I’ve never been good at cleaning up without making a bigger mess first.
Case in point. This is my living room right now.
Yesterday we decided it was time to take down the Christmas decorations. In order to do this, I decided I needed to first finish cleaning out our playroom closet which I’m happy to announce is was one of the last organizational disasters left in our home.
Our closet is now clean.
The rest of the playroom, however, is a nightmare.
I’ve always believed that the best way to clean everything up is to drag it and dump it all out. Make a big old pile and sort through, item by item. It’s time consuming. I would argue that it wastes time; after all, I’m dumping out stuff that was already pretty much organized.
But in the end I know that it’s all clean and perfect and perfectly clean.
The problem is that I do that with life too. I go along with everything being fine. I feel happy and content, and then I will notice an area that could be cleaned up a little bit. I peek in to take a look, and five minutes later, all of my internal cubbies and baskets and bins have been emptied out into a great big pile in the middle of my psyche.
It’s as messy as it sounds.
So I sit there, feeling my pile, and I wonder how I’m going to get it put back to where it all belongs. Sometimes it’s easy. I take it step by step. I rebuild my life.
Othertimes, however, the mound feels awfully high, and I can’t see the top. I don’t know how to dig in and every time I try pieces come tumbling down on me, making it hard to catch a breath.
So I scream out in prayer, “how?” “why?” “what if?” And I scream and I scream and I scream. I still haven’t really learned yet that when we scream, we’re so deafened by our own noise that we can’t hear any answers.
And so I sit here with a heavy heart and a cluttered mind, and I look at my kids.
They make me laugh sometimes. I tell them to eat their spinach, and they get mad at me. They think they win if they can get away with not eating it. They don’t know its purpose. They mope when they have to go to bed. They cry at punishments. They simply don’t understand the why of it all. And so it feels unfair.
And inside, I sometimes have to laugh. If only they would trust me. If only they would believe that very small parts of this world do make sense, and if they allow me to guide them, I will walk them straight into those small, tiny, sensical pockets. After all, there are a few instances where I know what I’m talking about. Where I know better.
But they don’t trust me. Not in that way. They have their wills, as do we all, and they do their darnedest to try to express them.
And if I look at that and I take the lesson that is handed to me on a platter, I would learn that it’s the same way with me. I don’t understand it all. I don’t understand the whys or the hows or the how comes. I don’t know how I get into my messes or how to get myself out. I don’t know why I have to experience them. I simply don’t know.
And if only I would trust rather than scream out in consternation, perhaps my answers would come a little bit more easily. At the very least I would avoid the pain of screaming until my bloody lungs hurt.
But I’m a slow learner. I probably always will be. Let’s pretend it’s part of my charm.
All I know is that when I’m at my quietest, there are two things that I know to be true.
Sometimes we have to learn to let it be.
And it matters who we take on our journey.
God bless, my friends. Don’t make the same mistakes I do.