Doing What Is Right

We are visiting my mother in Mississippi to celebrate her 91st birthday this weekend. She has survived a bout of COVID, four falls, and several visits to the emergency room over the past four weeks. This morning she said without prompting: “I feel good this morning.” She is one tough lady!

When I am “home,” as my mother says when I visit her, Cheryl and I want to help my mother as much as she will allow us to do so. She can’t walk without a cane or a walker but believe it or not she still runs the small sweeper over the floors. She holds on to her cane with one hand and has the sweeper in the other. She wants to do everything for us: Can I fix you a cup of coffee or tea? Let me hang your jacket in the closet. I will cook lunch today. She has been serving people all her life, and she just can’t accept help from others.

There is just Cheryl and me visiting my mom, so it is just the three of us living in the house. My mother is obsessed with cleanliness. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then my mother is as close to God as one can get. It is actually sad that mom is legally blind and cannot see small things like crumbs on the floor that the sweeper will not pick up. She would be upset if she knew these particles were lying on her kitchen floor.

But there are still a lot of things she can still do and one of them is walk around with a can of Lysol in her hand. My brother and sister-in-law live next to my mother, and my mother keeps them hopping from store to store to keep her supplied with Lysol spray. My brother and I have both ordered some “Lysol-like” sprays, but they sit unused on a shelf in the closet. Mom will not use anything but Lysol. Interestingly enough, she was a huge user of Lysol before we ever heard the word COVID. For years we have purchased Lysol in bulk quantities for my mother.

A few minutes ago my mother came into the “porch” room (former porch and now a sun room) and warned me that she was about to spray the room. I quickly went to the kitchen table to continue my work while she sprayed the chairs, the floor and more. I asked her why it was necessary to spray since there was just the three of us in the house. I already knew her response: “Because I do this every day!”

I resolved myself to the fact that she believes that this is the right thing to do in spraying the house with Lysol. She has her routines that we do not understand, but they are the right things to do for her.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone did the right thing. We are better at talking about the right things than we are at doing them. Yes, we would have a happier place for mankind to thrive if everyone was focused on doing what is right for all instead of doing what is right for personal gain.

Teddy Roosevelt said it well: “Knowing what is right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”

The Bible says it better: “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”  James 4:17