This afternoon I was in my basement, folding laundry — and thinking about Mary. I’m always thinking about Mary, not just while doing wash. But my mind went back to a snippet of conversation we shared a week before her cancer got bad.

She was at my house, and we were chatting while I folded clean clothes. When I picked up a fitted sheet, she said, “Could you show me how to fold those things? I’ve never been able to do it right.”

Having watched Martha Stewart on TV years ago, I said, “Sure,” and showed her how the Queen of Homemaking did it: put one corner pocket into the next. Then fold both into the other two. Tuck the first two into the second two, and the sheet will loosely resemble a square. After that, the rest is easy.

“Let me try,” Mary said, taking the sheet away from me. As she folded and rolled and ended up with a big wrinkly ball, we both had a good laugh.

“Oh brother,” she said, handing it back to me. “I guess I’ll never get it.”

Today as I folded that same sheet and remembered our conversation, an important thought landed hard. It really doesn’t matter one bit that Mary never learned to fold a fitted sheet. She’ll never need to know.

On the heels of that, came this. How many hundreds of other things have I struggled to learn that I’ll never need to know?

Of course we have to function in a world of know-how, and if we don’t learn certain things (like brushing our teeth or driving a car) we’ll be at a disadvantage. But we ought to hold everything up against the standard of eternity before investing any money, time, or effort. We should ask ourselves, is this important to God?

If the answer is no, we need to proceed with caution. After all, it isn’t essential to have a shelf of perfectly-folded sheets. Mary lived her whole life without one.

“Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.” (James 4:14)