The Importance of Laundry

Today I’m doing the laundry. I only know one person who absolutely loves to do laundry (you know who you are, Christy.) It’s not my favorite chore, but I don’t hate it either. While waiting on the dark load to spin today, I took a walk through laundry lane.

It started the summer before third grade. The latchkey neighbor kids got to stay home alone while their parents worked. I helped them do their chores, which included folding laundry, so they could come out to play sooner. It was the coolest responsibility ever! And my first clue that someone had to do work to keep clean underwear in my drawer.

Fast forward to my young married life, where we did weekly laundry in a shared venue for the first several years. Sometimes at a public laundry mat and sometimes at community washers and dryers in our apartment complex. Why did they always have dirty black and white linoleum? My husband and I were in college and usually studied while waiting for the clanging machines to complete their cycles. We fed the dryer one quarter at a time until the towels were so hot you could hardly carry them to the folding counter we had just sanitized.

Then we got two laundry pairs of our own.  One pair was the washer and dryer out in the hot south Texas garage of our first home. The other pair was the darling boy and girl who more than doubled our weekly loads of laundry. Doing laundry was no longer a weekly event, but was crammed into the tiny crevices of our hectic schedule in bits and pieces.

In that era, we removed perfectionism from the laundry. My parents were perfectionist laundry people. When I was young, Mom designated Tuesday for wash day and clothesline drying, followed by Wednesday ironing day. On ironing day, she used a giant glass bottle of water with a sprinkler topper to re-dampen the clothes. She ironed the 100% cotton sheets until polyester cotton blend was invented. Even then she still ironed the pillowcases so they would be crisp that first night you laid your head on the pillow. So you can imagine the burden of laundry guilt I carried when one day I had a moment of enlightenment. I didn’t HAVE to fold the underwear, just because my mom did. I’ll never forget how liberating it felt to just fling a handful of undies into the drawer!

When our kids each turned 14, they were promoted from laundry helpers to “do your own laundry” scale of responsibility. It came with a few “cruel and unusual” and “none of my friends have to do their own laundry” critiques. But later when they went off to college, their laundry was not on our list of worries. The weekly laundry chore for my husband and me decreased back to the basic four loads: lights, darks, towels, and sheets. All in the comfort of a cheery room dedicated to laundry.

Now in the relaxed pace of retirement life, I’m experiencing the pleasure of doing laundry again like my eight-year-old self. The swish of the water. The fresh smell of the detergent. The time to do Pinterest while waiting to switch loads. The little ditty my dryer sings to me when it’s finished. The “all is well” sense of normalcy that comes from putting away clean clothes for another week and resting on fresh sheets tonight.

Nothing makes the clean sheets better than knowing my soul has been washed today as well. I John 1:9 [ESV] says If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Jesus washes me up from the grime of my sinful humanity. He gives me robes of rightness because my own rags are filthy with wrongness. He never wearies of my coming to Him to ask forgiveness. I’m promised a full spiritual cleansing every time. Every day is laundry day for the soul. And nothing sleeps better than a clean soul on some clean sheets.