Laundry OCD and Trust

Here's where I admit to the world my laundry-folding OCD.

A family of five is only a moderate-sized assembly; however, it is large enough to create stacks and stacks and stacks of laundry. Through our tiny laundry room moves a veritable mountain of clothes each day, and the laundry basket is never empty, because the proverbial unmatched socks will always be present. And since I have other parts of my life that do not revolve around laundry (school, studies, the ever-existing dirty dishes -- another struggle for another day), I just can't ever seem to catch up with getting all clothes folded and put away.

So, the obvious thing to do here is to accept help, right? That does make sense.

But have you seen my kids' folding expertise? It's improved, I'll give you that, but there are still wrinkles in the clothes when they fold them. Sometimes the shoulder seams don't match. Sometimes, I've found underclothes wadded up and shoved into drawers.

I hear your collective gasp. I know, it's terrible.

But here's where you see my dilemma: When I let go of the responsibility of folding clothes nicely, I'm also letting go of my own expectations, guidelines, and standards of excellence, and I'm handing them to someone else -- here's the kicker -- trusting them to do well.

Trust is a difficult thing to come by. It means releasing something from my control and allowing someone else to take up my expectations and run with them. Sometimes the person I trust will do well... and sometimes they won't. But without that hand-over -- nothing will be learned on either side, by either party.

So in Exodus 18, Moses has to learn this lesson. He's arrived at Mt. Horeb, the same mountain where he originally meets with God in the bush-that-is-burning-but-not-burning-up (Exodus 3). He's sent his wife and sons to visit his father-in-law Jethro in Midian, and they all come out to see him. There's a big family reunion.

Moses and Jethro process the whole traumatic previous year and all the plagues that happened during it and what those things meant for the nation of Egypt and the nation of Israel. They have dinner together, and Aaron and all the elders of Israel party-crash on the scene. They eat "in the presence of God." It's a good time. It's a holy time. 

Unity is a good thing, and it hurts my heart to hear, sometimes, that Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is a dreaded event for some, because "family is just hard to deal with." I get it; opinions differ, sometimes widely, sometimes hurtfully.

Let me offer this for perspective: Jethro is a priest in Midian, which -- is not a nation that recognizes the one true God as God. This likely means that Jethro is a priest for other gods, and when Moses serves a God who declares to him a couple chapters later that "You shall have no other gods before me," there are likely to be a few friction sparks in this association.

And yet Jethro and his son-in-law have a good relationship. "How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity... for there the Lord bestows His blessing, even life forevermore" (Psalm 133:1, 3). 

Moses and Jethro somehow manage to iron out their wrinkles as Moses tells him all that God has done -- a wonderful example of missionary work, by the way. The result? Jethro says: "Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods, for He did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly" (Exodus 18:11).

We don't know what kind of surgery God does in Jethro's heart after this encounter, but we do read in this verse that Jethro sees and recognizes the Lord's hand at work. 

So when it's hard to meet with people of differing opinions, consider the Moses treatment: conversation, testimony of God's work in your life... and dinner. Food almost always makes things better. :)

I got sidetracked. Back to the laundry. Moses has come to Horeb still in the afterglow of this battle with the Amalekites from Chapter 17, the same battle where he sits on a rock, and on his right and left, Aaron and Hur hold up his arms until the whole battle is over. Moses has found he can't do it by himself, so he gets his helpers to help him.

You'd think he'd have learned his lesson. 

Nope. Look what goes down during Jethro's visit, the day after their family reunion dinner: "The next day, Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, 'What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?'" (Exodus 18:13-14).

Perspective. Moses doesn't see what's happening, but his father-in-law recognizes the signs right away. He sees his son-in-law is the only leader for an entire nation of an estimated two to five million people.

Say it with me: B-U-R-N-O-U-T.

Moses answers: "Because the people come to me to seek God's will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God's decrees and laws" (Exodus 18:15-16).

Mosaic law, as we see especially in the New Testament, is a foundational aspect of the Jewish people. Jesus addresses it often in his confrontations with the Pharisees and the Teachers of the Law, and Paul and the other New Testament writers refer back to it repeatedly.

What Moses is doing is necessary and good and right, but he's doing it alone. He's already forgotten the lesson he should have learned when Aaron and Hur held up his arms for the entire length of the battle with the Amalekites.

Jethro says: "What you are doing is not good... The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone." He makes a suggestion, and Moses immediately recognizes the worth in it: "Select capable men from all the people -- men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain -- and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide for themselves" (Exodus 18:18, 21-22).

Trustworthy men... Trustworthy people are people who take the trust you place in them -- and uphold it. They run with it, and do well. 

So Moses "listened to his father-in-law and did everything he said." He finds his trustworthy men, and he hands over the reins. He lightens the load on his own shoulders by sharing the burden. He releases his iron grip on these things and places them in capable hands.

Can you smell the humility from here? :) 

On Moses' part, taking advice from one who is most likely a pagan priest of Midian... takes courage and humility, a willingness to listen to someone else who maybe doesn't hold onto his own worldview. Moses exhibits a stripping away of his own expectations as he places those expectations into someone else's worthy hands. 

In the spirit of full disclosure, this is a struggle for me. I've had to admit I'm stubborn and often bull-headed. It's hard for me to hear truth from people with whom I don't always agree. It's really hard to take their advice.

That's why I think it's so important to focus on the truth itself, and not on the person giving it. It's essential to judge and vet the truth, yes, to be sure that it is the truth and not a carefully-packaged half-truth... 

But it's also essential to recognize the worth of the suggestion even if the person who gives it has crossed hairs with you before.

This year has truly been a test of that for me. I recognized this when I heard the word of God -- unfiltered without any other added thoughts, just pure Scripture -- read by someone I haven't always agreed with. And my heart resisted listening. Instead of concentrating on the content, I focused on my past interactions with this person, and that's when I saw my lack of humility, the strawman prejudices I had unknowingly constructed in my heart.

I had to ask forgiveness from the Lord. It was a wrong attitude. "...In humility, consider others better than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3). Humility is hard, y'all.

But Moses swallows that difficult pill. He sets aside his own preset standards, recognizes the truth beyond the giver of that truth, and he makes the changes he needs to make to align himself with the right thing to do.

I have some laundry out there in the den waiting to be folded (of course I do). So today, I'm going to make a concentrated effort to accept every different fold from what I would have done, every unsmoothed wrinkle from what I would have taken out, every set of lopsided jeans, every half-flopped t-shirt. I'm not going to let it set my teeth on edge, because I'm handing my trust to my children.

They can do it; they're capable of this task, and even though they may complete it slightly differently from me, they'll get the job done.

I trust them.