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.

Ewwww..... Yuck

Yes, I know. Three blogs in one night is a little too much. But this will make you feel so much better about your own house, and it made me laugh.

I was cleaning the playroom on Saturday. I found a dead bird in the toybox. No lie. Dead bird.

Maybe I should clean a little more often.

sippee cups and God

I hate cleaning house. Detest. Despise. Dread. I don't have enough negative adjectives in my repertoire to adequately describe my nasty emotions about cleaning. I do it because it must be done and I do it as well as possible because that's the right way to do it. However, anytime that I am cleaning, I am battling a particularly foul attitude. It's just how I am and haven't been able to change it in spite of many attempts to view cleaning in a more positive light.

Because of the foul attitude, I spend a lot of time praying while I'm cleaning. To confess and try to overcome the guilt associated with the negative attitude. Because of all the time I spend praying while cleaning multiplied by all the cleaning time involved in showing a house, God often speaks to me through the mundane tasks.

This week it was a sippee cup. NO JOKE! I was washing dishes....which I hate less than I used to so I guess that's progress. I was dumping and rinsing sippee cups....no big deal and tossing them in the dishwasher. Then I came to a long lost sippee cup. You parents out there know what I found inside...chunky, stinky, white, moldy cheese. So then I had to hold my breath and work for quite some time on cleaning up the cup so that it could be usable. That's when God got my attention and taught me a little lesson about sin.

You see, daily confession is like washing the fresh dishes. We confess our sins, get rinsed off and are good to go. Very quick, easy, and fairly painless. But the sin that we allow to fester and grow and hide becomes the stinky cheese. It is harder to totally rinse away, and it is a chore to completely remove it and become usable again. God desires a daily confession and cleansing from us so that we are constantly yielded and usable. When we allow sin to overtake us, it is much harder for God to use us.

There it is....a lesson about sin from a nasty, stinky, gross sippee cup.