"My Messy Room"

The junk is piled high and wide. I am in the midst of a forced cleaning of our “furnace room” because we need a new furnace (have you priced furnaces lately?). So far I have managed to move the junk about 20 feet, from the furnace room to the door in my home study. Up until recently, of course, that junk was precious to me. An old dehumidifier I was sure would miraculously heal itself the next time I plugged it in; basketball coaching shoes which I kept “just in case” I started coaching again; and enough assorted books and magazines to start a store. I am trying to work up the strength of mind and will to take it all to the town dump, but excuses abound, like “try writing about it and perhaps it will make the mess disappear.”

Kathleen Norris wrote an amazing book titled Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith containing short entries about faith and life.  In her  entry on “Repentance” she tells the story of a little boy who wrote a poem about how angry he gets when his father yells at him. In his poem his response, he imagines, is to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town.” The conclusion reads, “ ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself I shouldn’t have done all that.”

It is hard to clean up the messes in our lives. Sometimes they come because we ignored the growing monster in the other room, allowing hurts and wounds to pile up because it was easier to throw them in the furnace room that throw them out when we knew we should have done so. Sometimes we allow our emotions to ruin not only our lives but our families, our homes and even “the whole town.”  It isn’t hard to create a messy room, but it is really hard to clean it up, as any mother of a teenager or wife of a “rat packer” like me can attest.  But, I know that once I get the junk out the door, into my trunk and delivered to the dump I will feel like a man set free.  The little boy, in his confessional poem, was taking the first step toward the healing that repentance offers in the great tradition of “Have mercy on me, O God….” (Psalm 51)

 This first weekend of Lent find a time to gather with others and begin cleaning up the mess we all carry around inside our lives, so that by Easter you have plenty of room for the sheer joy of the Resurrection to rise within you. Norris concludes,  “If the house is messy…why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell.”  Time to clean.