“Whenever you have order, your time will multiply and, as a result, you will be able to give more glory to God, working more in his service.”
St. Josemaría Escrivá (The Way, 80)
I have lived with nuns before and I have also visited monasteries and houses of parish priests as well and they are quite the busy people, but they always managed to have impeccable dwellings.
Think about the time it takes you to look for your keys every time you are going out the door, because you can never find them. Think about the time it takes you to clean the kitchen or the bathrooms, because you wait until they are absolutely filthy and need some serious cleaning. Think about the time it takes you to look for that spiritual book you love reading, but it’s probably buried under all the clothes that you still need to fold since last week. I don’t know about you, but I know I’m guilty of at least one of those situations.
Wouldn’t it be much easier if we place our keys in the same place every time? Or if we would clean the kitchen every time after we cook or the bathrooms every few days? Or if we fold the clothes as soon as we get a chance instead of having them sit on the corner for days?
Of course it would be nice to be organized and ordered around the house,
but to do so requires willpower and discipline. What St. Josemaría Escrivá says above about order should inspire us to be more organized: he actually says that if we would have order, we would have more time to give glory to God and to work for Him. Isn’t that quite something? Think about it. You really feel like praying the rosary, but you just can’t remember where you put it and after 15 minutes of searching for it you give up and turn the TV on instead. If you would have kept the rosary on a usual place, you would have spent those 15 minutes praying it instead of looking for it!
The more ordered we are around the house, the more prone we will be to pray or to sit down and read or do something else that will be worth our time and the less we will be tempted to turn the TV on. Usually when we turn the TV on or surf the internet with no aim in particular, we are doing so to avoid something else. And the truth is that the dishes in the sink will not go away and the soap scum in the bath tub will not go away either, so we need to find a way in which we can glorify God in every small task we perform. While cleaning the kitchen, give thanks to God for giving you a kitchen in which you can cook delicious foods for you and your family and think of those families who had no dinner tonight and had no dinner table either. When folding clothes, thank God for providing you and your family with clothes, no matter how old they can be or how few holes they may already have, because so many have no clothes or the few they have they may be embarrassed to wear on a daily basis.
The point is not to become a neat freak, but to have our homes reflect the ordering of our minds and hearts and to keep them as a welcoming dwelling.
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