Yesterday was laundry day. As I sat outside in the heat, dividing up the clothes, I started thinking about how much I am looking forward to our new camper which will provide more room and a lot more privacy.

Well at least I will be able to divide up laundry inside the camper verses outside where everyone can see our underwear and dirty towels.

I will of course still be heading to the laundry room to get it washed and dried. And that often leads to some interesting encounters (some of our favorite travel memories are from doing laundry). And the laundry room in campgrounds are not always the cleanest of facilities.

No matter how hard we try, we tend to have a big pile of weekly laundry. We wear clothes over but the weather has a big impact on how often you can repeatedly wear things. It reminds me of the trip we took with the kids to France many years ago. We each had one small backpack 4-5 sets of clothes for our 2 1/2 week trip. We planned to do laundry half way through the trip. But after the first four days in Paris - in a repressive heat wave and in a hotel without air conditioning - we found ourselves needing to do laundry shortly into the trip. Instead of wandering the streets of Chartres we spent the day in the laundromat.

And it has not been really different on this trip. It is hot. It is humid. You really don’t want to put something back on that was drenched in sweat the day before. And when your camper is postage stamp size you spend a lot of time outside.

Add in two gigantic dogs that act like barbeque mops and things get even messier. I have always said that having Newfies is like having two versions of Pig Pens living with your from the Peanuts cartoon.

And then there is Brigid. Brigid loves to play ball like a rugby player. She is an all in kind of girl and she has no qualms about taking her sister out in pursuit of the ball. And when you weigh 150+, and you barrel into something at full speed, things often get banged up. At least once a week she comes back from playing ball bleeding from her tongue, or somewhere else in her mouth, and she always manages to spread slobber and other unmentionables across the dog bed, or worse our bed. Then she gets put on ball restriction for awhile until everything heals up (we are in one of those periods right now which is why my laundry pile was even bigger than normal yesterday).

I suppose we could stop the ball playing but there is not really anything else - besides food - that gives her that much joy. And the exercise is good for her big bones. But we have to keep reminding her to play gently and to take turns with her sister. But sometimes she gets over excited and then boom! We are back on restriction again. And the laundry pile gets bigger.

For the past year I have been praying a line that comes out of the morning liturgy, “take my preoccupation with comfort and transform it by the light of the gospel”. I think that one of the places I feel this most intensely is with the laundry. It is hard work to drag your laundry out into the world, it costs much more than you would imagine to wash and dry it, and then haul it all back to your camper. Each time I do this I am reminded that it is the poor who mostly shoulder this burden - the rest of us having the privilege of washers and dryers in our own homes. Each time we want to run a load I am sure the majority of us don’t drag out the quarters to see if we can afford it.

As I sat outside in the heat - with all the world literally seeing my dirty laundry - I repeated this line over and over. Take my preoccupation with comfort and transform it by the light of the gospel. Take my preoccupation with comfort and transform it by the light of the gospel.

Instead of focusing on my own discomfort let me remember those who do not have the luxury of doing their laundry in private. Let me remember those who do not have enough money to wash their clothes each week. Let me remember the burden of having to take time out of your day to go to the laundromat and then give up a couple hours of your day to make sure nothing happens to your clothes. Let me be transformed so that I no longer obsess about my own comfort but instead think first of those for whom life is anything but comfortable.

I can’t lie - I am really looking forward to the privacy of the new camper. And I know that it will make things more comfortable.

But I will continue to lift up this prayer. It feels very much like an invitation to freedom for me.

And not only do I wish to be transformed - I hope to also be part of the transforming of the world - especially for those whose burden is much heavier than I could ever imagine.