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Articles about Prayer

Laundry Day Prayer

Jolene Cassellius

Doing the laundry is perhaps an odd time to find inspiration for prayer.  Nonetheless, as I let my thoughts drift, I find reason to pray while I sort and fold.

My earliest memories of doing laundry date back to when I was eight years old.  My family had just moved to Tamazunchale, Mexico.  As new missionaries, we were extremely poor.  I had three younger siblings at the time and my youngest sister was due soon.  While we didn’t have large or fancy wardrobes, a family of six produces a lot of laundry.  We had no money for a washing machine, so Mom and I learned how to use the concrete scrub board that is often built into the porch of Mexican homes.  One of us would scrub the garments, sprinkled with water and soap, over the rough surface of the board.  The other would rinse the soap out in a tub of water and squeeze the garment until our hands were red. 

Trips with Dad up to the mountain villages around Tamazunchale soon taught me how blessed I truly was with that concrete scrub board.  After hiking up remote trails, we would often come upon a stream.  There, the women would crouch. With a child wrapped on their backs, they rubbed the family’s threadbare laundry on smooth, flat stones and hung the clothes to dry on nearby bushes.

My senior year of college, while I was teaching street children in the southern region of Kenya, the school where I was staying had no running water or electricity.  When doing laundry, the kids and I had to lug the water in buckets up to the porch where we scrubbed our clothes by hand in a large tub…no scrub board.

The buzzer sounds, pulling me from my memories, and I run to switch loads.  I think of the countless individuals around the world that labor over a scrub board today while I turn the knob on my machine and pour in detergent.  Perhaps they scrub because they have chosen to make a sacrifice, like my parents.  Maybe it is because of their socioeconomic status or the place where they live.  For some, chaos resulting from a natural disaster or national conflict limits electricity and the ability to use what are considered luxuries. 

Yet, whether I am standing next to my Mom scrubbing my little brother’s socks, under the Kenyan sun up to my elbows in suds, or sitting on my carpeted living room floor surrounded by a dryer-warm load, I am a woman washing clothes.  I am a woman in need of prayer.  I am a woman who can pray.  I think of my sisters around the world, crouching by streams or rubbing their work worn hands.  My thoughts wander next door to my neighbor who is at this moment turning the knob on her own machine.  The sorrows and hopes carried in hearts and the worries and joys on minds, as our hands work busily to do the laundry, supersede generation, culture and class.  So, today as I do my laundry, I pause and I pray. 

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