Accountability is the Scriptural Guard

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Hebrews 13: 2

If someone showed up to your front door, unexpectedly, at some inconvenient hour (at least for public door opening), say 8:00 in the morning, how would you want your living space to look? Yes, I know that is the time the sloths are still turning on their beds, the diligent, godly, and exemplary are well into their day, and the rest of us are halfway between befuddlement and inspiration.

If you don’t completely blow off the question, but give it some consideration (preferably when most of the befuddlement has drained off, and inspiration in on the upswing), you will have the beginnings of a baseline for living space tidiness that will suit you and your situation.

Now suppose the knock on the door is the Lord Himself. He gave you the door, the furniture, the dishes, the toys, the tools, the furniture, the schedule, the work, the schooling, the groceries, and here He is. Now how do you want the space to look? What excuses do you want to make?

Accountability is all about Proper Prods. Prods are those provocations, penalties, motivations, rewards, consequences, pleasures, embarrassments, those whatever-they-are-that-make-you-toe-the-line-change-your-tune-bite-the-bullet-or-man-up to do what you  ought or stop what you ought not.

For cleaning, two superior prods exist. One is hospitality. The goal is to have both ourselves and our living spaces readily available, welcoming and comfortable for others. This makes 8 a. m. question, then, a truly elegant evaluation tool.

• It provides instant assessment (How comfortable and welcoming are my living spaces right now? If not very, why? Is it my wrong expectations? What needs changed? How can I make that happen? What has to happen to maintain a reasonable, comfortable level?).
• It can adapt. It is equally pointed and prodding when addressed to a bedroom, a modest home, a mansion, a classroom, an office, or show room.
• It offers a range of options. (How messy is too messy for me to open the door and welcome a guest? How quickly can I return things back to comfortable and welcoming? What can never be allowed to happen? How often can I pull it back in shape?)

Now I am decidedly not in favor of a home or living space being a showcase for visitors. The home is first and foremost the life training center for whoever lives there, and it should serve them well, but part of living well means being ready to serve others with the space God has given.

But those living in the space also provide the second Proper Prod for Accountability: apprentices. The home is the center to train apprentices, most often this means the children in the home, but will also be others for whom we have some level of  edification responsibility.

An infant must master many life skills: eating, sleeping, personal cleanliness, controlling bodily functions, controlling desires, clothing the body, caring for personal space and personal items, and developing personal spiritual relationships.

Additional life skills radiate from those basics to additional levels of mastery: food preparation and cleanup,maintaining public living spaces, clothing care, financial acumen, sharing home with others, and developing corporate spiritual relationships and growth.

Only after all those vital skills do we finally get to what society considers important: academics, employment, citizenship, and socializing.

But that Final Four will never be successful if the apprenticeship training for the first fourteen is a failure. Look, if academia handled life, they would expect to see all those deficiencies “made up” before someone could start the “adult program.”

So many great things came from having apprentices in the home, because attending to how to train them, made training myself more successful. So much fun, creativity, structure and process came from treating my own development in housekeeping expertise as apprentice training, rather than an endless stream of “doing chores.”

• Gifts of tools and keepsake boxes made longer lasting and more useful gifts than inexpensive toys, but also helped me collect what we needed to work smart and be organized.
• Developing lifelong skills at early ages made my children vital to our home’s success, and made the  time I spent en suite planning routines and connecting systems very profitable.
• Timed tests for cleaning up spills, looking for lost items,  fixing broken items, and cleaning Olympics made training less like enforced drudgery, and more like family camaraderie, but it also kept me more patient, objective, and experimental, less worried about the end result and more thoughtful about the process.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think apprentices are the purpose for cleaning, rather than one of the prods. And it does warrant a little time in the kids’ room before working more on a cleaning plan. Cycles, you know. Simmering.