If I'm going to be honest, I'd much rather spend an hour in silent
meditation than an hour scrubbing a crusted-over casserole dish.
But
as the mother of many children, now is not the season of quiet. It's a
season of work. I wake early each morning and begin cooking for my
family, washing and cleaning, managing and teaching my children. It's
not glamorous. It's dirty.
But God is there.
Last Fall, I was feeling really burned out. I locked myself in the bathroom and broke down in self-pitying sobs.
Where are You, God? Is this Your purpose for me? An endless string of work, work, work?
At
that point, I had still drawn a line between Holy Work and unholy work.
Holy Work was something visible like: Bible Studies, book clubs,
prayer meetings, community service. Unholy work was invisible:
laundry, dishes, dirty diapers, meals.
But that was a false demarcation. As Brother Lawrence once said: "…our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God rather than for ourselves."
A close friend of Brother Lawrence wrote: "The most effective way Brother Lawrence had for communicating with God was to simply do his ordinary work."
For Brother Lawrence, this meant spending fifteen years working in the monastery kitchen.
Now,
I don't claim that God spoke to me in that bathroom. All I know is that
I started to remember all the things I had left undone. The work I had
shirked, the duties I had neglected.
Maybe instead of pleading
with the Almighty to show me His GRAND PURPOSE, what I really needed
to be doing was cooking dinner for my family.
In the following months, I have repeatedly found one thing to be true: God is in my work.
My
work is not a curse. It's a blessing! The work of my hands directly
benefits my family. I place freshly washed towels in the bathroom: my
precious family gets to use them. I make a meal and
my own flesh and blood is nourished by it. I live and work here at home–everything I do is for the care of others.
How is that not holy?
I am often tempted to diminish the holiness of mothering. It's easy to become discouraged–especially when the laundry pile is taller than me!
But then I remind myself of something St. Padre Pio once said: "Duty first, even before something holy."
For me, striving to live a life that is pleasing to God means to simply do the ordinary work, the daily duties. Every single day.
Or as I Corinthians 10:31 says, "Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."
In the end, it's not about me finding God's purpose for MY life. But rather, me finding my life in God's purpose.
