Sleeping between freshly washed and ironed sheets is a pleasure, and so on Fridays I wash and iron them and call it “laundry day”, even though it’s usually only the sheets that I wash on that day. Since I was a child, Fridays have always been “laundry day,” and when I asked my mother “Why?” she said only that it was the most convenient day for her to do laundry. I believe that her own mother did laundry on Fridays as well.

Recently Jack told me that he had read that the average American family washes their sheets approximately every three weeks. I was amazed, as I thought that I had been living a cultural norm all my life.

I came to see clean, pressed sheets as a luxury I had taken for granted, an actual indulgence that was utterly unnecessary, but at the same time very hard to surrender.

Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” How many other behaviors of mine have I not examined? How much of myself do I really know?

In The Interior Castle St. Teresa of Avila mentions the “room of self knowledge” as one of the most important places for a soul to spend time. It is close to the place where God Himself dwells in us. Jesus said “. . . “you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). The better we understand our own real motives and desires, the closer we are able to come to experience the real presence of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives.

Best of all, we can share this self knowledge with the One who loves us and who already knows the workings of our hearts, and who waits patiently for our prayers of acknowledgment and of discovery of our own motives. In the process we discover that we really do love an invisible God, a thing that seems the very least likely.

I still wash and iron the sheets every Friday, but now I think with gratitude of the privilege, and of the mother and grandmother who, though not present, are the inspiration for the work. The sheets, like all good things on earth, remind me to pray.

Love in Him,

Prue