Cleaning House

"He [Jesus] is going to clean house - make a clean sweep of your lives. He'll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he'll put out with the trash to be burned." ~ Luke 3:17

This summer I've been working on cleaning around the house - cleaning out the office/craft room and helping my son clean out his bedroom. Each room was a major undertaking. When I do projects like this, I like to empty the room first in order to reconnect with the space and look for ways to reclaim some of the space in new ways. Then, bit by bit, all the things we removed either get a new spot back in the room or they are sorted into trash, recycle or give away piles.

I have to be in the right mood for this project. If I'm not fired up to make the "hard" choices of what to get rid of, it becomes a shuffling of items rather than any actual purging. Sometimes I have started this project and gotten only so far and had to just put it all back because I just wasn't ready to really make the tough decisions.

My son's room was the harder of the two projects. My son is sentimental and he keeps everything - rocks, papers, paper airplanes, tags, cards, drawings, stories, office supplies, etc. He had NO interest in letting me clean out the room for him, afraid I would trash all of his little treasures. There were times I would just stand in the middle of the room feeling overwhelmed. Some spots were in such disarray I didn't even know where to start. So, it took a whole week to do this one room.

We were in the middle of the bedroom project when I read this verse from the Message. John the Baptist was talking about Jesus and the work he was coming to do. I imagined Jesus standing in the "room" of my life. Does he stand there sometimes, noticing all the places that are so out of hand it's hard to know where to start? What are the things that I cling to, that I don't want him to purge from my character?

May I learn to let go as Jesus cleans up my life.