"Time to Clean"

 The junk is piled high and wide. When in doubt, I throw it in the furnace room. I am trying to work up the will to clean it out and, 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 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 he imagines his response 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 we make in our lives. Sometimes we prefer to ignore the growing monster in the other room, allowing hurts and wounds to pile up because it seems easier to throw them in the furnace room that to throw them out. 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.  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. Why do I wait?

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 second weekend of Lent, let’s find time to begin cleaning up the mess we all carry around inside our lives, so that by Easter we have made room for the sheer joy of the Resurrection to fill the cleaned up space. Norris concludes,  “If the house is messy…why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell.”  

Time to clean.