Some days it's easy for me to get discouraged when I look around my home. In every room are half-completed house projects. What was clean just the day before looks as if it hasn't been cleaned in a month. I notice the crumbs, the cracked eggs (the cracked dishes), the subfloors and lack of trim, the fingerprints on the windows, the dirt tracked onto bathroom floors. Dirty floors tend to get me the quickest.
Do I love having a big family? More than anything. Do Josh and I thrive on the creativity of house projects? Yes. When we entertain and our home is full of people and laughter, is my heart full of the joy that only serving the Lord gives? Absolutely. But do dirty floors get me down? Even though I know it shouldn't, there are moments when, yes, they do.
Then God gently reminds my heart: where are your eyes? Are they focused on the crumbs, or the lives you are raising and touching for eternity? Are they focused on the fingerprints on the door, or the beauty I have put all around you? Are they focused on all you think you "need" (or want), or is gratitude turning what you have into enough?
One of the verses I think about the most often, talks about when you have "an empty manger" it will be clean (ie - clean home), "but from the strength of an ox comes an abundant harvest." (ie - an ox brings a huge harvest, but not a clean stall)
Do the kids and I regularly clean our house? Yes.
Should it have to be clean every moment and look like all those Pottery Barn magazines and blog pictures to keep me happy? No.
Someday we WILL reap a harvest. And when we get to heaven and see our Saviors face, it will be more incredible than we can even begin to imagine. And oh so worth it. But right now is the time for us to put on those boots, and fix ours eyes on lives forever changed for eternity.
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