Kitchen Floor Metaphor

On Sunday afternoon, after running errands on a rainy day, the Common Household Husband asked me, “What are the plans for the rest of the day?”  I said, “I’m going to scrub the kitchen floor.”  He sighed, and pressed his hands to his head.  “Why do these things have to happen on the weekend, when I’m here?” he said.

I said, “If I do it today there is proof that I actually washed the floor because everybody’s here to see it happen.”  He said, “Can’t you just take a picture?”

The Procrastinator’s Club, of which I am a member, approved the idea of putting the task off until the next day, when nobody would be around.  Monday I did scrub the floor, hands-n-knees technique.  This lengthy painful process gave me plenty of time to think theological thoughts.  And since there are few things churchy folks love more than a metaphor, I came up with my own:  God’s grace is like maid service.

And I will now inflict a detailed explanation of my metaphor on you. See, I could try to clean up all the dirt on the floor myself (Reader’s Cliff Notes: the kitchen floor is a metaphor for Life).

The maid service didn’t put the dirt there (the dirt is a metaphor for Sin!). The maid service also didn’t deposit the glob of chocolate ice cream that congealed in a sticky little puddle a week ago.

But the maid service would enter the house cheerily, do the dirty work, and clean it all up!  For free!  I could stop my futile scrubbing, which never really gets rid of all the dirt anyway.

I think God is willing to come clean the kitchen floor because God doesn’t want us to be wasting our time scrubbing our own floor.  God wants us to be free to go out in the yard to do some gardening and play and cheer up the rest of the world.

Enough! Enough! my few readers cry.  Okay, no more metaphor.  That was pretty painful, maybe even more painful than scrubbing the floor.

Today I e-mailed the photos to my husband.  He called me to ask, pointedly, “Why did you send me a picture of someone peeing into a bucket?”  Certainly that is something that only a man could say about my photo of the bucket.

My leg muscles really hurt today.  Next time I’m going to use the Swiffer mop.  Because, really, no one ever notices when I scrub the kitchen floor.