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Dear Dishwasher,
My 17 year-old daughter is wonderful, she's smart, keeps her
grades high and in many ways an ideal child. BUT SHE WILL NOT DO THE DISHES.
They pile up and wait for her but she's never in the mood or what? She gets
motivated occasionally to get the parental unit off her back... What can I do
to make her understand the spirituality of washing dishes?
Frustrated in Idaho
Dear Idaho,
I'm sorry to say, not much.
Teaching spiritual lessons never happens in lecture form …that's
more appropriate for the physical sciences. Your example in life is the only
way to teach real stuff…washing dishes is only a prop or tool we use to
learn something else and it's not the only prop thank goodness. She may model
your spiritual approach to life and apply it somewhere else at a later time
and probably precisely not in doing dishes. I would say there is no hope for
the dishes in this lifetime. Forget the dishes.
Letting her see them pile up and then doing them all at once
is a perfectly ok application of the tool. But the lessons may not come for
another 20 years when one day she looks out her kitchen window and
contemplates something her mother once said or did and in a flash of joy a
memory reaches out and forms a realization. We all make mistakes of wanting to
see results to quickly, we want agreement… this is mostly for ourselves or
to achieve another aim of our own. (Like getting the dishes done) You must
have faith that God works his spirituality his own way in his own time.
You might separate in your mind the observation that
"doing dishes" can be a spiritual practice (which is true) from the
householder duty of everyone who lives together to contribute to the running
of the house. You're the leader so to speak so delegate firmly without anger
and blame for past transgressions, the duties of the householders. Call a
house meeting and set some guidelines or standards. Move toward co habitation
and away from parenting.
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