Three Items Every Woman Should Wear Out
Another shirt went from the closet to the pajama drawer this week. It’s quite a collection I have, of shirts that have an area of holes right across the waistline.
Took me a while to figure out what in the world was happening. Why the same circle of holes developing in the same place?
Countertop meets waistline. That’s what it was.
I was just the right height for the button of my jeans to rub through my shirt and against the edge of the countertop, in front of the sink and where I cook.
How Faithfulness Becomes Evident
I have never heard another woman talk about this problem. Is it common? Dishes in the morning, dishes in the afternoon, dishes at night. Cutting carrots. Wiping dirty counters. Putting together casseroles. Wearing a hole right through our shirts?
Proof of my domestic service to my family.
And then there are my hot pads. One day a friend came over, and I pulled a ratty, stained hot pad out of the drawer. “Yuck,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, “I thought those were supposed to be dirty and worn out from using them all the time.”
Proof of food going in and out of the oven for my family.
The shirt, the hot pad –and the Bible. The Bible I used, before I got my new one last Christmas, literally had a “to-go” version of my favorite chapters in Romans. You could open up to that section of Scripture, and the whole thing would fall out. Leather was worn. Some pages had stains on them from quiet times spent with the Lord, in conjunction with eating breakfast.
Proof of a desperate housewife turning to God for help and hope.
Badge of Honor
King Lemuel’s mom never told him these things, when she talked about what a noble wife would be like in Proverbs 31 of the Bible. I think she should have said, “Son, you want a woman whose kitchen hot pads will sport evidence of one too many casseroles pulled out of the oven. Now that woman is a keeper.”
We love to have new things, but maybe we should work to have a collection of dilapidated, worn items that lay in the drawer like badges of honor.
I hope my own daughter develops holes in the front of her shirts and has a food-stained, frayed hot pad by her oven. I hope her Bible practically falls apart when she picks it up.
Would you add anything to the list? Maybe something your mother used until it was worn out? Or something in your own home?
With love from Montana,
