5 Things in My House I Use Much Too Often

(And my quest to change it all.)

1. The Internet

The world wide web is a grand thing. We all know the pros and cons because, like many good things, it can quickly be turned into a bad thing. For some, it can feed addictions. For others, it allows them to indulge in a feeling of escape. For me, it’s a time suck.

 I don’t want to cut the Internet out of my life totally, because I do use it for a lot of good things.  It helps me learn Spanish.  (Hola, amigo! Como esta? Mucho gusto! No se como hacer el acento con el ordenador!) I totally googled that last one.

The Internet is where I turn when I want to look up the chords to a new worship song, or when I want to see pictures of my friends and family and find out what they’re doing, or when I want to chat with my mom. (We’re type-chatting right now. She’s coming to visit in three weeks, yay!) And I LOVE looking up copycat recipes. I’ve found a whole lot of great recipes from cooking blogs and recipe sites. So it can be good, but let’s be honest – it can also suck away vast quantities of time. I often find myself staring at “20 Amazing Animal Pictures That Will Change Your Life” or “31 Celebrities That Raise Chickens.” I click on links to articles that I see posted because, “Hey, my friend thought it was interesting, so surely it must be interesting!” One thing inevitably leads to another and before I know it, I’ve spent an hour on the Internet and don’t even remember why I sat down at my computer to begin with.

Well sir, no more. I’m putting on my perspectacles (blatantly stolen from a great blog post by “G” at momastery.com, one of the ones worth reading!) and seeing what I could be doing with all that time. Laundry. Reading to Bella. Bible studies. Prayer. Crafts. Talking with my nieces on the phone. Playing music with Josh. Writing blog posts that will challenge people to change their lives….er….you get the idea. I can be using that time a lot more productively.

2. The trash can

Bella and I have been reading the Little House books this summer, and one thing jumps out at me over and over again – how little they wasted. An animal that was killed was used up, piece by piece – bones, meat, fat, hide…everything had a use. When crops were harvested, the fruit went to the house, the tops and roots and chaff were used for animals. Scraps of food were fed to the stock. Apple cores were saved for the entire year and made into vinegar. Laura and Mary ran around picking up nails from the ground when Pa was roofing the house. If a nail was bent, Pa straightened it and used it. “It wouldn’t do to waste a nail.” Nothing was wasted, because waste was a sin.

Last week, I cleaned out my refrigerator on trash day, and threw away an entire bag of food. A whole bag of things I forgot about, thinks I never got around to, things that I meant to make but never did, things that had spoiled or turned. It was much more than I usually throw away because I had a terrible time keeping up with anything this summer, but as I hauled that bulging bag to the curb, I felt appalled, remorseful and shamed all at the same time.

Usually, I feel like I waste less than the “average person.” (I put it in quotes because really, I don’t know what the average person wastes. But I know that when I take my trash out on trash day, I usually have fewer bags than most other houses, so there’s that.) I recycle everything that can be recycled in our city. I collect all paper and lightweight cardstock in a basket in my pantry, and when it’s full I take it to school to the paper recycler. I give all of our recyclable paper to Bella to draw on and craft with before I recycle it, so that she has a constant supply of paper without using up new paper. I compost and save food scraps for the chickens. And yet, there I was, dragging at LEAST $50 (I nearly choke thinking about it) worth of bad food out to the trash because I just never got around to it.

That is not pleasing to God. It shows a lack of respect for the bounty that he has given to me, and my goal is to stop that. I want to be diligent, to show good stewardship with all of my resources – time, money, food, everything. No more waste!

3. The dishwasher

No, I don’t have anything intrinsically against a dishwasher. It’s more about what the dishwasher represents. When Josh and I were first married, I never used this particular appliance. It came with the house, but I just didn’t use it. I use it to store my pots and pans. I washed my dishes in the sink, which is what I had done my whole life, because growing up, we didn’t have a dishwasher. Occasionally I would have a pile of them to do, but most of the time, I got them done in a reasonable amount of time.

Now, the past three years, I use the dishwasher because I feel like it is the only thing helping me keep my head above water. Some days I look at my counter and I am appalled at the pile of dishes everywhere. The past several months, actually, Josh has been doing the majority of housework and that is the only thing that has kept my head above water! I’d like to say that I just don’t have enough time to do what needs to be done, but that’s not entirely true. The truth is, I don’t use my time in the best way possible, resulting in a pileup of housework. If I were more diligent, and finished things as they came up instead of putting them off, I would not need to load up three loads of dishes. Again, it’s not the dishwasher that I want to cut out of my life, it’s the way in which I use the dishwasher – namely, to dig myself out of a hole that could have been avoided had I acted more wisely.

4. The scale

When I was 20 years old, I never weighed myself. I don’t think I even owned a scale for the first several years we were married. Ah, the good old days, when I could binge on Coke floats and Kit Kat bars with absolutely no ill effects. Not so, anymore. At 26 my metabolism suddenly changed (curse you, genetics!) and, to quote a dear departed German friend, “now I’m spreading out all over the place.”

Sometimes it’s like a weird mole or a nasty bruise. You don’t actually like to look at it, yet you feel compelled. The number on the scale never used to mean anything to me. I would step on and step off every now and then with this breezy little air. “Oh, I see I am still a twig. Excellent. Well, I’ll just be on my way then.” No relief, no burden to know….just idle curiosity.

Now, that same act is performed with trepidation. Where will the number be? I dare not hope it’s gone down, but has it gone up? The result of this auspicious moment in time can make or break my day. I must see. I simply must know.

And now, I resolve to stop. I am trying, every day. And some days are fantastic, and some are not. And I realize that I am not perfect, but I also realize that as long as I keep trying to be healthy, I’m never truly beaten. I’m not going to stop caring, I’m just going to stop being saddled to a number. The number is not me; it’s my daily decisions that define who I am. So I am going to focus on those daily decisions, and not whatever result they may bring on a scale.

5. The rinse cycle on the washing machine

Quite often, I throw a load of clothes into the washing machine. I go on about my business and realize, sometimes an entire day later, that I never put them in the dryer. After that length of time, I can’t just throw them in – they’d reek of dryer funk, as I like to call it. (You know, that nasty mildew smell clothes get if you wait too long to put them into the dryer.) So I have to rinse them again.

Then I go about my business, and sometimes, an entire day after that when I can’t find my favorite jeans, I realize that I never threw them into the dryer. Again. So they have to be rinsed. Again. Our washer is not the new breed of quiet, efficient washers. It takes 45 gallons of water for a load, or some obscene number like that. I’m wasting electricity and resources every time I fail to remember a simple chore.

Again, I am not lamenting my washer’s rinse cycle. What I am concerned about is the amount of carelessness that I allow in my daily life. I just don’t pay attention to something, even something easy, and it ends up costing me time, energy and resources. Not the way I want to live my life. There are other areas in which I struggle with carelessness too; the laundry is just an example. So my goal, ever moving forward, is to have a care – to focus on tasks at hand and see them through, so that I don’t end up with unnecessary waste and having to redo tasks that have already been done.

Obviously, a lot of the things in this list overlap in a very definable cause-and-effect type of way.  This is not a soap box or a rant. I’m not full of righteous indignation, thinking that you all need to be more like me and take up these same causes. But for me, they are specific areas of my life that the Lord has been dealing with me about, so they are things that I am forever working on.