Me Tidy?!?

Apparently I am now considered to be a very neat and tidy person.  If you ever saw my room when I lived at home, or my room at school when it wasn’t around SAMI time, you would find that statement hilarious and wonder what drugs the person was on who spoke it.  As far as I know she wasn’t on drugs, and has never done drugs when my friend told me my room always looks like nobody lives in it, and may have even called me a ‘neat freak,’ although I may have just imagined that part.  

Now this change hasn’t come about without a conscious effort on my part.  My effort to keep my room tidy did not come about through any lessons I learned at West Point about having a neat and orderly room, but rather through something I read in one of Elisabeth Elliot’s books as well as a statement I think one of my sister’s made over the summer, although I may have imagined that as well.  

In her book The Shaping of a Christian Family,  Elisabeth Elliot writes of how her mother was taught the value of neatness and order.  Her mother describes that she was taught to believe “…in a God of order, Creator of a universe arranged in an orderly fashion, each thing in its appointed spot,”  and that, “the freshness, neatness the sense of things being placed…This was a visible sign of an invisible reality.”  The truth of this really struck me when I read it and for the first time I saw the value in being neat and orderly besides it being more aesthetically pleasing and easier to find things.

The other statement that changed my attitude on neatness was when my sister, I think it was Betsy, although I could be wrong, mentioned how if you keep your home tidy when visitors unexpectedly drop by you are a bit more ready and willing to welcome them into your home because it at least looks presentable, which could lead to an opportunity to share the Gospel with them.  

I now try and keep my room neat and orderly as much as possible.  While at West Point I noted that when my stuff was messy my life in general felt a bit more disordered, but that only caused me to tidy-up when it got really bad.  It’s been almost 4 months and so far I’ve managed to keep-up the clean streak, which I believe is a new record for me.  

On a totally separate and different note, I think I may like ice so much because my throat is rather dry.  At times I think I like the ice because I am a bit dehydrated, but other times when I am not even consciously thirsty but want ice it is because the ice cools my mouth and throat down and makes them feel better.  I just came up with this hypothesis over the weekend, so I’ve only had two days to think about it and I could be completely wrong.