The Agitator

wo or three times a month I wash my clothes
(I know, it’s embarrassing how infrequent).

The reason why I do it so seldom is
It’s a physical hassle
I’m suspicious of whether or not my clothes actually become cleaner.

My friend referred to our washing machine once as “the clothing agitator”

In America (or anywhere where there is running waters) most washing machines have a
wash, rinse, spin and drain cycle.

Here there are 15 minutes of agitation.
No rinse, no drain and “spin” is in a separate compartment that you manually have to transfer everything to.
Any rinsing has to be done manually in a separate bucket, though usually I just add a couple of scoops of water in before the spinning.

At the end the dirty water has to be drained and dumped into the toilet outside.
Because there isn’t any rinse cycle I feel that I’m just adding soap to dirt and mixing it around Adding a fresh laundry smell to still dirty clothes.

The funniest thing is that usually I think I do a fairly good job of washing…
Until I visit America.

Then I realize that my fresh smelling clothes don’t smell so fresh
(More like I rolled around at a petting zoo and then went to work at a coal mine),
And my white clothing isn’t quite so white as I thought it was In my 4 years in Mongolia God has put me through the “agitator," getting the dirt to fall out.

Sometimes I wonder, am I worse than I was before I came to Mongolia?
I’ve seen things come out of my heart that I never knew were inside.
But the thing is, all of it was already inside.
It just took Mongolia to “agitate” it out.
Like my clothes being shockingly dirtier than I thought
Inside my heart was also much worse than I thought.

Doing laundry in America, I don’t get the “privilege” to see how dirty my clothes really are.
I put them in the machine, close the door, and 45 minutes later open the door to clean clothes.

But here, I have to get my hands dirty, draining the murky water
Feeling its weight
Dumping it out.

In America, I had the same stuff inside, I just wasn’t in circumstances where I could get a close view of my true condition
 
So take heart.
When it seems like you are far worse than you could have imagined.
when it seems like you’re spinning in murky water
Have hope.

It might mean that the agitation is a cleansing process
Removing the dirt,
Even healing.

If I want my clothes to be especially clean, I have to put new water in for each cycle
I usually don’t and reuse the same water for 2 or 3 loads because it uses so much water and requires more work of draining and dumping.

And for us, if we really want to be healed of the muck inside
We will have to feel its weight
And dump it out
Away and UN-retrievable
Over and over again.

The final step is to hang my clothes up to dry
No dryer here except the sun

And sometimes after exhausting heart work, we too have to just wait
Wait and let the Son do the rest.