Vacuuming an Octopus

Our home is an equal opportunity household. Everyone gets to share in the chores. Our three boys know how to do dishes, sweep, vacuum, and (vaguely) how to do laundry. Our girls know how to mow and (vaguely) help their father with repair jobs. When a child is big enough to run the vacuum, he gets added into the loop of divide and conquer—the household chores, that is.

With five children, that gives us a lot of hands to get the work done, but that also means we have to clean far more often than a typical American family with 2.5 children. To compound our dirt-factor is that with homeschooling, there are six of us home 24/7, we live in the country, and we have a contracting business. All that adds up to a lot of dirt, and a lot of cleaning. So we divide it and conquer it.

Although the kids do much of the cleaning, I work myself into the rotation to make sure that each chore gets done correctly every now and then. I don’t know if you’ve watched a child, or even a teen, vacuum lately, but they just don’t do it quite like a cleaning professional does. A kid will stand in the middle of the room and pretend to draw octopus tentacles around him, using the vacuum as a paint brush. When the octopus is complete, the room is vacuumed. Oh, and did I mention that the faster they make their octopus the happier they are?

That’s not how a cleaning professional does it. They start at one side of the room and slowly and methodically work their way across and out of the room, leaving in their wake a room well vacuumed, and, depending on the kind of carpet, a sea of neat vacuuming lines that seems to make them smile.

So tell me, which kind of vacuumer are you? Do you stand in the middle of the room of your life and create an octopus as you vacuum the dirt and sin out of your life? Or do you do it the professional cleaner’s way, and slowly and methodically cover every inch and get every particle of dirt possible? When you’re done confessing and communing with our Heavenly Father, is the carpet of your life such that it’s inviting to stretch out and relax on, or would you cringe at the thought of setting a baby down to play there?

How about your approach to Bible study? Do you hurry through, making an octopus around you, then declare it done when you’ve only made tentacle swipes here and there? Or do you approach your Bible study time methodically and prayerfully, with a pen in hand?

Just like we need to teach and train our children to vacuum correctly, we need to teach ourselves to do more than an octopus job when it comes to our spiritual lives and our prayer lives. We need to deliberately take the time to do a thorough job reading and studying the Bible, as well as a thorough job confessing our sin and communing with our Savior.

And just like we need to teach ourselves to do more than an octopus job when it comes to our spiritual lives, we need to teach our children this same skill!

By Patty

About The Author

Patty Wysong has written 34 articles on this blog.

Since Patty quit running from God's call on her life, she's been happy. Life is never dull for her as she juggles being a wife, a homeschooling mom of five, bookkeeper of their family business, teaching online blogging classes, and her writing. In addition to drinking black cherry kool-aid from china tea cups, she loves weaving lessons that she's learned into short stories and devotionals, most of which can be found on her blog Patterings. You can also find Patty at The Barn Door, the Internet Cafe and Adding Zest, a site for Christian women who want to add some zest to their love nest.

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