A Love Letter and Toothbrush

“The whole world is a love letter from God…See the sunrise not as a mindless, mechanical necessity but as God’s smile. See a wave not just as tons of cold salt water crashing down on the shore but as God’s playful action. See even death not just as a biological necessity but as God tucking us in at bedtime so that we can rise to a new life in the morning.”

~ The God Who Loves You, Peter Kreeft

Today, one of the paragraphs in my love letter had to do with a blue plastic toothbrush and our living room’s baseboards. (Very romantic, I assure you.)

This morning, I awoke, rather groggily, from a much needed sleep. I was still recovering from the [insert positive superlative, such as “incredible,” of your choice here] New Attitude conference, which had ended on Tuesday afternoon. As I clenched the bathroom counter and “assessed the damage” the night had wreaked on my face, I remembered something horrible. In the excitement and chaos of getting ready to leave the conference, I had left my toothbrush at a friend’s house, some thirty minutes away from my own home.

Said toothbrush would be impossible for me to access until the afternoon.

Faced with this catastrophe, I had to choose between two equally disgusting and unhygienic options: 1) don’t brush my teeth until the afternoon, or 2) use someone else’s toothbrush. I’m not going to disclose which option I chose, because either one merits condemnation.

Suffice it to say that, later in the day, I was still dealing with feelings of “dental inferiority.” Maybe that’s why I couldn’t make myself scrub the baseboards in sweatpants…But I’m getting ahead of myself.

By mid-afternoon, I had done as much computer work as I could handle, so I decided to change the pace and do some sweeping, scrubbing, and mopping. However, as my broom and I cut the rug to David Crowder’s Collision CD, I began to feel that something was very much amiss. Somehow, it didn’t feel right to be cleaning house in my sweatpants, despite their huggable softness and elegant grey-ness. No. There was no way I could continue in my present attire. I definitely needed a skirt in order to finish this task. (I would’ve put on lipstick, too, but that didn’t seem like a particularly toothsome prospect - pun most emphatically intended.)

So it was that I found myself washing the baseboards in a skirt, and wondering why I thought that it was a job suited to A-line floral prints. Since we have a lot of baseboards, I had plenty of time to wonder. This is what I came up with:

Ideological change never takes place in a vacuum. (Get it? Get it?) Evangelizing and asking people to change their ways of thinking entails, in many ways, asking them to shift their cultural foundations, as well. Choosing to believe new things requires people to change certain patterns in their lives: to stop spending so much time with certain friends, to visit the bar less frequently, to not watch the same movies, etc.

But, we can’t just tell new Christians to stop doing things. We must be able to offer something to replace the old culture. Our goal should be to develop an alternative culture, one that pursues excellence for the sake of God’s glory. There is a desperate need for a vibrant counter-culture that springs directly from the principles of the Christian worldview.

Many of us do live in homes that take the idea of developing “cultural capital” seriously. I know I do, but I rarely remember how significant this is. I’m more likely to shake my head (fondly) at how “weird” my family is, than to rejoice in the cultural traditions we’ve developed. However, it’s the people who take the time to create cultural capital that contribute the most to consistent and concrete expressions of the principles of Christianity.

I love the implications of this idea. This means that baking bread and scrubbing baseboards are directly linked to great philosophical battlegrounds. Homemaking and philosophy are not opposed – they are complimentary. No longer must we struggle to find meaning in the mundane moments of life. All we have to do is tap into the immense flow of meaning latent in every second.

It was in honor of this beautiful truth that I wore a skirt while sweeping and scrubbing.

After all, there is a hidden nobility in cleaning a house, in coining a phrase, in making a joke, in playing a piano, and in picking strawberries…

…and, as I’ve recently discovered, in recovering truant toothbrushes.