A lesson from Cheerios

I love to vacuum.  It is my favorite chore.  It is my children's least favorite chore, so things work out.  Lately, I have had some trouble with my vacuum and it won’t clean like it should, so my vacuuming routine has been disturbed.

A few weeks back, we had a few Cheerios under my youngest child's chair that had done their time and were starting to bother me.  While vacuuming the rest of the house,  I tried to suck them up with my dysfunctional vacuum, but I became frustrated, thinking they were too big.  Knowing that smaller pieces would disappear more quickly, I lifted the vacuum to crush the Cheerio so it could progress to its new home.   (Can't imagine why the vacuum wasn't working).

Immediately a life lesson touched my heart.  How often in the midst of our lives that seem cluttered and overly messy do we make a sincere effort to fix them, only to find that things get messier, and we feel crushed before they get cleaned up?

There are messes we create that become comfortable.  Sometimes we would rather live with the mess because we know that cleaning up the mess creates a bigger mess, before it can be cleaned up.

Let's back up and analyze this cheerio a bit closer.  Why was it on the floor to begin with?  (Probably because I just mopped)!   Think of the child who was eating a bowl of Cheerios.  Typically the distance between the bowl and the eating zone is too far.  The grip on the spoon might be a little off.  The load in the spoon might be too big for the eater's small mouth.  One of these can cause a Cheerio to fall, or perhaps all three contribute.

As I reflected, these things that contributed to the fall of the Cheerio could lead to my own demise:

Is the distance between where I focus energy too far away from my zone of genius and the work I am intended to do with my life?

Is my grip not firm enough on things that add value to my life and the lives of those around me?

Is the load I am carrying in my spoon so full of things with no real consequence, that it causes me to drop my most important Cheerios like my family, faith and friends?   How much am I trying to chew?

Or again, all three.

It is much more effective to prevent a fallen Cheerio than it is to go through the crushing process of cleaning it up.

Families can be “cleaned up,” but because we are in our routines, and we get used to things, it sometimes requires making a bigger mess, to clean up what we have.

By adjusting our Cheerio eating posture and cleaning up messes immediately, we can keep a clean floor.

Elder Ballard said, “I am impressed by countless mothers who have learned how important it is to focus on the things that can only be done in a particular season of life. If a child lives with parents for 18 or 19 years, that span is only one-fourth of a parent’s life. And the most formative time of all, the early years in a child’s life, represents less than one-tenth of a parent’s normal life. It is crucial to focus on our children for the short time we have them with us and to seek, with the help of the Lord, to teach them all we can before they leave our homes.”

I know I’ve dropped plenty of Cheerios, but it is my goal to make the adjustments needed to keep my floors clean and my family on track, even if it means making a giant mess before we can get put back together.