My oldest son got baptized on Saturday so we had some family come into town for that big event. In preparation for all of our guests, I spent a few days last week cleaning and getting our house ready. Part of that cleaning involved clearing the junk off the counters in the kitchen. The kitchen counters collect a lot of random junk at our house – the things that we don’t want to deal with or put away at the moment, and then they just pile up more and more over time until I finally have to deal with the mountain of chaos. I don’t love this bad habit of mine. I actually really love having clean counters.
After having a bunch of guests in our home this weekend, this morning was dedicated to tidying everything up again and getting things back in order. I got the counters all cleaned up again, except for a couple of games that my boys had gotten out. I asked Porter to put the games away in the basement closet. He protested a little at first and said “but Landon and I want to play with it after school!” I told him that they could get it back out after school, but I wanted him to take it off the counter and put it away for now.
That little conversation spurred a gospel discussion. I explained to Porter that the kitchen counters could be symbolic of us as people.
When the counter is completely cleared off of unnecessary items, we have a desire to intentionally keep it that way. But when something gets left on the kitchen counter that doesn’t belong there, it is so much easier to put something else there as well. And then something else. And something else. Until eventually, what was once a clear counter becomes a cluttered mountain of chaos. It’s not impossible to get the counter clean again, but it does require a lot more time, effort, motivation, and desire.
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We can contrast this with the experience of intentionally keeping a counter clean and clear. It’s inevitable that something will get placed on the counter at one point or another throughout the day. But the trick is to not let it stay there. It’s important to put the item away in it’s proper place as soon as possible, so as to avoid the slippery slope of adding additional items to the counter.
Photo by Gina Manzeck on Unsplash
This is the parable of the kitchen counter. We (as people) are the counters. The items of clutter are our mistakes and sins. If we let one little mistake or sin just sit there, instead of dealing with it and repenting right away, then it becomes an invitation for more and more mistakes and sins to pile up on top of it, until the little innocent mistake or sin, over time, becomes a mountain of chaos and pain. Just like the kitchen counter, it’s not impossible to become clean again. That is the miracle of the Atonement of Jesus Christ – that no matter what, we can become clean again. But the bigger our mountain of mistakes and sins becomes, the more time, effort, motivation, and desire is required to get us clean again.
We can contrast this with the experience of intentionally trying to keep ourselves clean spiritually (and this bleeds into physically, mentally, and emotionally as well). It is inevitable that we will make mistakes and commit sins. That is just part of being human and part of our earthly experience. But the trick is to not let those sins and mistakes make themselves at home and stay with us. It’s important to repent right away and come clean again, so as to avoid the slippery slope of adding additional mistakes and sins to the pile and getting stuck in the deep pit that we dug ourselves.
This parable reminds me of an experience that I had in February of this year when Jershon and I got to help clean the temple one night. Our cleaning shift started at 10 pm and ended at midnight. This was a first for both of us – we had never volunteered to clean the temple before. It ended up being an amazing experience, especially because somehow Jershon and I were the lucky ones that got to clean the Celestial Room and Endowment Rooms.
Here are some excerpts from my journal entry…
“You know what I kept thinking about the whole time I was cleaning? … “It is so nice to clean something that is already clean.” 🙂 Yep. That’s right. The temple wasn’t even dirty. All that wiping? Yes, it did serve a purpose, it was to disinfect everything since the chairs and such get touched by so many people… but you wouldn’t have even thought I had wiped anything at all. The cloth was still white at the end. All that dusting? … You couldn’t tell a difference at all… because there wasn’t any dust to begin with. I actually did find one teeny spot that had some dust on it. It was on the base of the big round table in the middle of the Celestial room…the one with the gigantic vase of flowers sitting in the middle of it. I was pretty excited to feel like I was doing my part to get rid of the little bit of dust that was hiding. The only other thing that I actually felt like I cleaned up was I found a cough drop wrapper on the floor in one of the endowment rooms.
Anyway, while I was cleaning (the things that were already clean,) it reminded me of a talk that I heard in Stake Conference a couple years ago. The lady that spoke talked about her experience with cleaning the temple. She said that while she was cleaning, she felt a little bit annoyed that she was cleaning something that didn’t need to be cleaned. It was already clean. She kind of felt like it was a waste of time.But then she had the thought come to her that cleaning the temple is kind of like cleaning our lives. We shouldn’t let our lives get to the point where they need to be cleaned – where they are already really dirty – and it takes a lot more effort and time and energy to scrub things really hard in order to get them clean again. We should be doing the daily maintenance. We should be maintaining cleanliness instead of reaching the point where we have to do deep cleaning. The temple is always clean because it is cleaned everyday. It doesn’t even have a chance to get really dirty. That’s how our lives should be. We should be doing the daily (or regular) things (prayer, scripture study, repenting, going to church, going to the temple, etc.) If we do those things regularly, then our lives won’t have a chance to get really dirty. We will be constantly cleaning what is already pretty clean. And that kind of cleaning is so much easier and more pleasant.
Also, because the temple is always clean, it is always prepared and ready for Heavenly Father to visit His house. There isn’t any “uh oh. Heavenly Father is coming next week, we better clean this place because it’s dirty!” Heavenly Father is welcome to come to His house any day. And He can feel comfortable there, because it is clean. He likes clean. He can dwell in clean, holy places. It is the same in our lives. If we are in the habit of cleaning our lives regularly, then the Spirit of God (the Holy Ghost) can always have a place to come dwell.
So I was just thinking about all of this while I was cleaning.”
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