I recently have discovered that I love to cook. I really had no idea how to make anything until I got married and asked for cookbooks on our wedding registry, and then pinterest happened and that was it. I was hooked. There were so many beautiful pictures of food that I wanted to try it all. So I got organized, because that is how I am, and created a system where every time we go to the grocery store I buy ingredients for three new meals; one from pinterest and two from two different cookbooks of the six that I cycle through. I think I have made the same recipe more than once only a handful of times in the past two years because I have yet to run out of recipes to try. I come home from work, pick which of the three recipes I want to make and get to work. It's wonderful.Now don't think I'm some fancy wife that has everything together. It is very messy and sometimes (well, most of the time) it takes wayyy longer than I planned. We have exactly two windows in our tiny apartment and the kitchen is on the opposite side of the apartment from the windows so it feels kind of like I'm cooking in a dark, tiny corner. (Which is not ideal when you have the oven and the stove on and the corner becomes very hot and cramped.) But the worst part of it all is that after I make this delicious meal I "forget" to clean it up. The dishes pile up in the sink and on the counters and on the stove and I'm one of those people that has to let things "soak" for a while before I will put it in the dishwasher. It's actually not just the kitchen, the whole apartment will often go a while without being cleaned.
I've tried to reconcile this about myself, and I really have put a lot of effort into trying new systems of cleaning. I divided up the rooms and put on the calendar which week I was cleaning this set of rooms and which week I was cleaning that set of rooms. That lasted for about a month. Then I decided I would still keep with that idea, just give myself some slack and only do it twice a month instead of every week. Now I am really trying hard with a new system where I do just 15 minutes of cleaning every day when I don't have something after work, but lately I've been struggling to keep that up too. I don't know what it is about cooking that is so easy to put effort into and cleaning that is just impossible for me. I have friends that always have spotless homes and no matter how often I come over nothing is ever out of place. I'm one of those people that as soon as I have someone coming over I rush home and spot check as many things as I can before they get there and it is still not as clean as their home.
So I have to remind myself that I cannot do everything. I am not perfect at everything. Some people are cooking people and some people are cleaning people, and neither is better than the other. They are both great. Some people garden. Some people travel and aren't home that often anyway. Some people do manage to cook and clean and garden and raise kids and are superheroes or something, but I have to remind myself that it's ok that God gave me some strengths and passions and not others. Of course I am still open to advice on a system of cleaning that might work for me, but I am learning that while it is important to work at the things that do not come naturally to us, it is maybe more important to focus on those things God made us great at. We each have our own spiritual gifts, our own desires, our own paths in life and the differences are what makes us all work well together.
There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. 1 Corinthians 12: 4-6
The next time you are frustrated with yourself, maybe you can remember this too and learn to not be too hard on yourself. God made you with just the right abilities for your life. And He made me a cooking person, not a cleaning one.
