Today's guest author, Hilary Bernstein is a women's ministry director, blogger, and former newspaper editor and columnist. She is the author of The Tension of Tidy. Hilary loves to host friends and family in her Ohio home and spend time with her husband, son, and daughter.
In The Tension of Tidy, Hilary helps readers understand that expectations of a "perfect" home are an impossibility, not a necessity.
To enter the drawing to win one of three copies of The Tension of Tidy, send an email to [email protected]. Please be sure to include your address in case you're a winner.
Welcome to the book club, Hilary...
The Certainty of Messes
While we're living this life, the tension of tidy is real simply because messes are inevitable.
In fact, messes are as certain as the scientific law of entropy. Just in case you need a science refresher, entropy is the process by which everything declines to disorder. When a house or yard is left alone without any upkeep, you'll see entropy in action.
Over the course of our marriage, my husband and I have bought three different houses, and throughout our three house hunts, we've walked through more than two hundred unique properties. (What can I say? We're both particular and have very different preferences.) Some houses were immaculate and gorgeous, but other houses should have been condemned.
Every home had been in new and excellent condition at one time, but neglect had taken its toll in frightening ways:
- We walked through century-old homes that not only needed thorough cleaning but also new heating and cooling units, windows, roofs, electricity, kitchens, and bathrooms. The only aspects that didn't appear to require massive work were the basic frames of the houses. Yet based on the condition of the rest of the house, I doubt we looked closely enough.
- In one house, we walked down the basement steps to find four feet of standing water everywhere.
- Two other houses had huge cracks along the entire length of their basement foundation walls.
- A few houses had dead leaves blowing in the rooms because of the broken and missing windows.
- Before we toured one house where gargoyles decorated the basement, we had to sign a waiver that we wouldn't press legal charges if we were harmed on the property.
I can assure you, entropy is very real in homes!
On a smaller scale, in our everyday lives, entropy simply means once we clean our houses, they will get dirty again. We might appreciate and seek order in our lives, but it will never be perfect or permanent on this side of heaven. Once we accept that and stop beating ourselves up over the inevitable—that perfection is impossible—we can start to break free from the tension.
-- Hilary Bernstein
To enter the drawing to win one of three copies of The Tension of Tidy, send an email to [email protected]. Please be sure to include your address in case you're a winner.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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