Counting the cost?

This morning, sitting safely in the coffee shop not thinking about or looking at the messes at home, I am laughing at myself for yesterday's post. We moms know that no one could ever afford to pay us for all the things we do for free. I mean, we are pretty great. (If you don't think so, just check out this awesome video and be reminded.)

(I don't mean to exclude the non-moms out there. This lesson is for all of us who want to be a blessing.)

Of course, the people we bless day after day also have to keep putting up with us. Enough said.

What if we did get paid for the hundred things we do in a day? Would we be happier? Is that why we do them? (No, of course not.) What if we could pay someone else to do them for us? (Um, yes please? At least once in awhile?)

Yesterday I rather blithely pointed out that I am a maid following in the footsteps of the servant Christ. Today when I re-read those words, I was aghast. 

How could I compare my little daily chores with what Christ has done for me?

And if I had to pay Him for His services? For all the things He has done, keeps doing, moment after moment through all eternity?

"If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?" (Psalm 130:3) 

He went beyond serving us for free. He paid to serve us.

"For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh . . ." (Romans 8:3).

Why did He come to live among us, walk in our messes just like us, go about the mundane and ordinary task of living, if not to show us a better way? Yes, He performed the ultimate sacrifice of dying for our sins. But He lived among them first, taking care of His fleshly needs just like the rest of us. He didn't come just to give us a ticket to heaven. He came to teach us how to live. And His death was the final act of a life poured out in service.

I'm amazed to think He counted it worth the cost to gain my love.

Can I really sulk over laundry piles when He's holding out these scarred hands, asking for nothing but my love? How can I tally up my "services" when I have been set free from a debt I could never hope to pay?

And this abiding, this learning to know Him, it confronts us again and again with our helpless need for Him and His joyful response. He holds nothing back.

It is ALL joy to Him because He does all for us.

Everything else is rubbish.

And this is what He wants us to know: The more  we know Him, the less we need anything else.

The more we know Him, the more everything else looks like rubbish.

What are we pressing toward? A clean house? Perfect kids? The lie that we have it all together?

Or do we "forget those things which are behind and reach forward to those things which are ahead" (Philippians 3)?

The call is upward. The prize is in Him. But the way to get there is often found in making sacred spaces in our daily mess.

"No less a saint than Therese of Lisieux admitted in her Story of a Soul that Christ was most abundantly present to her not 'during my hours of prayer . . . but rather in the midst of my daily occupations...' 

"Seen in this light . . . the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life--all the cooking and cleaning of a people's domestic life--might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present in everything we do." 

--Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work"

We really could do this. We could learn to count all things loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. We could make even folding laundry a holy moment, a place for Christ to enter in and speak to us. And then we could be filled up with His love, and it would overflow into the lives around us. 

Today is my grandmother's 96th birthday. She's spending it with Jesus. I remember watching her serve my rather crotchety old grandfather, going way beyond what should have been "expected" of her, day after day. And yet she had a joy and a quiet peace. She knew Jesus well from experiencing Him in the everyday. She was always doing something for somebody. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing her do one single thing just for herself. She was a welcoming, giving, laughing presence that always made me feel safe and loved. Now she is enjoying her citizenship in heaven, her lowly body conformed to His glorious body (Philippians 3). 

The messes aren't going away. But maybe we will learn to see them differently. Maybe we will see them as a way to reach forward, as a call to look upward, counting all things loss for Him.

Day 23 of Abide: 31 Days of Resting in Him

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