Hidden Spots

I love cleaning out a closet. Or, maybe I should say I love it when my closets are clean. My huge closet in our foyer is sometimes very tidy with it's contents in pretty wicker baskets. It has, along with alot of other spots, been very messy for a while now. I hate when that happens. I feel so organized when my hidden spots are tidy. It's kinda like this...if closets, drawers, my purse and under beds and couches are cleaned out, then everything must be clean. Since we've been showing our house for two years now trying to sell it, I have often times had to clean and tidy in a superficial manner. Does anyone know what I mean?? It means piling junk in baskets, laundry under cabinets, and sweeping dirt under a rug. Basicly just hiding "stuff" wherever we can. Uugh!! It really makes me itchy to think about it. I told Richard the other day that it would make me so happy if he would get me one of those big dumpsters to go in my driveway for a few days. Would that be pretty?? Ummm, we'd definitely get a letter about that: ) Anyways, when we show the house and it looks good to people not looking too deep, I just don't feel good about it. I think about how it would have been nice to spend that time folding laudry instead of hiding it in cupboards or it would have been nice going through and throwing or giving away what we found under beds instead of sticking little containers of randon things in closets. That gets me back to the topic of my newly cleaned out foyer closet. I just wanted to say...It looks good. The whole time I've been typing this post, I've been thinking of how it parallells with our spiritual lives. i seriously just wanted to tell about about my closets but I'm thinking I'm not going to be able to resist going deeper with it. Here is how I clean a really messy closet with buckets of mis-matched "stuff" and coats piled on top of that. And here also, is how to clean the mis-matched piled up junk in our lives. Just take a broom and sweep it all out. I don't sit in the closet and pick through the buckets and decide what to keep and what to throw away. I make the closet look really good and really quickly. I get almost immediate impact. OK, then I have alot of "stuff" right there in the living room. Just right out in the open. I immediately take a trash bag and throw away all the obvious garbage. And then what happens next is beautiful. I call everyone else in my family in to help me sort everything out and put it where it all goes. Together, we make everything right really quickly. I guess that parallells confessing to others. Confessing is letting someone else share your messy burden with you. It really makes the burden light. I don't know, maybe I've gone too far with my little analogy now. There is no doubt that masking or being superficial or putting up a nice front or sweeping issues under a rug, though, makes me feel itchy inside just like sweeping real dirt under a real rug makes me feel itchy too. I am very thankful for the Holy Spirit convicting me and not just convicting me but helping me haul it all out to the dumpster when I'm hiding and holding onto things I shouldn't. My little question i was going to ask before I turned spiritual here was going to be if you enjoy the cleanness of the closet when you're done or the lost treasure you find amongst all the junk... I'm sorry, but that preaches too. For instance I found some cool grammar flash cards and also some flash cards with the constellations I used to use with the older kids and that will now be perfect for the younger set. I am seriously going to enjoy using those with Cole, Kam and Nona tomorrow during school time. It's a simple pleasure---you know---seeing my little children learning something new from some flash cards that bring back a sweet memory of Karis, cason and Kimmi. I think, spiritually speaking, when our lives and hearts are cleaned out, we can enjoy the simple blessings in life more.

Praying for God to reveal more hidden spots to me.