Martha! Martha! Martha!!!
(Mary Who?)
This week we were expecting visitors from out of town. I didn’t know them, I had never met them, and it was a possibility that they were going to spend the night! This brought me a bit of anxiety.

I started nearly a week ahead of time deep cleaning my house. I re-arranged rooms, washed anything that would fit in my washing machine, scrubbed cabinets and floors, fixed drawers that didn’t align right, cleaned out corners that they would never even see, and cleaned every mirror and window that we had.

While on my knees scrubbing the white grout against my white tiled bathroom floors, the smell of bleach staining the inside of my nose, I heard “Ok, Martha.” I stopped scrubbing and straightened up for a minute. Martha? I then realized God was trying to get my attention.

I ask you, reader of this blog, how many times have you heard the story of Martha and Mary? How many times have you listened thinking, -Wow, Martha is an idiot. Everybody knows when Jesus is in your presence you pay attention. There is NO WAY I would be worried about my house if Jesus was there, there’s no way I would be so preoccupied like that …worldly…Martha.-

Yet there I was on my knees, my head pounding from the smell of the bleach, my knees aching from kneeling on the floor, and my mind making a continual list of the things I NEED to get finished before the visitors arrive.

Like most people, I start to reason with God why I’m doing what I’m doing. I start conversing with my Father, trying to have an intellectual conversation with Him about how he doesn’t understand that I’m doing this because it’s what I should do. I proceeded to tell Him, “God, I want to have a clean place for them to sleep, eat, and to…..just be. I want them to feel comfortable, and honestly I don’t know them so I don’t want them to have a negative first impression of me.

His words to me, “You remind me of Martha. I am sending people who love me. Those who love me do not judge you based upon how clean your bathroom tiles are, or how well you dust your knick-knacks. These people who are coming love Me. Their vision is not of the world, their vision is filtered through me. They will see your heart. They will see your home as a place you have opened to show them love. You have lost sight and have become like my other daughter Martha.”

Talk about a God smack. ME?!?! MARTHA?!?! NOOOOO. I’m not gonna lie, I finished cleaning the tile in my bathroom. (I couldn’t leave it half white and half…..yuk.) Afterward, I went and cleaned up, grabbed my husband and son and left it all behind and went to lunch. I want to be Mary with a little bit of Martha.

The people who came were obviously my brother and sister in Christ. They oozed love. I enjoyed them both. And you know what? It wasn’t until the end of the night that I realized that all the drawers were still out of a cabinet that I was trying to fix. How did I miss that? Maybe because I sent Martha packing and invited the heart of Mary in.