Happy Tuesday, everyone! If you live in Georgia, then I'm sure you are doing the happy dance right along with me because the sun is out today! After a gloomy, stormy day yesterday, it is refreshing and encouraging to see some sunshine.
This weekend was quite a busy one for me and I got a lot done. My biggest accomplishment by far was cleaning the house. I don't say the world cleaning lightly. To be more accurate, I should probably say I spent all of Saturday scrubbing the house. I am the kind of person who likes organization and for everything to be in its place. I don't like things on the floors and I can say that most of the time my house is picked up and not a disaster zone. But, I don't enjoy actually cleaning: wiping things off, vacuuming, mopping, sweeping, getting down on my hands and knees and scrubbing the bathroom, etc. Nope, that's not really my thing. One of the joys of our new home is the space while one of the challenges of our new home is the space. We love having more room, but every wife knows the more space you have, the more there is to clean. Let's just say I haven't made this "deep cleaning" thing a ritual or a weekly ordeal. I definitely should, but I'm just not there yet. With all that being said, although the laundry was done and everything around the house was picked up, I was shocked at how long it took me to clean a seemingly put together home. I literally cleaned every surface of our house (knowing that it will be some time before this "spring cleaning fever" strikes again). Throughout my cleaning venture, I discovered my house was a lot dirtier than I expected and the process of really getting the house to really "shine" was much more time consuming than I would have guessed.
The process of "deep cleaning" my house reminded so much of life, especially our spiritual lives. How often do we breeze through without taking the time to focus on the details? It's easier to skip over the mess and hard work that we know would be involved in cleaning it up. You can glance at your spiritual life like I glanced around my house and convince yourself that there's nothing more to be done, but we all know that's not true. It takes courage and honesty to take a self-inventory of our spiritual lives and it's scary to see what we might find. We know that God is calling us to dip deeper and push harder, but that requires facing what can sometimes be a dirty mess.We would rather go on in ignorant bliss than deal with all the emotions and fears that lie within those crevasses and cracks. God is challenging us to stop going through the motions and really let Him prune us and put us through the fire, so that we can come out molded into something even better on the other side. Exposing the buildup of gunk in your life to God is scary, but that's where the blessing is. We don't want Him to be like a guest in our house and pile all of the junk under the bed before He comes over. We need to be transparent about our spiritual lives with the Lord in order to be transformed. In the Bible it says that God "makes beauty from ashes". He takes the "dirt" in our lives and turns it into something beautiful. He looks at the things we aren't proud of, the things we regret, and the things we aren't very good at and then smiles at us, reassuring us that He loves us no matter what. That love is what makes us whole again. That love is what cleanses and renews us. Only God has the power to do that. Hiding those darker spots in our lives won't give God the opportunity to do something great with them.
Like I said, it's easy to go through the motions when it comes to your faith. It's easy to do the parts that come easily for you and avoid steps of faith that you know will be hard and require work. It's easy to hide from the "dirt" in our lives without ever exposing it to God because we just don't want to deal with it. And it was easy for me to go on for months glancing at my house convincing myself that it was "clean". I knew how much work it would require to get it where it needed to be. I knew I would find spots along that way that I wasn't proud of. I knew I would find more dirt than I cared to see. But at the end of my Saturday, my house looked good! After a lot of scrubbing and accepting that I really don't do it as much as I need to, those dirty spots were washed away. The awesome thing about Jesus is that the hard work is only found in getting up the guts to share our whole selves with Him, dirt and all. After that, He does the work. He loves us. He accepts us. He transforms us. All we have to be is willing to "clean our house".
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