I Clean Houses And I Lie About It

Somebody asks what you do and you say, oh, a bit of everything at the moment.

Or you name the job you had four years ago and let them assume it is still true. Or you ask them a question about themselves, which works every time and which you are now very good at.

And the work itself is fine. That is the thing that makes this so confusing to explain to anybody.

You are not miserable at work. The houses are quiet, the work is real, you are good at it, and there is a woman on Thursdays whose kitchen you like being in.

It is the question that is exhausting.

You are tired from two things and have only been counting one of them, and the work of hiding a job has never once been free.

Let me put some numbers on that, in the loose way you can put numbers on a thing like this.

The cleaning takes the hours it takes. The hiding runs all day. It runs at the school gate, at church, in the group chat, at a family thing where somebody's husband asks a friendly question.

And every one of those is a small piece of arithmetic performed at speed: what will I say, how much is true, will this come back round.

That is the tiredness. It has never once been the floors.

Why have I found grace in thine eyes

There is a woman in Ruth doing the lowest paid agricultural work available, in public, in a town where everybody could see her, and she says something that gets to the heart of this.

Then she fell on her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and said unto him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger? (Ruth 2:10, King James Version)

Seeing I am a stranger.

She names her own position out loud, to the man who owns the field, without softening it. She is a foreigner, she is poor, she is gleaning behind the workers, and she says so.

You are looking at a woman who named her own situation to the most powerful person in the field, and a plain account of where somebody stands has never once cost them anything in that book. Ruth 2:10 says seeing I am a stranger, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept her sentence rather than a more dignified one.

And look at what she is not doing. She is not hiding in the field. She is out there, in daylight, doing it where the whole town can see.

The gleaning is the least concealed work in the Bible, and the account never once suggests she should have been embarrassed by it.

You have an entire book of scripture named after a woman who worked in public at the bottom of the ladder, and visible ordinary work has never once been treated there as something to be managed. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that whole account in, and it is written in Ruth 2 with the fieldwork described in detail.

The hiding is teaching you something

Now the hard part, and I will say it once and then move on.

Every time you change the subject, something gets confirmed in you. Not consciously. Underneath.

What gets confirmed is: this is a thing that must not be said. And a thing that must not be said becomes, over about a year, a thing that is shameful, even if it did not start out that way.

You did not begin with shame about this. The shame is being manufactured by the hiding, daily, in small amounts.

You are producing the feeling you are trying to avoid, and a habit of concealment has never once left a person feeling better about the thing concealed. The written word puts a woman's low work in the open in front of a whole town, and the Spirit of God is the one who breaks a cycle that has been running by itself.

And there is a second cost, and it is the one that will matter in five years.

You are not being known. The people at that school gate do not know what your days look like. Which means that when something hard happens, they will not know where you are or what you are carrying, and you will be surprised by how alone it feels.

You have been keeping people out of a life they would happily have been in, and a subject changed at a gate has never once been the same as privacy. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person out from behind a habit, and Ruth 2:10 has a woman speak plainly about her own position to somebody who could have despised her for it.

Take it, and say the word

So the assignment, and there is a specific word in it.

Take the shift, and tell one person plainly what you are doing and why. Ruth 2:10 has a woman name her own standing out loud in a field, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present while a person says what she actually does.

And use the real word. Clean. I clean houses.

Not I help people out. Not I do some domestic work. Not I look after a couple of properties. The real word, in one syllable, without a softer one wrapped around it.

You are able to say one plain word, and the actual name of a job has never once made a woman smaller in a room worth standing in. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a person the plain word, and the written word lets a gleaner call herself a stranger without a flinch.

And pick somebody safe for the first one. Not the hardest audience. A friend, a sister, the woman at church who has never once made you feel small.

You are allowed to start with a safe person, and choosing the gentle room first has never once been the same as not doing it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is not in a hurry with somebody, and it is written in Ruth 2:10 that the first person she said it to was the one who had already been kind.