From the Request Line: This One goes Out to A

A friend and I were chatting on FB the other night about our disdain for laundry.  The conversation went something like this:  (ok, not something like…as in copied and pasted exactly like this):

A: Can you do me a favor? Can you write a super-tastic blog entry about doing laundry that will make me feel inspired, make me cry and laugh simultaneously, show me the gospel, and help me in general with that dreaded task? Top of Form

Thanks in advance ;)

Me: A. Clearly, you've missed the whole "I hate laundry" theme on the blog.
B. Have I mentioned how much I hate laundry?
C. I'll see what I can do.
D. By the way, what I hate most about laundry is the doing it.
E. I also hate putting it away. It's like the baskets full of clean, folded laundry just taunt me. Laughing, in their sweaters, saying. "You can't finish anything."

A:  A. I must be behind in my reading.

B. I haven’t heard that recently.

C. Thanks

D. giggle

E. Great big DITTO...this is where I'd like you to focus, the putting it away effort. Thanks again.

Around an hour and a half later, my friend got really sick.  Like “put you in the hospital and life is going to look drastically different for a good long while and possibly forever” sick.  

And because I’m a good friend, I sent her the following text yesterday afternoon, “So, you’re probably not so worried about your laundry now are you, huh?”

She called me back within seconds, laughing.  (Because she’s awesome like that.)  I told her, “So, to tell you how you being in the hospital is really all about me, it inspired me to put away three baskets of laundry.”  I know, you all wish I could be there for you in your darkest moments.

Thankfully, as I’ve mentioned before, my Bible Study group is studying Genesis.  (To give you some context, I've been in A's group since struggling with infertility.  I then co-lead the group with A for 3 years, before stepping down from leadership.  A still leads the group.)  And the morning before dreadful thing happened to A, we were studying the effects of the Fall.  The curse and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden so that they couldn’t eat from the tree of Life in their fallen states.  

And so for you, my darling A who has pointed me to Jesus for so long, here is your Gospel according to my laundry basket moment:  Doing the laundry stinks.  

I could write about how we should all just but on our big girl panties and shut up and do the laundry without complaining.  I could remind you about how there are people who have to take their laundry to a Laundromat somewhere else and that’s gotta be a bigger pain in the butt than just seeing all that clean laundry piled up on your couch waiting to be folded.  And I could tell you that in terms of world problems, our mutual hatred of putting away the clean laundry ranks along par with “I’ve run out of Capri Suns and I’m too lazy to go to the store” and “my toddler only wants to eat cookies”.  And I could remind you of the simple truth that if you have laundry to do that means you have clothes.  And that if your laundry is sitting in baskets at the bottom of your stairs just waiting to be taken up and stared at for three days until you finally get around to putting it away, then that means you have a home and some people don’t.  And all of those kids who keep changing clothes 14 times a day?  Yeah, there are folks who ache to have that problem.  And there are kids who wish they had parents to clean their adorable teeny tiny socks.  And all of those things are true.

But what is also true is this:  sin affects EVERYTHING.  In Genesis 3, when God explains the consequences of the lie Adam and Eve believed, it basically tells us that we will not be in right relationship with our own bodies, with our families, with our work, with our identity, with all of creation.  There is no escaping it.  And we can couch all our attempts to escape the effects of the fall in Spiritual terms, and we should most certainly work towards bringing God’s image to bear in the midst of all the brokenness, but we can’t return to the garden.  We can’t use our faith to bypass the suffering surrounding us.  Our study’s notes say “We do not escape the suffering of the world by living a good life.  To believe this is to live with unbelievable pride and pressure.”  Pride and pressure that sometimes cascade off our couch and onto the family room floor. 

But here is another truth for you, dear laundry hater:  Jesus didn’t try to bypass the suffering.  Instead, he left the throne of heaven to enter into our suffering. And he didn’t just flip death off, he defeated it.

To speak of sin apart from the realities of creation and grace is to forget the resolve of God.  God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back.  Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.”

-Cornelius Plantinga, Not The Way It’s Supposed to Be

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