The Stewards of Our Messes

The messes we leave tell a story about us.  Lego pieces and barbie dolls scattered across the family room floor are the happy remainders of a day well-spent in play. Pieces of Scotch Tape left stuck to the ceiling perhaps held balloons and streamers for a child's birthday party.  The baked-on crud left on the oven rack might have been the spillover from a casserole hastily thrown in the oven on a busy school night. The smudges on the wall and the stains randomly scattered in cupboards or on baseboards are proof of life. The thin layer of dust on the top of your cabinets is --well, never mind what it actually is, but this too is evidence that your home is a place humming with activity.

Granted, most of us don't hold such a romanticized view of dirt, and grime, and grease. And neither should we. Left alone, a house or an office that is given a pass on cleaning day will grow, quite literally, into a place that is not just unattractive, but actually uninhabitable and even toxic for life. It's no exaggeration to say that if you never clean up after yourself, you won't survive! The dishes will pile up in the sink, the leftover food pieces attracting insects or vermin; the bathroom will become an unusable breeding ground for all manner of bacteria; the floors caked with dirt, dust, and who knows what else will create a health hazard. The messes we leave say a lot about us, but left in place, they are a threat to our wellbeing.

Naturally, many of us clean our own messes. We run the vacuum across the carpet (often stepping on a lego or two in the process); we wipe the dust from the pantry shelves, we wash the fingerprints off of the walls and we scour the grease off the inside of the oven. But for others, we hire someone to do the dirty work for us. Serenity Cleaning Services (based here in Salem, OR) is one such company that happily takes care of your dirty work. Brenda bills herself as "Your Cleaning Lady", and she and her staff of a twenty or so employees, are dedicated to cleaning up the messes that we leave. Brenda has been running the company for over twenty years, and the company brings their eye for detail, and their dedication to excellence to both residential and commercial clients. On a recent Wednesday morning, they invited me to join one of their crews as they cleaned a vacant home to prepare it for sale. Brooklynn has been working for Serenity for over two and a half years, and was the supervisor of this three-person crew. Originally scheduled to clean a two-story home, a last-minute change (not uncommon, I'm told) moved us to a nearby vacant house that was being prepared to be put on the market. For three hours, Brooklynn, her son Justin, and myself set to work: cupboards were meticulously sprayed and wiped down; the refrigerator was wiped free of spilled food in the hard-to-reach crevices, and the oven was scoured of burnt-on grease. No detail was overlooked -- appliances were pulled away from the wall, tile grout was cleaned, and corners in the back of the pantry were scrubbed with a grout-brush. At the end of three hours, the kitchen was gleaming.

While the home we worked on was empty (aside from the landscaping crew that was doing to the outside of the home what we were doing to the inside), many of the locations regularly cleaned by Serenity are not; crews working with Serenity regularly enter homes that are well-lived in, and offices that are normally humming with activity, for the noble task of removing the messes that we leave. On the surface, the work seems straightforward: scrub, scour, and sanitize so that the place looks cleaner than when they arrived. But in fact, teaching me how to clean didn't take that long -- I needed some basic instruction and some guidance along the way, but cleaning isn't an overly complicated task for most. But as Brooklynn taught me, there's a lot more to cleaning than getting rid of the dirt.

To invite someone into your space, even to clean, is to make yourself vulnerable. Ask a cleaning crew into your home, and you are welcoming a stranger into some of the most personal and even intimate spaces of our life. Hire a cleaning crew, and they will see the trash in our master-bathroom, they will see the confidential papers left out on a desk, or the articles of clothing you forgot to toss in the hamper. And of course, they will see that you aren't as clean as you'd like to think you are. In a strange sort of way, the messes we leave carry with them a strange sort of guilt. A messy house is judged, in Western culture anyways, as a sort of personal imperfection. Perhaps this is why, as Brooklyn pointed out to me, many people feel the need to clean up before the cleaning crew arrives -- it's a form of damage control. Or put another way, it's a way to control how much of our own imperfection that we share with a stranger.

But here's where Brooklynn taught me something important about the work of cleaning.  Cleaning is pursued as a calling when the cleaner enters steps into our personal space -- imperfections and all -- and treats the client with dignity and respect.  I asked Brooklynn about the purpose behind her work. "Why do you do this work?" She answered by telling me a story -- I've changed the details here, but the point remains the same. She had once worked for a client whose elderly wife was getting increasingly forgetful. As early alzheimer's set in, it became more and more difficult for him to cook for the two of them, pay the bills each week, clean the house, and most importantly, properly care for his ailing wife. The couple was reticent to consider moving out of their home that they had owned for a half a lifetime, but they also knew they couldn't keep up with these demands. Hiring a cleaning crew became a way to outsource some of demands of everyday life, freeing him to tend to his wife. Each week, the cleaners stepped into that space of vulnerability -- a couple dealing with the weakness and limitations of age -- and they served them. For this cleaning crew their faithful work became one small, but meaningful part of this elderly couple's loves story.

For other folks, the needs are different. A busy young family might hire a cleaning crew so that they don't have to use their free time cleaning, but can instead play a board game, or go for a walk in the park, or finish the homework. A middle-aged couple might hire that same crew because they are simply looking for peace of mind -- knowing that they can come home from a full day at the office, tired, and stressed, but knowing that their sacred space is clean and welcoming. These too are limitations -- though of a different sort. They are the acknowledgment of our own limits -- the young family simply can't do everything, and still have time for each other, and the middle-aged couple can't devote themselves to a job and have the energy to keep the home clean. The need to hire a cleaning crew is an admission that one needs help.

Brooklynn shared with me that she gets attached to her clients. In fact, some of them, she suspects, hire the cleaning crew not because they are incapable of doing the grunt work on their own. No, she admitted, some of her clients just need someone to talk to. And while the cleaning matters, it's the companionship that provide the real benefit to a few of her clients. And Brooklynn obliges. She'll hear them as they talk about their families, or their troubles, or their memories of years past. "I hope to show them kindness, and love," she explained.

Christians familiar with the New Testament might recognize these two attributes as what St. Paul names as "the Fruit of the Spirit." To be sure, you don't need to be a Christian to be good at cleaning (and just for the record, the phrase, "cleanliness is next to godliness" is not found in the bible!). But perhaps Christians can bring a unique perspective to this work. Cleaning isn't glamorous work -- in fact, it's often seen as low down on the social ladder. The work itself, I came to realize, quite literally brings a person to their knees, doing the dirty work that most of us would rather not do. It's humbling work, work that requires you to steward someone else's messes while they receive the benefits of your labor.

Jesus himself commands his followers to adopt such an approach -- again, those familiar with the New Testament will recognize Paul's admonition in Philippians 2 to take on the attitude of Christ, who himself embodied the difficult calling of servanthood. Jesus was the steward of the greatest mess -- the grime of our sin and hostility, and entering into our weakness, he responded with the utmost love and kindness. To be Christlike is to follow that pattern by serving others. Cleaning the messes of others can become a tangible way of being servant-like.

Cleaners are welcomed into our vulnerable places. They see our underside. They see the messes that we leave that say so much about us -- the stuff that we probably would rather not show to the world. To be invited into that space is a sacred trust -- and it's one that workers like Brooklynn, and her crew, and the Serenity Cleaning company use as an outlet for love and kindness.