Lovely Reminder

What To Always Remember when You're Working

All work is good work. The work of our hands is always making the world a better place.

And work is my liturgy, motions of worship to Him, who from, and to, and through, are all things.





All once was perfect, ordered, pristine, back there, In the Beginning. In That Garden. But not now. Not in this house, not in this garden.

Science may call it entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, the wearing down of all systems, the measure of chaos. God calls it sin and decay, and my daily battle.

Weeds, dirty laundry, piling dishes, dust collecting...this is life after the Fall.

Yet, in small ways, I return to Father and the Perfect Time Before when I order, wash away, sweep clean...beating back the chaos, the powers of destruction.

Simple acts of cleaning are my humble, conquering efforts in the quotidian struggle between chaos and order, creation and disintegration, God and Death. And I frame this cleaning as my monastic beauty, my daily wrestle, to create, in imperfect ways, a world for these loved ones... like You created so perfectly for humanity when the world began....

Deliberate, ritual motions maintain an easy order. Easier than wresting order out of invading chaos. And a tidy house ushers in the possibility of a tidy heart.

A heart beating with His, in a place more like that place In the Beginning.

Is this housework a picture of entering into Redemption? To bring restoration to that which has fallen...



"To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory,
but a man with a dungfork in his hand,
a woman with a slop pail,
give Him glory
too.

God is so great that all things give Him glory, if you mean that they should."

~St. Ignatius Loyola



Lord, today I mean that all of it should.