I is for IRONING

There are certain objects that I have managed to avoid using for all of my life. The iron is one such piece of equipment. Look, don't get me wrong, it's not that I belong to some sort of anti iron society or am a member of a cult that doesn't believe in ironing or am even a male chauvinist that believes ironing is only a woman's job, though obviously I'm not opposed to them doing it and would certainly not go on any crusade to support an end to ironing for women. No, it's just that, there has always been someone around to do it for me and the fact that it has been a woman is purely down to coincidence and the fact that the females in question have been my mum and my wife! But to be truthful, there are probably a couple of reasons why I haven't been rushing forward to lend a hand over the years. First, nobody ever taught me how to iron and I still haven't the first clue how to go about it. Yes I know you switch it on and it heats up and then you lay the clothes flat out on an ironing board and apparently run the hot metal up and down it until it looks nice and flat but then what do you do? And why do you sometimes squirt steam from a jet on the iron, all over the clothes? And how do you know how long to hold the iron on the surface before you do everlasting damage to a shirt or a blouse? And what temperature setting is just right to use? Secondly, it just seems so boring. I mean it's not like cooking, where there is an end product you can actually enjoy or mowing the lawn, which just generally makes the grass look tidy. And even though washing the dishes is equally laborious, at least you feel you are helping to contribute towards the good health of your family apart from actually having nice clean cutlery and plates to use. Which brings me to my third difficulty. Why do we iron? Sure what difference will a few creases make and does it really matter if our shirts or skirts look a bit crumpled? So what do people think about when they're ironing, for it's obvious you just don't think about ironing? Maybe, like wife you watch TV or listen to music or just talk or maybe it's a bit like mowing the lawn in that you just think about all the problems of the day and take it out on the ironing. Which suggests I must remember not to annoy her on the days when she plans to iron!

We had an interesting conversation about ironing yesterday. I felt I needed to explore the subject a little bit more and I discovered that in the list of household chores that women (or men for that matter) love to hate, ironing is pretty near the top of the list and something that brings the procrastination gene out regularly. Yet it seems to be a necessity, though that is clearly based on the need to look well in other people's eyes. So when my son attended a function recently with an unironed and crumpled shirt, it seemed to cause a high degree of annoyance, even though the shirt was completely covered form view, beneath his suit.

Yet that very fact got me wondering about my own life. How easy it is for me to hide the creases and crinkles of my life from other people beneath my smile, my words, my understanding of the Bible, my public prayers and my apparent sincerity and yet God sees every single thing that others don't and it annoys Him. Yet He is always ready to forgive me, to iron out those things that are sin and hinder me from the perfection He seeks for me. And how often isn't it the very things that we need to be doing that we try to avoid, like spending time in prayer and reading His Word and we go and fill our lives with other substitutes, yet al the time knowing that the only way we are going to please Him is to iron out the crumpled mess that our lives get into when we take our focus away from God. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5 to 'Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.' Also David, after defeating his enemies sang a song of praise which included these words, 'It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect.' And while I will never attain complete perfection like Jesus, in my human lifetime, such perfection must be my goal and I know that some day I will be perfect when I go to live with Him in my new body. But for now, I will continue to iron away the crinkles, with His help and forgiveness and look forward to the day when the last of the blemishes will be gone. I guess, if we want to look best in God's eyes, we all have a bit of ironing to do.