Two Weeks Of Doing It In The Tub

Eleven at night, and you are wringing out a school shirt over the side of the tub.

Your back has gone. It went about four days ago and it has not come back, and it is specifically the standing bent forward that does it, and you know exactly which movement to avoid and you do it anyway because there is no other way to get the water out.

The water is cold now. It was hot at nine.

And there are three more things in the tub behind that shirt, and then you have to find somewhere for them to dry, and everything in that house that could take a wet garment already has one on it.

This is day eleven.

Let me say the first thing before anything else, because I am not going to build to it.

This is hard.

Not character building. Not a season with a lesson in it. Hard, in the ordinary way, in your shoulders and your back and the hour it takes out of every evening, and I am not going to spend one sentence of this article making it into something finer than it is.

I have read the kind of writing that does that. It calls this simplicity. It talks about how our grandmothers did it and how something has been lost. And every line of it is written by somebody who is not currently standing over a tub at eleven at night with a school uniform that has to be dry by seven.

Your grandmother did it because she had to, and she would have taken a machine the day it arrived, and she did.

So no. This is not a hidden gift. It is a machine you do not currently have, and the work has landed on your hands, and it is costing you an hour a night and a good deal of your back.

And you are doing it. Every single night for eleven nights, and nobody in that house has gone out in a dirty shirt.

That is the actual subject of this article.

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily

There is a line in Colossians that was written to people doing hard physical work with no audience.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. (Colossians 3:23, King James Version)

Whatsoever ye do.

Not whatsoever ministry ye do. Not the visible things, or the spiritual ones, or the parts of your life somebody might one day thank you for. Whatsoever, which is the widest word available, and it was written into a passage about the most ordinary and least regarded labor in that world.

And then: as to the Lord, and not unto men.

That is a change of audience, and it is the whole verse.

Because nobody sees this. That is one of the hardest parts of the last eleven nights and you have probably not said it out loud, because saying it sounds like fishing for something. But it is true. The washing appears clean. Everyone in that house puts on a shirt in the morning and nobody has once wondered how it got there, and if you said something they would be briefly sorry and then it would pass.

The work is invisible by design. That is what housework is: it is only noticed when it has not been done.

And this verse relocates the audience. Not unto men, who are not watching, and who could not really be expected to. As to the Lord, who is not in the room asking about it either, but who is not unaware of it, and who does not need it announced.

So the eleven nights are not unseen. They are unseen by the people in the house, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference matters at eleven at night with your back gone.

What you are doing at eleven at night is seen, and it has never once been the case that nobody knew about it. Colossians 3:23 puts the widest possible work in front of the Lord rather than in front of people, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody wringing out a shirt over the side of a tub.

Managing is not going without

Here is the practical half, and it is about a word you have been using about yourself.

You have been saying you are coping. And underneath that there is a quieter thought, which is that you are failing to provide something.

Look at what is actually true.

Eleven days. Nobody has been sent out in something dirty. The uniform has been ready every morning. The clothes are washed, dried somehow, and back in use. The household is running.

That is provision. It has been provided by your hands rather than by a motor, and it has cost you an hour a night instead of nothing, and the outcome is identical: everybody has clean clothes.

Doing it the long way is not the same as going without. Those are two completely different situations and you have been quietly filing yourself under the second one.

And I want to name what that filing does, because it is not harmless. If you believe you are failing, you cannot rest afterwards. You finish at half past eleven and instead of putting it down you carry a sense of deficit into the next day, and that is what has been making you so tired, more than the work itself.

You are not in deficit. You are doing a job that a machine used to do, by hand, on top of everything else, and the house is running.

And here is the other true thing that goes with it, because I said I would not romanticize this. It is still too much for one person, and it should not have to be you alone.

You are managing, and doing it the long way has never once been the same as going without. The written word calls the ordinary hidden work good and does it heartily, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been filing herself under failure.

One load, and let somebody help you

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the one you will want to skip.

Do one load by hand tonight and let one person in the house help you.

One load. Not the backlog. Not everything in the basket. One load, and then stop, even if there is more, because there is always more and there always will be until the machine is back.

And then the part that matters.

Ask somebody in that house to help you with it. Tonight.

The fourteen year old. The husband. The one who is old enough to wring and not old enough to be trusted with the delicates and does not need to be. Give them the actual job: you wash, they wring, you hang.

And you do not want to. I know exactly why, and it is not that they would not do it.

It is that it is quicker on your own. It is that you would have to explain it. It is that you would have to stand there while somebody does it wrong and not say anything. And underneath all three there is the real one, which is that asking makes the situation visible, and while you do it silently at eleven at night nobody has to notice that anything is wrong.

Let them notice. This is the thing that has been happening to your household for eleven days and you have been carrying it as though it were private.

And when they help, do not supervise. Do not redo it after they go up. Let it be done adequately by two people instead of perfectly by one, because you have run out of the capacity to do it perfectly and adequately is what is available.

You are able to let one person into it, and doing it silently has never once been what made it get done. Colossians 3:23 says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with two people at a tub instead of one.