Life and Laundry

Sundays are my days to do laundry, pay bills and sometimes, if absolutely necessary, clean my house.

This Sunday I put a load and a half of wet, washed clothes into the dryer. Worried that I might have overloaded this old machine, I opened it about 10 minutes before the dryer cycle ended, and to my surprise everything except for a heavy bath towel and one twisted bedsheet were dry.

I was grateful and then embarrassed. This meant I’d been wasting energy running my drier an extra 10 minutes for years and probably wearing out my clothes in the process.

I had a lot in common with my drier. Not a comforting thought!

I spend way too much energy tossing things around in my mind, my brain spinning in circles and my emotions on the verge of overheating.

Just as there will always be laundry that needs to be cleaned and dried, there will always be times when we have personal situations stained with frustration or muddied with confusion and uncertainty. 

You can throw dirty clothes into a washing machine, but where do you throw the messy challenges of life. You don’t throw them anywhere. You sit with them, learn from them, grow from them.

When clothes get dirty, they need to be washed. When life gets messy it needs to be understood.