A Clean House Won’t Get You Into Heaven
What Do You Want to Be Valued For?
I’ve tried many times to turn this line, “A Clean House Won’t Get You Into Heaven” into a song, but I guess it was destined to become an article instead.
I grew up living in some very clean houses. First there was my grandmother’s house — Nini. Then my mom’s. Everything was always perfectly neat and organized, and if you threw garbage in the bathroom pail, 5 minutes later it would mysteriously be empty.
It was no accident that my first job was a dishwasher at a catering hall, where I not only cleaned dishes, but the entire facility. Constantly.
As I grew up and started living on my own, I was fairly domestic, but I did rebel just a little, by keeping my shoes on in the house!
Later on, I slacked off on the cleaning even more, but there was always a nagging feeling — that something was wrong if the house wasn’t perfect.
Not just that something was wrong. That I was wrong.
I’m tired of being valued for whether or not the house is clean, or if I have personally busted my ass to clean it!
It’s like my mind is telling me that it’s not enough to spend hours doing the actual thing that I get paid for — my job, or working on a project that might make a real difference in the grander scheme of things, beyond just impacting my own selfish needs. No, my mind is still saying, “but Mike, you didn’t clean today, you’re not done …” So, even when I had made a decision to let it go, to ignore the mess, that voice is still talking to me. “Mike, you know there are still dishes in the sink, don’t you?”
But A CLEAN HOUSE WON’T GET YOU INTO HEAVEN!
I don’t think the point of life is to check off all the boxes, and make everything nice and clean, so I can then get my reward. But that is exactly the message that was programmed into my head as a kid, at least subconsciously.
But I don’t want to be valued for my cleaning abilities anymore.
I am valuable because of how I think, what I say, and what I believe — but most importantly, because of who I AM — not what I clean.
I should be able to just stand here and do nothing, and still feel valuable. I don’t need to clean the house first. So, I’m calling bullshit on that little voice in my head, and I’m changing the story.
Originally published at https://michaeldefern.com on July 8, 2020.
