I hate cleaning.  I admit it.  I loathe it.  There is true enmity between dishes and me.  It is the thing I put off the most, and the thing I most need to do.  I have to be very intentional about making myself keep up on my cleaning duties.  Most of the time I fail, but I give it a valiant effort.

This last weekend I set about the task of getting two things done.  I wanted to get my house, “back in order,” as I like to say.  In other words, I had a week’s worth of dishes and laundry and clutter to deal with.  And, I wanted to start to clean out our basement.  Ugh.  The basement.  Two years ago it flooded.  We stacked up furniture in a dry corner and pulled up carpet in an effort to save as much as we could.  That time we did, but since then it’s flooded every third time it’s rained.  It’s awful.  So, I knew I need to just pitch most of what’s down there, and like all housework, I’ve been putting it off.

When my husband and I went down to start organizing things, we knew we had a big chore ahead of us.  What we found was not as bad as I’d imagined, but a whole lot of work.  The biggest issue is the mildew.  It’s growing in a lot of places and it’s going to be a battle getting rid of it.   It’s attached itself to things we treasure and we’ll have to clean.    We’ve lost a lot of things—nothing that can’t be replaced but still it was hard sorting through some of it.  It also hit me, “why have I been holding onto this stuff?”  Much of it I haven’t used in years, and it really didn’t need to be kept to begin with.  I just didn’t want to see it go.

The song “Whatever You’re Doing” by Sanctus Real kept running through my head as we took on this monstrous task.  The specific lyrics that resonated were:

“Time to face up,
Clean this old house
Time to breathe in and let everything out
That I’ve wanted to say for so many years
Time to release all my held back tears”

As I worked on the two cleaning tasks I undertook this weekend, I got to thinking, “What sins and issues have I been putting off dealing with?”   I began to ask God to show me things that I had been avoiding cleaning out in my heart.  And, just like I asked Him to, He delivered.

The biggest sin He showed me just reared its ugly head a few days ago, but it was characteristic of something I don’t like admitting I struggle with—my temper.  This last flare-up was about something very dear to me—my Bible.  You see, since I’ve been working four jobs, I’ve had to grab my quiet time on the go.  So I’ve kept my Bible in my car’s passenger seat so it’s easy to grab.  The other night my daughter left something in the backseat, and for reasons that make no sense to me, she opened the front passenger door and climbed across the backseat to get it.  Her hands full, she carelessly didn’t close the passenger door behind her.  The result was about 6 barn cats climbing all over the seats.  And to top that off a thunderstorm came through.  The seat was drenched…and so was my Bible.  I have years of notes in the margins, and memories that go with them stored up in that volume.  And it was drenched.  I suppose I should thank the barn cats for setting off the warning lights or I’d have never gone out to check it until morning—by that time my Bible would have been ruined.  When I came back in, I was heartbroken.  I sat down and cried that something that was so precious was damaged—at the time I believed beyond repair.  (After a lot of work, I was able to salvage it.)  What made me mad though wasn’t that my daughter had carelessly caused this catastrophe, but rather her response to it.  She said it, “wasn’t her fault.”  I blew up.  I chewed her up one side and down the other.  I hurt her feelings the way mine were hurt.  I was so wrong.  I damaged her because something I loved was damaged.  How wrong of me.

God began to show me that, even though she was wrong in what she did and said, so was I.  My overreaction did not give her a good role model for dealing with adversity.  Instead, I was showing her that throwing a fit when something upsets me is acceptable.  It’s not.

“It’s time for healing time to move on
It’s time to fix what’s been broken too long
Time make right what has been wrong
It’s time to find my way to where I belong”

When we avoid sin it begins to turn into a similar scene as my basement.  We hold on to things we don’t really need—things that can cause damage if they’re left for too long.  They begin to mildew and break down.  They aren’t any good to us, so why do we keep avoiding dealing with them?  The worst part is that the sin we’re holding onto and not confronting can cause damage to other things that are of worth.  The mildew of it grows on the things we treasure—like relationships with our family, and with the Lord.

Avoiding sin is easy.  We just keep living upstairs and keep it up and running, but underneath, in the basement of our hearts, it’s still there, it’s not going away, and it’s destroying us little by little.

“Time for a milestone
Time to begin again
Reevaluate who I really am
Am I doing everything to follow your will
or just climbing aimlessly over these hills
So show me what it is you want from me
I give everything I surrender…”

Lord, show me what I can do to fight off this sin nature that I detest so much and avoid.  I surrender…”whatever You’re doing inside of me…You’re up to something bigger than me.  Larger than life, something heavenly”  Let me be brave enough to say, “It’s time to face up.  Clean this old house.  Time breathe in and let everything out”

Staying Alert in Christ,

Megan