If You're Going to Sit at the Feet of Jesus, It Helps to Have Clean Floors: The Year of Living Expectantly

My resolution this year is to wash my floors more often – my literal floors, not the metaphoric floors in my head where dust webs have woven walls and sectioned off rooms. I resolve to take more concern for the washing of my floors – not the spiritual floor boards where I spiritually walk in circles looking for missing metaphors like glasses, phone chargers and remote controls, where I shuffle allegorical baskets of laundry and chairs and half-filled coffee cups, and where I figuratively pick symbolically small pieces of Lego out of swept up piles of metaphoric dust and crumbs. This year I'm not polishing my precious thoughts or words, and I'm not waxing the scuffed soul-floors where I actually desire to sit and listen and ponder the words that Jesus has for me. I'm going to wash my literal floors – a lot. I'm going to wash them religiously.

If I thought I could manage it, I would resolve myself to other meaningful things, like washing and putting away my dishes every day, washing/folding/putting away laundry every day, always having fresh lemons in the house and water in the fridge, and drinking eight glasses of water every day, exercising to Jillian Michaels every day, writing every day, eating less chocolate and more kale every day. You know, normal things that other people do all the time. I can't commit to those things because life is short and I will fail and, as Anne Lamott says, I don't need that kind of negativity in my life. Ashes to ashes, dust we shall have with us always. Something like that.

Washing your floors is the housecleaning equivalent of hair-maintenance (which, while we're at it, I should also spend more time on). If your floors are a mess, it doesn't really matter what else you do to the place. Clean your floors, and miraculously everything else feels sweetly bidding of care.

I want to live in anticipation – that is the goal for this year. I want to live expectantly – ready for Jesus when he shows up with words of wisdom for me. It is the business of religion – this fixating on the external, this arduous, mundane process of securing undistracted devotion to God, this making ready to sit at His feet.

In 2017, I'm finding religion.