Finding Grace in the Vegetable Drawer

It happens when I reach into the vegetable drawer of the fridge for the last onion and a bright orange bell pepper. My eyes are drawn to the pile of old onion shavings left in the netting, sifting through the small slits of plastic. I know they need to be thrown away and my tendency to let things sit for as long as I can stand them, so I grab as many pieces of the papery shavings my hands can hold. In the two steps over to the trash can they sift through my fingers and fly through the air like petals on the wind.

As I pick up my vegetables again, I see it. It was underneath the onion shavings stuck in the small divot at the front of the drawer. A sticky, brown substance caked in the corners from old vegetables makes me thankful God never gifted me with a sense of smell.

I set aside the vegetables, shift what’s left inside to another shelf, and pulled out the drawer. I wait for steam to rise from the running water before settling it in the sink to soak. Hot water squeezes itself through the muck, loosening its grip on the vegetable drawer from underneath.

Make Your House A Home

We’ve called this house our home for almost three years now, and this is the first time I’ve cleaned the inside of the fridge. I know. I know. I can hear your horrified gasp through the computer. It’s disgusting. (To be clear, I have cleaned up any messes or spills in the fridge as I became aware of them, but I never deep cleaned.)

About a year ago, I listened to a podcast interviewing The Lazy Genius, Kendra Adachi where she explained her system of cleaning her house during the week. Adachi sets aside a little time every day to clean a specific place in her home. The schedule insures you do a little at a time to avoid all your housecleaning landing on one exhausting, awful day, and helps prioritize what matters most in your life.

I’m a slow processor, which means I sometimes need to sit with ideas for a long time before fully wrapping my mind around them enough to do anything about it. As it is in writing, it is in living. After we married in 2018, our chores all seemed to fall on Saturday mornings, bleeding into Saturday afternoon, until we fell on the couch completely spent by Saturday evening. It felt like all we did on the weekend was try to catch up with the chores we neglected to do during the week, and it was exhausting. All this weekend work left us with little to no time for seeing family or friends, or, heaven forbid, resting and observing a Sabbath.

The Ministry of Home

This year I wanted things to be different, to start off on a different note. Rather than waiting for the weekend to catch up on all the housework left undone, I chose Fridays to be my housekeeping day. To vacuum the rug in the living room, to sweep all the dust bunnies from corners, or do a deep clean of the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s not a perfect system and I frequently clean things up on other days of the week to avoid the pileup, but it holds me accountable to the ministry of home.

As important as it is to be kind and generous to our neighbors and the people we pass in the meat aisle at the grocery store, it’s equally important to steward well the things we’ve been gifted in our homes. My recent read is Sally Clarkson’s The Ministry of Motherhood: Following Christ’s Example in Reaching the Hearts of Our Children, where she discusses at length the importance of the time spent with and around our children, especially time spent with them at home. Our homes are holy spaces, inviting Jesus to walk alongside us on difficult days and amidst the joys of mothering and living together.

After discovering the horrid conditions of my vegetable drawer, I began systematically shifting other items in the fridge around to clean underneath them. Left untended for any length of time, grime and small pieces of onion flakes become like cold tumbleweeds in my refrigerator. Wiping the space clean I remember, even though this was forgotten for almost three years there is grace in the cleaning.