A Mess Makes Me Think Worse Of Myself

You went past the counter at about ten and said something about yourself.

Not out loud. It took under a second, it was barely words, and if somebody had stopped you and asked what you had just thought you would have had trouble reporting it.

But it was a verdict. Something in the region of: look at the state of it, look at the state of me.

And you carried it up the stairs.

That happens most evenings. There is a moment on the way past where the room is assessed, and the assessment is not about the room. It comes out about you, and it is delivered in a tone you would never use to another human being.

That is what this article is for, and it is the hinge of this whole site, so I am going to say it outright rather than arriving at it gently.

A tidy house is not a moral achievement.

It is a convenience. It makes things easier to find and pleasanter to sit in and quicker to cook in, and those are real goods, and none of them is a virtue. A woman with clear counters is not a better woman. She is a woman with clear counters.

And the reverse, which is the one that matters tonight: a full counter says nothing about you. Nothing about your worth, your discipline, your love for the people in that house, or your standing before God. It is a description of a horizontal surface at ten in the evening.

That link between order and goodness is not from scripture. It got into you from somewhere else, and it has been charging you a small amount of self respect every evening for years.

I want to take it apart properly.

Ye make clean the outside of the cup

There is a rebuke in Matthew that is aimed precisely at reading a person from their surfaces.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. (Matthew 23:25, King James Version)

Ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter.

Now be careful with this, because there is a cheap version of it and I am not going to preach the cheap version. This verse does not say that tidy people are hypocrites. It is not a license to feel superior about a messy kitchen, and anybody who uses it that way has just built the same false link facing the other direction.

What it does is far more useful to you.

It says outright that the state of the outside is not evidence about the inside.

That is the whole mechanism of the rebuke. These men had spotless surfaces and it told you nothing about them, and the reason he can say so with such force is that the two things are genuinely independent. If a clean outside reliably indicated a clean inside, there would be no charge to bring.

So the principle underneath is exactly what you need at the foot of your stairs: appearance is not character. In either direction.

And notice who he is not talking to. He is not addressing tired people whose kitchens got away from them. Nowhere in the Gospels does anybody get rebuked for the state of their house. Not once. It is not a category of failure that appears anywhere in scripture, and if it were as important as your evenings suggest, you would expect it to come up.

What comes up constantly is how people treat each other. That is the thing measured, over and over, in every direction.

Your counter is not on the list. It has never been on the list.

The state of the outside is not evidence about the inside, and a surface has never once been a report on a person. Matthew 23:25 breaks the link between the clean outside and the state of the one holding it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody passing a counter at ten in the evening.

Where the link actually came from

Here is the practical half, and it is worth knowing the source of a thing that has been sentencing you nightly.

That link is largely inherited, and it is not very old.

It arrived through a particular idea that housekeeping is a woman's character made visible, sold hard for about a hundred years, through advertising first and then through everything else. A clean home meant a good mother. An untidy one meant something had gone wrong with the woman in it, and that idea was engineered because it sells things.

You did not choose to believe it. Nobody sat you down and taught it. It came in through a hundred small doors and it is now so deep that it fires in under a second on a staircase without producing a single sentence you could quote.

And you can tell it is inherited rather than reasoned, because you do not apply it to anybody else.

Think of the house you feel warmest about. Somebody's kitchen you love being in. It is not the tidiest one you know. You have never once walked into a friend's house, seen a full counter and thought less of her, and if somebody suggested you should, you would find it ridiculous.

You have one standard for everybody in the world and a different one for yourself, and only one of them is real.

And here is what it has been costing, which is more than a bad feeling on the stairs. A person who reads her house as her character cannot rest in her own home. The room is never neutral. There is nowhere to sit in that house where you are not being assessed, because the assessor lives with you and works nights.

You do not apply this standard to another living soul, and it has never once been reasoned rather than inherited. The written word measures how people treat each other and never once measures a countertop, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has nowhere in her own house to sit unassessed.

Leave one thing out on purpose

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately the wrong way round.

Leave one thing out tonight on purpose and go to bed anyway.

One thing. Something you would normally deal with before going up: the pan on the stove, the shopping bags on the chair, the bowl by the sink, the pile on the table.

Choose it deliberately. Look at it and say, out loud if you can: I am leaving that there tonight.

Then go up and go to bed.

Now here is what makes this different from the nights you were too tired to do it, which is most nights.

On those nights, it stays out and you go to bed with the verdict. This time, you decide. And a thing you have chosen cannot be evidence against you, because the meaning of it is set by you at the moment of choosing.

And in the morning it will be there, and here is the finding: nothing happened. You are the same person. Nobody came. The day works.

That is the entire proof and it is worth more than any amount of my arguing, because you will have run the experiment in your own house.

And do not deal with it first thing to compensate. Let it sit there through breakfast. That is when the demonstration really lands, because morning is when the verdict is usually loudest, and this time it will have nothing to attach to.

And you may find it uncomfortable. That discomfort is the link itself, straining. It is not your conscience. Your conscience is for how you treat people, and it has nothing to say about a pan.

You are able to choose it, and a thing chosen has never once been able to stand as evidence against you. Matthew 23:25 refuses to read a person from the outside of a cup, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody going up the stairs past something left out on purpose.