The Dust Bunny from God

One of my delights is to collect stories of God-sightings. We are putting together a book of them that we are calling Not Coincidentally. Here is a sample to whet your appetite for the book and encourage your faith in God.

Back in 1980 I knew a young mother named Martha who really was a lot like her biblical namesake. But I mean that in the very best sense. It is true that Jesus refused to make Mary get up and help her sister, but he did not order Martha to stop cooking and cleaning. Any of us who has had a Martha in his or her life has been blessed by her conscientious and thoughtful work.

The Martha I knew was the mother of three small children and she and her husband were full-time missionaries. Her husband, however, was at that time engaged in a very demanding and expensive graduate degree program. Necessarily, the family was on a tight budget. Being a Proverbs 31 kind of a woman, Martha watched for opportunities to work outside the home to supplement the family’s meager income.

Because Martha’s reputation as a housekeeper was sterling, she came to the attention of a family from church who lived in a large remodeled farmhouse just outside the city. Both the husband and the wife worked in the city all week and their grown children, still living at home, were either studying at the university or working in town themselves. With five busy adults coming and going, the house needed an occasional thorough cleaning that none of them were able to tackle. So Martha was engaged to come one day every other week to do the deep cleaning that was needed.

One of those days when Martha’s children were in school and she was busily cleaning the farmhouse, she suddenly realized that her vision was blurry in one eye. She stopped what she was doing to see if her contact lens needed cleaning and realized, to her horror, that there was no contact lens in that eye. She checked her clothing carefully but the contact lens was not to be found.

Her anxiety was very real. Replacing the lost contact lens would cost her everything she would earn on this cleaning job for the next two months. And she had no idea at all how long the lens had been missing. Therefore, she had no idea where in this large house she had lost it. She was more than half done with her work and had been in virtually every room of the house. The contact lens could be anywhere.

Choking back her tears, she prayed, “Lord, have mercy. I can’t afford to lose that contact lens and I don’t have any idea where to look. I will just have to trust you and get on with my work.”

And that’s what she did. She continued with vacuuming, changing the bedding in all the bedrooms, dusting the window sills and the furniture and washing all the dishes that had been left in the sink for days. And all the while she worried and prayed that the Lord would reveal where her contact lens might be. She had no time to look for it. She had to finish her work and pick up the children on schedule.

Well, Martha finished her cleaning and gathered her cleaning supplies. With both hands full, she was making one last pass through the house looking for anything that she might have done better. As she passed by the family room, she noticed one little dust bunny that marred the perfection of the hardwood floor that she had carefully dust mopped hours earlier.

It was a small dust bunny. Anyone but a Martha would have ignored it or not seen it in the first place. But Martha could not leave it like that. It had not been there when she had finished dust mopping and it could not be tolerated. She put down the vacuum cleaner and went to pick up the offending dust. And what to her wondering eyes did appear as she bent over to finish her work, but a contact lens lying undamaged right beside the dust bunny.

I think we can all agree that dust bunnies move around on hardwood floors at the whim of even the undetectable air currents that pass through a room. But you will never convince Martha that the movement of that particular dust bunny was controlled by anything less than the finger of God. He cares about Marthas as well as Marys, and meets them in ways that touch their deepest needs.

Luke 15:8-10
"Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.' In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."