Slimy slime

My wife left me last week. Calm down she just went to the Keys ahead of me in order to practice for her participation in our church’s Christmas pageant this coming weekend. I will be joining her in Islamorada tomorrow and today I am attempting to clean up our house after nearly a week of bachelorhood and deer hunting. It isn’t pretty and I will have my work cut out for me today in order to get it close to the way that it was when she left,(spotless).

One thing I detest is house cleaning. It just does not seem “manly” to me for a grown man to be vacuuming, sweeping, making up the bed, taking care of dirty clothes, or washing dishes Ughh! These chores have always been done by my wife and I consider them to be woman’s work. (Ha, that should stimulate some subscription cancellations and nasty e-mails from all of my liberal minded readers. Hey, before you send me the nasty letter, you should know that I do my part by taking care of all of the heavy stuff, like watching football from the couch and eating some chips).

Now please do not get the impression that I refuse to wash dishes or do house work, because I am lazy; there is not a lazy bone in my body and my work ethic is as strong as anyone that you will likely ever meet. I simply focus my work effort in other directions than house cleaning. In addition to thinking that it is not “manly” to do housework, I absolutely detest getting dirty food on my hands; it is nasty and gives me cold chills up my spine just to look at dirty dishes and think about the slimy mess in the sink or on the kitchen table. Nothing is more onerous to me than washing dishes. I simply refuse to do it. I would rather throw them away than have to wash them.

But for the most part this past week I have been using paper plates and plastic cups and thank God for microwave ovens. Consequently, as I looked into the sink this morning and surveyed the situation, I did not have that many dirty dishes. I thought that perhaps, just maybe, this might be doable without throwing any dishes away; however there was one particularly creepy looking bowl with hardened chili in it and I was wondering how I could get it off of the bowl without having to touch the bowl and get that mess all over my hands.


Now my wife thinks that this line of thinking is silly, especially considering that I don’t mind cleaning slimy nasty fish or as of late gutting, skinning, and processing the couple of dozen deer that we have been harvesting off my plantation. She claims the blood and guts involved with those processes are far grosser than the dishes. I don’t agree, nor care what she says or thinks, slimy fish and deer guts are no comparison; dishes are just plain “sick”.


I was thinking how this line of thinking parallels what we see in our churches today. Some folks will gossip until their tongue is raw because they saw a deacon from their church at the grocery store with a six pack of beer and a couple of bottles of wine in their cart. And yet they think nothing about going home and watching an x-rated movie or tuning into a porn site on the Internet. Jesus addressed this often, but perhaps His best analogy was when he told us not to talk about a splinter being in someone else’s eye when we have a “board” in our own. We should leave the judging of our brothers and sisters to God and worry about getting our own act together.

Hypocrites have probably turned more would be church attendees away from church and the Lord than most anything else that I can think of. We should not look beyond our own domain and cut everyone some slack. I am sure if we all will look deep enough we will find a thing or two that could be improved in our own lives and there should be plenty enough to worry about without criticizing others for their weaknesses.

I resolved the chili problem by running steaming hot water over the bowl while I used a spoon to rake the dried and hardened chili off of it and down the drain. I never even touched the bowl with my hand. A stroke of genius if I do say so myself

Matt. 7:1
Judge not, that you be not
judged.