled by perfectionism more than a desire to steward what we have well. Instead of just seeking to make what we own productive and God-glorifying, we want it to be perfect so it glorifies us. This is an idol and can be toxic behavior for everyone around you. We shouldn’t seek to clean for our own glory, just as we shouldn’t seek to have a nice house, the latest goods, and the most likes on Facebook. Anything done for our own glory will always lead us down the wrong path towards sin.
Proverbs 14:4 says, “Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but increase comes by the strength of an ox.” All the moms with kids say Amen. If you have life happening in your house, there will naturally be messes. If you are on a job site, it will get messy, and it should – because things are happening. Things are getting done. It is your own version of a productive life-giving field or vineyard. If you’ve ever had livestock, you know the mess they can make. The mess comes with productivity. It comes with action and hard work.
But, we have to have discernment that allows us to know the difference between productive mess and unproductive disrepair. A productive mess is a project that is in the works. Think of our mise en place that we talked about at the beginning of the episode. If you are cooking dinner in the kitchen, your kitchen is not spotless. You have your food out, your tools out, and you are busy chopping and cooking away to prepare. But, there is order and productivity in the mess.
This is different than the unproductive disrepair. When there is nothing getting done, things may still be messy, but they will also grow to be chaotic. And before you know it, problems will multiply just because of disuse. Think of a car engine that has been sitting around for too long, a vacant house that hasn’t been used, or a garden that is overgrown with weeds.
When people aren’t busy ordering their environments, chaos sets in. I believe this is why God commanded us in the very beginning to go out and subdue the Earth. When you are working on stewarding the Earth, it can be more productive and more beautiful than you can imagine. There have been studies of small homestead agriculture coming into areas and cultivating lush ecosystems. This is not due to a rewilding of the area. It’s due to the cultivation of that area.
But, that cultivation requires active presence and work. And, it requires a person that is ready to roll up their sleeves and get cleaning, decluttering, and putting their lives back in order.
So what do you think? Is cleaning something that you think is important? Do you agree that cleaning has theological significance and implications for our greater life? Let me know what you think. And, if you’ve been enjoying listening to the podcast, don’t forget to leave a rating and review wherever you are listening! Don’t forget to subscribe and share what you are listening You can connect with me on Facebook and Instagram. I hope you’ll join me next week for the next episode!
Leave a Reply