WINTER PURGE

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

Psalms 51:10

I took some (undisclosed until now) time off work this week and decided to use the time to do a "winter purge" (think spring cleaning) for my [portion of the] house.  I would post "before" and "after" pictures, but I don't want to be judged for the state that I allowed my den to get into prior to my start of this purge.  Suffice it to say, several hours and 30 gallon trash bags later, my den looks like a totally different place.  As I sorted through papers, greeting cards, wrapping paper, travel souvenirs, journals and photo albums, I was reminded of good times with friends and family, but resolved, one mo time again, not to be such a "packrat" ... or as my brother calls me - "a borderline hoarder".

When I stopped from my labors to cook dinner for a friend, I showed her my "before" and "after" pictures and she said that looking at my pictures brought to mind how Jesus takes the chaos of our lives, cleans us up and makes us sparkly and new.  Where things are disheveled and piled on top of each other, He straightens up and removes the dross that weighs us down - mentally and physically and spiritually.

Several times during the process of cleaning up, I would get disheartened and feel like giving up and stopping, I knew that I couldn't do that because ... well, you know what it's like when you start cleaning ... you have to keep on cleaning until it's done.  I'm glad that God doesn't look at us in our normal, chaotic and skewed states and just throw up His hands and say, "he must be crazy to think I could do anything with that mess" or "she's not worth the trouble".  He looks past the stacks of papers and envelopes of photographs and the entire stationary store that needs to be organized and sees the clean sofas, the file folders of information and the organized photo albums hidden underneath.

If you are anything like me, there are times in your spiritual life where you feel cluttered and disorganized and junky.  The promise of God's love is that all we have to do is call on Him like David did in our text above and ask Him to clean up our hearts and our lives.  We can rest in the knowledge that He will do it because He knows us, so He knows what we need. He created us, so He knows how we work.  And He loves us, so He knows how to clean us up and fix us.  Trust Him to do His work in you whenever you are feeling "unclean" and "out of sorts".

Be blessed.

© 2018 Kristina E. Smith