Tuesday, August 20, 2013

From Carpet Cleaning to the Sea


Funny how one event can trigger memories of another event – years earlier.  After two years of having college students in our house, it was finally time to get the carpet shampooed, and the guy doing the job was only too happy to show me how much more dirt his cleaner got that my vacuum missed.  He practically put the furry filter in my face to show me the earring wire and the shredded carpet caused by the layer of sand in my carpet. He said everyone’s filter would look like that, and all I could think of was I don’t live anywhere near a beach.  I wanted to tell him that you never impress a woman by showing how what a failure she is at cleaning her carpets, but didn’t know how I could end that speech, so I didn’t start it.
BUT, all that sand made me think of the sand that has touched my life, in more than one ways.  First, it took me back thirty years to our time in Chad, Africa where the sun sucked every drop of moisture out of the ground during dry season leaving only sand behind, the kind of sand that the Harmattan winds lifted into the air like fog which crept through the wooden shutters coating everything with fine dust. That made me think of rainy season where the “sandy” roads turned into chocolate pudding and holes that would put Pennsylvania potholes to shame opened up big enough to swallow a VW bug ( I really saw it once) or small trucks. Soldiers dropped barriers across the roads every ten kilometers when it rained, lifting them only when the sun appeared to dry up the roads…did I say there were no paved roads in the southern part – where we lived -- of the country.
Then I was carried forward to the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey and I could feel the splash of the foamy water washing away the sand under my feet as I stood at the edge of the ocean. I remember thinking about the endlessness of the ocean and the waves that followed one after the other all day and all night every night, and how the love of God is like that, never tiring, always washing over us every day and every night.
And finally I was thinking about that sand in my carpet, I never saw it. I vacuum several times a week, and with a pretty good vacuum, but that sand brushed off from the shoes of visitors and into my rug, and according to the carpet cleaning guy, the sharp edges of those grains of sand cut up my carpet, turning the nap into blue fuzz.  As I said, I never knew.
That made me consider what might be sand in my life…practically invisible, yet fiercely dangerous, and what could I do about it.  This may sound stupid to you, but I wondered if Spider Solitaire is like that sand – addictive and eating up minutes that could turn into an hour when you piece it all together.  I allow myself three games, as a break, I say, between chores, but three games might turn into four or more while I am not looking and what could I have done in that time?
I do believe God means for us to relax and to have fun in life, and a game or three of solitaire never killed anyone.  But for me, I wonder if my failure to limit it could be like sand in my carpet. 

1 comment:

  1. He said everyone’s filter would look like that, and all I could think of was I don’t live anywhere near a beach. I wanted to tell him that you never impress a woman b click here

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