Chaotic Cleaning

I am a chaotic cleaner. If I am organizing my closet, I drag everything out into the floor to begin. If I am sorting toys, I dump them all into a heaping mountain, and then put them back into the toybox as I go. I think this is pretty normal, but what makes my cleaning style even more chaotic is that I may go to the bathroom in the middle of closet organizing and get sidetracked into organizing the bathroom cabinets. Or I may move from the playroom into the kitchen for a snack and get sidetracked into cleaning the ovens. This translates into big messes everywhere while I am cleaning.

Currently, there are multiple mountains of stuff laying around my house. I am slowly but surely conquering the chaos. It is just insane while I am in the middle of the mess. I have basically conquered the bedrooms and kitchen and am now working on the garage. The stuff from the garage has taken over the house tonight.

Sitting in my living room tonight staring at boxes piled high with stuff to sort made me stop and think. In order to have a genuinely clean house, I have cleaned all the places that people see, but I have also organized closets, sorted drawers, and the scariest of all - cleaned under my bed. My chaotic cleaning reminded me of how God works on cleaning up sin in our life. He does not wave a magic wand and poof it all away automatically. I sure wish cleaning was that easy. But instead, God deals with me in small sections - just a closet or a drawer at a time. Sometimes there are seasons in my life that I am struggling with some difficulty that I just cannot seem to overcome (like the garage), and God temporarily moves on to something else more manageable for a short season - like washing dishes. Then He goes back to the garage again when I am more ready to obediently deal with the big issues.

So many times in my life, I feel like there is just absolute chaos inside of me as God is working a little bit here and little bit there. Sometimes He just drags all the really scary sin out from under the bed and leaves it sitting in a big pile for awhile, letting me trip all over it, until I am ready for Him to help me make it go away. The frustrating part has to be once we clean up an area of my life, and I move on, I have to make certain that I keep it clean. It doesn't matter if I wash all the dishes today, I still have to wash them all again tomorrow. If I let them go for a week then it becomes a very nasty horrible chore all over again. Taking care of sin is like that for me. If I will do it often, and be agreeable with God about the things I need to deal with, then it is a much easier, much less horrible event. It is when I leave my sin unattended and let it grow in dark places that it feels overwhelming to try to deal with it.

I don't know that I really have a concise point to make tonight. I guess, just as I was chaotically cleaning this week, it made me appreciate the cleaning that God has to continually do in my life a little bit more. I am glad that He doesn't ever give up, no matter how big the mess gets.