The Long List of Chores Is Proof of How Rich You Are

You’re standing in the garage at 8am on a Saturday, staring down a leaf blower, a stack of mulch bags, and a to-do list longer than your arm. Despite the seemingly endless list of chores, it’s worth asking what an empty garage would actually mean.

C.H.E.W. with Me

New here? What is CHEW? — a 30-second practice that grows into a day woven with God’s love.

C – Clarity: The Complaint Only the Blessed Can Make

Weekday you complains about deadlines that prove you’re needed. Weekend you complains about chores that prove the same thing, just quieter. A full Saturday task list isn’t a punishment handed down for existing — it’s the residue of a house, a yard, kids, and a family calendar that are all actually gifts. Having any of that to maintain was never the default condition of a life; plenty of people would trade their whole week for the blessings that lead to the busy Saturday that’s easy to complain our way through. Before you complain about the mess again, it’s worth noticing what you’re actually complaining about.

H – Hear: When Everything’s Clean for the Wrong Reason

“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” (Proverbs 14:4)

This proverb sits inside a string of sayings weighing diligence against ease, and it makes an uncomfortable trade explicit: you can have a spotless, empty manger, or you can have mess, work, and a harvest — but you cannot have the harvest without the mess. There’s a wordplay buried in the Hebrew that the English can’t quite carry: the word for “clean” here is bar, and bar is also the ordinary Hebrew word for grain. The very thing that makes a manger look empty and tidy is the same word for the abundance it’s missing. A clean manger and a full harvest are described with the same word, pointing at two completely different lives. God’s love toward you didn’t have to include a proverbial ox, a manger to fill, or more concretely, a yard to mow, or a family to run a Saturday around. Every mess you’re standing in this morning is a sign of his lavish, generous love.

E – Exchange: The Trade Between Resenting and Receiving

What has to be exchanged is the habit of viewing chores as a burden versus viewing chores as a sign of God’s loving gifts and blessings.

Because God’s love is generous and has blessed you with gifts that are reflected in your chores today, how does that change the way you approach chores this morning?

W – Walk: Say Thank You Before You Start

Before you touch the first tool today, name one specific “ox” in front of you — the actual mess, the actual mulch bags, the actual kid who needs a ride to the game in twenty minutes — and thank God for it out loud, specifically, as provision rather than as an interruption to your Saturday.

Closing question: What full manger have you been treating like a burden instead of a blessing?