The Laundry We Hide

The doorbell rings unexpectedly, and you spring into action. Not to get to the door. No, not yet! Because heaven forbid they see the condition of the house.

Most of us quickly scan the room. The laundry basket by the couch, the socks on the stairs, the folded undershirts waiting on the dining table: all of it is swept into a closet or a bedroom before the door opens.

We would rather greet our guest a few seconds late than let them see that we, too, wear clothes that get dirty.

Sometimes we have more preparation. Have you ever spent an entire day cleaning because a guest was coming the next day who might stay but an hour? Heaven forbid they might see how you really live.

It is a small thing, but many of these little things tell us something about ourselves.

There was a time when every household’s laundry hung on a line for the whole street to see.

Everyone knew that everyone else had sheets, socks, underwear, and work shirts that needed washing.

No one was fooled into thinking their neighbor lived without dirty laundry.

Now the machine does the job. It runs behind a closed door, and we have grown accustomed to presenting ourselves as if we never needed any cleaning at all.

This is not a complaint about washing machines. But these little shifts, sometimes occasioned by technologies that make life a bit "easier," sometimes accompany hidden spiritual costs. We do not think about them because, well, we're just grateful that the machine has made doing laundry easier.

Yet these "spiritual costs" align in some ways with some of the sharpest words Jesus ever spoke: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean" (Matthew 23:25-26).

The word translated “hypocrite,” hypokritēs in Greek, originally meant a stage actor, and in those days the actors often wore masks. Jesus is not merely saying these men were insincere, though there was that. He was pointing out that most of the way they lived was little more than a performance. They were living their entire lives as if behind a mask, showing the world their costumes, and little else.

You see, most of us are quite diligent when it comes to hiding our faults. Heaven forbid someone would see that you, too, have dirty laundry! What used to be visible to any passerby now becomes a source of shame.

And there is a danger when we treat our spiritual lives the way we've come to deal with our laundry.

A church full of people accustomed to hiding their laundry can easily become a church full of stage actors. When we put so much attention on the way we polish our appearance, to make ourselves appear better than we truly are, we are telling the next person in the pew that they, too, must hide their flaws, their faults, their weaknesses, and put on a good face.

We are telling them, "be a hypocrite," because no one wants to see your true face.

Think of the struggling parent, the man fighting a hidden addiction, someone who is struggling to pray. They look around and see others who seemingly have it all together, but they know even if they play along with the costume party, what's on the inside. So, they often conclude, that they alone are dirty.

So they hide themselves with even more diligence. They compete to see whose costume is the most impressive, as if they'll be rewarded (or at least praised) for it.

And so we all parade around in our costumes, each of us lonelier than before, none of us growing, because no one grows out of a fault they refuse to admit they have.

The apostle John speaks truth to the lie: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:8-9).

There's an order to it. Confession comes before cleansing. The laundry has to come out of the closet before it can go into the wash.

The Greek word for “confess” here, homologeō, literally means to say the same thing, to agree. To confess a sin is simply to agree with God about what is true. It is to bring that basket of nastiness out into the light so it can be washed.

And light is the central point.

Jesus says, "For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God" (John 3:20-21).

Old laundry lines operated on a principle that we easily forget: sun and air are themselves cleansing. Linens left in the dark only smell worse over time, they get musty. Faults left in the dark grow stronger, too.

We tell ourselves we are being modest, respecting privacy, keeping our dignity.

Is that really it? Or are we just afraid?

It is counterintuitive, perhaps, but this is the reality of it.

The truth about us, even the ugly truth, is always nearer to beauty than the lie we more readily show-off. 

There is a second lesson we might glean from our laundry rooms.

Once, washing meant kneeling at a basin, scrubbing, wringing, hauling water. It demanded effort, that the body get involved.

Now we toss everything in together, add detergent, and press a button. Sometimes with a pleasant "ding" to let us know that the machine is doing the work.

But we still complain about doing the laundry, don't we?

What is your least favorite chore? Some people will say the dishes, or cleaning the bathroom. But doing laundry is almost always high on people's list.

We speak of laundry day as a burden, though it costs us almost nothing. At least in comparison to the effort it once took.

How much more do we do this with our souls? We toss in an hour on Sunday, perhaps a hurried prayer at bedtime, and then sigh as though even that were an imposition on our real lives.

But the spiritual life has never been automatic. There is no "push button" approach to holiness that ends with a clean load, smelling like flowers.

The psalmist does not press a button, either. He speaks of an arduous kind of process and even begs for it: ”Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Psalm 51:7).

Hyssop was the rough branch used to sprinkle blood and water in the rites of cleansing. It is not a gentle image. To be made clean is to submit to a scrubbing, to let God handle even our so-called "unmentionables."

The contemplatives have always known this. Prayer that goes deep eventually brings everything up to the surface, and that is uncomfortable precisely because it is working.

It is also one reason why some people never go beyond surface prayers. They never seek to go deeper, because they intuitively know that when they do, they will stand entirely exposed before a perfect God.

Yet, this fear is unfounded. When God comes knocking, you aren't going to hide your socks by kicking them under the couch. He knew they were there before he knocked, but He knocked anyway.

Before God, pure though He is, this honesty is not shame. It is joy.

John’s vision of heaven describes the saints as those who "have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (Revelation 7:14).

These are not people who never had stains. And what our detergent does, with little thought, our Lord has cleansed with great ardor, with His own suffering, His own agony. A washbasin is nothing, much less a pile of machine-washed clothes that we complain about, compared to the intense trial He endured that we might have washed robes!

These people, John mentions in his vision of heaven, are not those who hid their laundry. They are people who brought their stains to the one who could remove them. The whiteness is a gift, and it came at a cost He paid. These robes are not costumes. Their purity is not a performance.

So what might we do this week?

First, when you pray, name one actual fault. Not “I am a sinner” in the abstract, but the specific impatience, the specific resentment, the specific lie. Agree with God about it. Let it come into the light. There is no shame in letting other people know you have laundry to do, in the abstract. But we tend to feel great shame over the specific pair of socks, or underwear, that we failed to put away before the guest arrived. Well, we must let our Lord walk and see what He already knows is there. There need be no shame in it, because He has never once bought in to the "pretense" of the outward performance or show. He already knows the truth of it. So, give him even the dirty laundry. The specific items, the otherwise "unmentionables." Name them. Hand them over.

Second, find at least one person you trust and let them see the true you, dirty laundry and all. Share your struggle with them. Scripture exhorts us likewise: "Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed" (James 5:16). Healing requires being known. Your honesty might even be what finally gives them the courage to do the same. It is not selfish to let others bear our burdens. It is a great privilege, in fact, that we might give another the opportunity to participate in Christ's work in this way. For when our Lord scrubs our laundry, He gets his body involved. And we are His body. That is one way in which our Lord has so lovingly invited us to participate in His passion, His way of saving souls. may be the permission someone else has been waiting for.

Think of it like this. How did you feel the last time a person you care about shared a struggle with you that you did not know they were going through? Did you judge them for it? Well, if so, shame on you. Chance are, though, that's not what you felt at all. You felt privileged that they trust you with something so deep, painful, and personal. And, you might have even felt a little relief because you realize that you're not alone. You aren't the only person who has a struggle. 

Third, stop treating your spiritual life as a load to be tossed into a machine and dealt with by the press of a button. Give it the effort you would give something you love. Kneel at the basin. Scrub a little.

And the next time the doorbell rings, consider leaving the basket where it is. You might discover that your guest has laundry too.

 

God Bless,

Judah