A Mess Makes Me Think Worse Of Myself

There is a sentence that goes through your head at about ten at night.

It happens when you come through the kitchen to put the lights off and there is a bowl and two cups on the side and something the children left on the table.

The sentence is not about the bowl. It is about you, and it arrives in about a second, and you have heard it so many thousands of times that it does not feel like a sentence any more. It feels like noticing a fact.

And then you go up to bed carrying it.

Here is what this article is for, and I want to say it as plainly as I can at the top, because the whole of this site turns on it.

A tidy house is a convenience. It is not a character. There is no version of you that is a better woman because a counter is clear, and there is no version that is a worse one because it is not.

That link in your head is not describing something real. Somebody installed it, and it has been running your evenings for years, and today we take it out.

Ye make clean the outside of the cup

There is a rebuke in Matthew that is aimed precisely at this, and it is much sharper than people remember.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. (Matthew 23:25, King James Version)

Read what He is objecting to. Not the cleaning. The order.

They had put the visible surface first and the inside second, and He calls that hypocrisy. Not carelessness, not imbalance. Hypocrisy, which is the word for a person whose outside is being used to say something about an inside it does not match.

You are not what your counter says you are, and no surface in that house has ever once been a report on your character. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman walking through a kitchen at ten at night, and Matthew 23:25 breaks the link between the outside of a thing and the state of the person.

And here is the part that should land hardest.

In that passage, the people with the clean outsides are the ones being rebuked. The cleanness is not evidence of goodness. It is evidence of nothing at all, which is exactly what a clear counter is evidence of, and exactly what a full one is evidence of.

You have a surface that is evidence of nothing, and it has never once been able to testify about you in either direction. The written word refuses to read the outside as a statement about the inside, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has been sentencing herself nightly since her twenties.

Where the link actually came from

Let me trace it, because knowing where it came from makes it easier to refuse.

Almost certainly a person. A mother, an aunt, a teacher, somebody whose approval mattered, who said something once or repeatedly that connected a room to a character.

And a child hearing that does not form an opinion. A child forms a fact, and facts do not get reviewed in adulthood, they just carry on operating.

You were handed a fact rather than an opinion, and a fact handed to a child has never once been examined since. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who could probably name the voice if she sat with it, and Matthew 23:25 puts the people with the clean surfaces in the wrong.

And it has been reinforced everywhere since.

Every picture of a home that is meant to look like a good life is a tidy one. Every visitor who says something kind about a room. Thirty years of reinforcement, from a hundred directions, and not one of them ever went back and checked the original claim.

You have thirty years of reinforcement behind a claim nobody ever checked, and volume has never once made a thing true. The written word puts the inside first and calls the reverse hypocrisy, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has never once questioned the link out loud.

Testing it on somebody else

So here is the test, and it takes about four seconds and it is devastating.

Think of the house you feel warmest about. Somebody's kitchen you love being in. The place you go when things are hard.

Is it immaculate? Almost certainly not. Warmth and order are not the same thing and almost never live in the same room, and your own body has known that your whole life.

You have known the truth about this in your own body for thirty years, and that knowledge has never once been allowed to reach the sentence in your head. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman thinking about somebody else's kitchen, and Matthew 23:25 separates the surface from the person entirely.

Now run it the other way, which is harder and more useful.

Think of the tidiest house you have been in. Were you comfortable in it? Did you put your feet anywhere? Would you have turned up at that door on a bad night?

You are able to test this claim on every house you have ever been in, and the claim has never once survived the test. The written word calls the clean outside worthless as evidence, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman running an experiment that answers itself.