Dust and Entropy

Sometimes, after being at home with the kids, a good portion of it alone, I just feel plain tired. I start to feel like all I ever do is pick up the same toys and wash the same dishes and wipe the same surfaces. I’ve become habitually seized with keeping the house tidy and clean—it’s cleaner now than it was before we had kids—because it helps me feel psychologically that the chaos is being contained. But it means I’m forever stooping to pick up scattered duplex Legos and dollhouse furniture and trucks and dinosaurs. I’m forever scrubbing the same kid cups and sippy straws and sweeping the same floors.

The kids are actually pretty good about cleaning up, probably due to my minor obsession with it; even Esme will mime grabbing a tissue to scrub the floor. I try to get them to clean up one set of toys before they start playing with another. But the sheer entropy still manages to overwhelm us. And sometimes entropy is the price of distraction: I’ll let Esme get into a box of pens whose caps I know she can’t open, or dump all the recycling out on the floor, if it means I get ten minutes to cook at the stove, or help Ellie with a piano passage, or test Eric on a sight word.

Sometimes, I sit down and consider the fact that I have to feed six people three times a day for the next decade. That every inch of the house is one I have to clean; by the time I’ve worked to one end, the first end is dirty again. That every toy and object has to be curated: collected, stored, maintained. My life feels like a fight against indomitable dust and entropy. The life of the homemaker is not for the faint-hearted.

How strange that, after years of book studies, my life has devolved into a succession of menial tasks. These are times when I think about what it meant that Jesus was a carpenter for the vast majority of his life: the Greek word tekton [Matt 13:55] may be translated craftsman, but seems to refer in particular to a worker in wood. Either way, he worked with his hands in the dust. He had to habitually sweep, wipe, wash, and clean. He had knowledge that amazed the elite intellectuals of his day [Luke 2:47], yet after astounding them all as a twelve year-old prodigy, he returned to a life of manual labor.

I know I am doing all of this with a purpose. It takes a certain brand of humility and love, I think, to do these kind of things repeatedly and cheerfully. Jesus didn’t just turn on the works at thirty; he was the same person then as he’d always been, and these kind of weeks, I pray for the kind of vision to see even the mundane as ministry.