The kitchen must be the favorite room in nearly every home. It’s where the family meets to share their meals and their day, to gather important information—“Mom! Where are my good jeans?”—to pick up sustenance when the time between meals is long and the activities vigorous, and a place for sharing thoughts, dreams, and childhood troubles over chocolate chip cookies and ice cold milk. When the kitchen is full of people and laughter, all is right with the world.
That makes the kitchen floor a microcosm of how we all live. All you have to do is drop something small, something that requires your face to be an inch above the floor trying to spy the odd shape or color, and suddenly you know everything anyone has eaten, spilled, or tracked in, even if you clean your floor regularly. If I had every dustpan full of sweepings over my 38 years of marriage, it would make a ten foot pile high of sugar granules, flour, cornmeal, panko, cookie crumbs, Cheerios, oats, blueberries, chopped parsley, basil, and rosemary, the papery skins of onions and garlic cloves, freshly ground coffee beans, tiny, stray low dose aspirins, grains of driveway sand, clumps of garden soil, yellow clay, limerock, soot, and burnt wood, strands of hair from blonde to nearly black to gray and white, frayed threads, missing buttons, assorted screws, and loose snips from the edges of coupons. If I had never cleaned the floor at all, it would be layered with coffee drips, dried splashes of dishwater, bacon grease and olive oil splatter, tea stains, grape juice, and sticky spots from honey and molasses spills while I was baking. Put it all together and you would have a pretty good idea how we live our lives.
Every soul has a kitchen floor, places where the accumulated spills of life gather. We must regularly clean that floor, just as I am constantly sweeping and wiping and mopping, trying to stay ahead of the messes we make. As soon as I miss a day or a week, I have even more to clean up. It would be ridiculous to think I could ignore that floor and no one would know about us, wouldn’t it?
Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” Matt 12:34. You can deny it all you want, but what you speak shows who you really are. I can say I never bake, but whoever sweeps my floor will know better. I can pretend we don’t like Italian cuisine, but the evidence is right there. I can tell everyone we live in the city instead of the country, but the soil on my floor will say otherwise. It is getting harder for me to see those things now and to sweep them up perfectly, but my blindness to them will not keep others from knowing exactly what I do here all day long.
That kitchen floor of a heart will tell on you too. All you have to do is open your mouth. If you don’t keep it cleaned up, if you don’t monitor the things you store in it, it could belie your protestations of a righteous life. Sooner or later a word will slip out, a thought will take root and become a spoken idea. I heard someone say once that you cannot imagine in others what is not already in your own heart.
Of course, what’s on your floor could prove your righteous life instead of denying it. So take a moment today to examine your kitchen floor. Let it remind you to examine your heart as well. I had much rather people see sugar and cookie crumbs than Satan’s muddy footprints.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer, Psa 19:14.
Dene Ward
That makes the kitchen floor a microcosm of how we all live. All you have to do is drop something small, something that requires your face to be an inch above the floor trying to spy the odd shape or color, and suddenly you know everything anyone has eaten, spilled, or tracked in, even if you clean your floor regularly. If I had every dustpan full of sweepings over my 38 years of marriage, it would make a ten foot pile high of sugar granules, flour, cornmeal, panko, cookie crumbs, Cheerios, oats, blueberries, chopped parsley, basil, and rosemary, the papery skins of onions and garlic cloves, freshly ground coffee beans, tiny, stray low dose aspirins, grains of driveway sand, clumps of garden soil, yellow clay, limerock, soot, and burnt wood, strands of hair from blonde to nearly black to gray and white, frayed threads, missing buttons, assorted screws, and loose snips from the edges of coupons. If I had never cleaned the floor at all, it would be layered with coffee drips, dried splashes of dishwater, bacon grease and olive oil splatter, tea stains, grape juice, and sticky spots from honey and molasses spills while I was baking. Put it all together and you would have a pretty good idea how we live our lives.
Every soul has a kitchen floor, places where the accumulated spills of life gather. We must regularly clean that floor, just as I am constantly sweeping and wiping and mopping, trying to stay ahead of the messes we make. As soon as I miss a day or a week, I have even more to clean up. It would be ridiculous to think I could ignore that floor and no one would know about us, wouldn’t it?
Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” Matt 12:34. You can deny it all you want, but what you speak shows who you really are. I can say I never bake, but whoever sweeps my floor will know better. I can pretend we don’t like Italian cuisine, but the evidence is right there. I can tell everyone we live in the city instead of the country, but the soil on my floor will say otherwise. It is getting harder for me to see those things now and to sweep them up perfectly, but my blindness to them will not keep others from knowing exactly what I do here all day long.
That kitchen floor of a heart will tell on you too. All you have to do is open your mouth. If you don’t keep it cleaned up, if you don’t monitor the things you store in it, it could belie your protestations of a righteous life. Sooner or later a word will slip out, a thought will take root and become a spoken idea. I heard someone say once that you cannot imagine in others what is not already in your own heart.
Of course, what’s on your floor could prove your righteous life instead of denying it. So take a moment today to examine your kitchen floor. Let it remind you to examine your heart as well. I had much rather people see sugar and cookie crumbs than Satan’s muddy footprints.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer, Psa 19:14.
Dene Ward
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