The Hour Does Not Exist And When It Does I Clean

The hour mostly does not exist.

That has to be said first, because the encouragement that gets handed to a woman with small children usually starts from a false picture. It assumes there is an hour sitting there, unclaimed, and she is failing to take it out of some deficiency of nerve.

There is no hour. There are fragments. There is the twenty minutes between the nap starting and the older one coming home. There is the stretch after they go down where you are so flat you could sit on the stairs.

So we are not talking about an hour. We are talking about the fragment, and the fragment is real, and the fragment is where this happens.

Because here is what you do with it, every time.

You wipe down the counter. You empty the machine. You put the four things away that are on the stairs and you sort out the bag for tomorrow. And the fragment goes, and you did not decide to spend it that way, and you would honestly say you had no choice.

But look at it plainly for a second. The counter was not urgent. The bag could have been done in the morning in four minutes. Nothing in that fragment had to happen tonight.

What happened is that the kitchen is defensible and you are not.

If somebody walked in and asked what you were doing, the counter answers for you. Making something does not. And after a certain number of years of being the person everything depends on, a woman gets very good at only doing what she could defend if she were asked.

Nobody is going to ask. But the sentence is ready, all the same.

One thing is needful

There are two sisters in Luke and I want to be fair to both of them, because the one who gets criticized is doing what most of us do.

Martha is not a bad woman. Martha is hosting. There are people in her house, there is a meal in progress, and the work is real work that somebody has to do, and she is the one doing it while her sister sits down.

And when she says something about it, listen to how gently He answers, and to what He actually says.

You are able to choose while the work is still going on, and Luke 10:42 records exactly that choice in a house full of guests. The Holy Spirit is the one who says chosen over a woman who thought she had no choice in it.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:42, King James Version)

Mary hath chosen. That is the word I want you to hold. Chosen.

Not stumbled into. Not got away with. She looked at a room with work in it and she made a choice, and He calls the choice good and says nobody is going to take it off her.

You are allowed to choose the thing that cannot be defended, and Luke 10:42 is where that choice is called the good part. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken in a busy house full of guests and lays it down in a kitchen at eight at night with the machine still full.

And notice the last clause. Which shall not be taken away from her. He does not just permit it. He guards it.

You have a portion that heaven has put a guard on, and it is already settled in the written word that nobody gets to take it off you. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been handing her own fragments away for years without once being asked to.

The counter is not more real than you are

Now I want to be careful, because there is a wrong turn available here and it would hurt.

I am not telling you the housework does not matter. It matters. Somebody has to do it and mostly that somebody is you and I am not going to be clever about that from a distance.

What I am saying is narrower. The counter is not more urgent than it is. Wiping it tonight rather than tomorrow changes nothing about anybody's life, and an optional job has been treated as a compulsory one because the optional job comes with a defense attached.

And the thing you would make instead is not less real. What comes out of twenty minutes is not a measure of you, and neither is a clean counter, and neither of them will be remembered by anybody in this house.

You are free to leave the counter tonight, and heaven has never once ranked a wiped surface above a woman's own hands. Luke 10:42 puts the good part on the one who sat down while the work was still going, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that ranking where Scripture put it.

And do not turn the making into a job to be efficient about. Do not decide to make something the children need, or something for the school thing, because that is the counter wearing different clothes.

You have permission to make something nobody needs, and this is yours: the good part was chosen and not earned. It is written in Luke 10:42 that it shall not be taken away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact rather than a sentiment.

Twenty minutes, and the sink stays full

So here is the ask, and it fits inside a real fragment.

The next time twenty minutes appears, do not go to the kitchen. Sit down and make something.

Draw. Fold paper. Do four rows of something. Take whatever is already in the house and put your hands on it.

You are choosing rather than failing to cope, and Luke 10:42 calls that the good part in a house where the work was not finished. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts that word over a woman with twenty minutes and a sink still full behind her.

And leave the sink exactly as it is. That is not a detail, that is the exercise. If the counter is wiped at the end of those twenty minutes then the fragment went where it always goes.

It will be uncomfortable for about three minutes. The machine will be audible. Every item on the stairs will present itself. Stay in the chair.

What you make will be nothing much. Four rows, a bad drawing, a paper thing a child could have done better. Leave it as it is and do not tidy it away afterward.

You are covered while the kitchen stays as it is, and Luke 10:42 is the ground under that. The written word puts a guard on the choice rather than on the housework, and the Spirit of God is present at a table at eight in the evening with a bad drawing on it.