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         It was my Junior year of college and I was living in a house with three amazing roommates. In college it seems you either have absolutely nothing to do or a humanly impossible amount to accomplish in a short amount of time. Well one week all my other roommates were having the ridiculously busy kind of week and the dishes were piling up in the sink. I was having one of those rare but beautiful weeks where very little was taking place. I decided to wash my roommates dishes that week. I was happy to help them out and make sure we actually had some bowls to eat out of by the end of the week. Plus…my roommates are the ones that taught me to be clean! Might as well use my new found talent!  

                                                              Then came that next week…                                                                     
 
I remember it being a horribly busy week! I remember trying to blissfully reminisce about the week before where I could sleep and eat sitting down…only I didn’t have time to do that. One morning I leave my cereal bowl next to the dish filled sink knowing I won’t be able to get to it later that night.

I get home that night and the huge pile of dishes in the sink are washed and put away. But guess what is still sitting next to the sink….

                                             My cereal bowl!!!!

I couldn’t believe it! My one dish! Just one tiny bowl.  Pile in the sink= gone! Piles the size I had washed the week before (I might add)…and my one dish remained. In the same longitudinal position! Untouched! Dirty!

As I started to violently scrub my cereal bowl my attitude turned as equally sour as the milk still left in it…

I couldn’t believe that my roommates had the audacity to wash all their dishes and couldn’t simply wash my single dish! Didn’t they remember how I washed their dishes?! Didn’t they have any gratitude?! Any humanity?!(Ok…so I blew it a little out of proportion) But still…I was furious inside. No one appreciated anything I did! Poor Me! See if I ever wash their dishes!!!!

 

As ugly Michelle was yelling inside of me I heard God whisper….

                                                You are loving for all the wrong reasons…

      Wow! I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I remember looking out the window over the sink wondering how I’d missed it. How did I still not get it? And then 1 Corinthians 13 immediately came to me. As God’s word washed conviction and truth over me, I prayed for God’s forgiveness and asked him to keep teaching me what it means to truly love. 
      To love because Christ first loved us! To love even if its not reciprocated or returned in the way I feel it ought to be. It’s like it says in 1 Corinthians 13 that even if you give all you have to the poor and the helpless but don’t have love, it is worthless. So what if I wash other people’s dishes or take out the trash when its not my turn! If I’m not doing it with love or because of love…it’s pointless.

I hope to wash dishes the way Jesus washed feet.

 Jesus (God’s Son!) washed his disciples’ feet when that job was meant for a servant or even one of his disciples to do. It was a humble love. It was other’s centered love.

“Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.”  John 13:14-15
 
I hope to wash feet each place I go on this trip…and all my life.
 
And just because these words are so good…
   “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 

   Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-7
 
*** Just thought I would note that I by no means wrote this to bash my roommates! They are amazing women of God that have taught me so much about His love***