When is the last time you clean?

Dear parents and teachers, I hope you teach your kids cleanliness. Yes, cleanliness that involves physically cleaning up a space. To sweep to mop to arrange to tidy up to wipe to vacuum to tuck in.

I could not tell you enough how important it is to instill this value in our children. I could not tell you enough how much character building we can achieve with our children by simply disciplining them to clean.

Cleaning teaches us responsibility, appreciation, teamwork, and its worth transcends beyond these to deeper spiritual level. It forces us to (literally and spiritually) take a step back at wherever we are and evaluate the situation. It forces us to clear out the skeleton in our closets (hopefully this one is just spiritually).

Ladies and gentlemen, be someone who cleans, and marries someone who cleans. If a person can't even treat his/her space right, how do you suppose he/she treats your body right? If someone is too busy doing other important stuff that he/she doesn't have time to clean, how do you suppose that someone finds time to listen to you rant?

God puts aside a whole book of Levi to talk about rules, and a lot of the rules concern about cleanliness. God is a god who loves cleanliness. Or as my kids love to write in their essays, "cleanliness is next to godliness".

Chemistry talks about entropy, the degree of randomness. Any reaction will be in favour of proceeding in a direction that increases the overall entropy of the universe. Which means it is a natural tendency for a space to get messy and messier. However, this is not an excuse for us to not clean; on the contrary, countering that instinct and nature to be messy, to get dirty is what makes us human. In the similar fashion, we counter that instinct to hate in order to love; we counter that fleshly desire to sin in order to do good.

A kid is never too young to learn about cleanliness. And if you are stil thinking who should teach the kids cleanliness, IT'S YOU.

One day, all children in Malaysia will be able to clean their schoolbags, classrooms, toilets, and labs without being forced to.


-written by a teacher who just spent a good 20 minutes sweeping and arranging the lab, because she believes in cleanliness, also because she prefers anything else at this point than grading papers.


(extracted from my Facebook post, written on November 15)