Cleaning With The Light
“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.” Matthew 6:22
Years back, as a new wife and housekeeper, I read a blog with tips and tricks to maintaining a tidy home. Most of the tips seemed obvious to me, but one stuck out: always clean with the blinds open and the lights on. The idea is that the light exposes all the places of dust and build up that you would otherwise miss.
I can’t say I thought too much about it, didn’t even follow the advice, until the other day after 5 straight days of rain, children coming in and out of the mud, and piles of undone laundry I set out to clean my house. The sun was finally shining so I opened the windows, lifted the blinds and got after it.
I was sweeping and mopping when I caught a glimpse of the underside of my cabinets, areas that I typically clean weekly and realized that they looked like they had been untouched for months! I was disgusted. Why am I just now seeing this? The article I read as a new wife and housekeeper came rushing back to mind. I was seeing all of this gunk and dust because of the light. I was seeing how truly nasty some of the dark spaces are in my home because they have gone without exposure to the light. They have been cleaned by the standard of what my human eyes have been able to see.
How closely does that relate to our relationships and specifically our marriages? How often do we tidy things with our human power and perspective, and leave the dark spaces unkept, the secrets still looming, the nastiness tucked away?
See, the Bible is clear that our eyes don’t see the things God sees, our minds can’t comprehend the things that our God can comprehend so when we attempt to fix anything absent of His presence and His light, we are doing so in vain.
Relationships can’t be kept, they can’t be cleaned up to an extent that offers any real value unless we are opening up the windows to our hearts and allowing the light of Christ to expose all the dirty secrets and unkept spaces we try to keep anyone else from seeing. Or maybe they aren’t secrets you want to keep at all, maybe they are just areas of your relationship you avoid all together, or just maybe you’re so disconnected from Christ that you aren’t trying to avoid them, but you’re like the underside of my cabinets that I thought I gave enough attention but were really being left to build up without the true attention they require.
The truth is at first it feels daunting to view everything through the lens of Christ, right? Like, Lord, how much of me do I need to get rid of? How much of me do I need to clean up so that I am honoring you with the way I live the role as wife and mother? The answer is all of it. You will never be good enough, clean enough or kept enough on your own- and that doesn’t have to feel daunting- it can be liberating, because we have a Savior who came to do just that- cover the imperfections that we can never clean up on our own!
“these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” 1 Corinthians 2:10
If you know for sure that there are areas of your marriage that you aren’t investing in, I invite you to welcome Him in. If there are dirty secrets that you pretend don’t exist, I challenge you to step into the light and let Him begin to clean it up. He is faithful to do so. If you aren’t sure if any of this even pertains to you- maybe you are like me and thought you had been giving the needed time and energy to all the spaces of your life- I believe if you take the time to let the Lord reveal Himself, you’ll see just how great the chasm really is between how you’re living and what God intends for you!