Creating the visual of clean can be as satisfying as actually doing the hard work of cleaning.

For example, your living room is cluttered with things and someone is on his way over to your home for a visit or a meeting. You don’t have the time to clean the living room from top to bottom so you take the clutter and you stash it.

You put those items behind things, underneath things, out of sight. 

Then, just before the visitor arrives, you stand back and admire how neat and tidy everything looks.

You get the same satisfaction you would have if you had taken an hour to put everything away in its proper place. 

I do this with my office. Over the course of a few weeks, paper will start to gather on my desk. 

I don’t know how it happens. It’s a little like how snow starts to fall from the sky. At first it melts quickly and you don’t see it on the ground. But as the snow persists, it starts to accumulate. 

It begins to pile up.  

That’s what happens on my desk. Dealing with all that paper that has accumulated takes a lot of time – sometimes hours. Who has hours for filing and sorting and what not?! 

The downside is that I can’t work with the piles of paper; I keep looking at them. So, from time to time, I simply gather up all the papers and put them on a table in one neat pile.  

Then my office desk looks neat and clean and I can work. It’s fantastic. And I don’t have to spend all that time dealing with each individual piece of paper to give me that feeling. 

Today I cut the grass. At this time of year the dandelions are in full bloom … and we definitely have our fair share of them. 

No, that’s not correct. We have way more than our fair share! 

Curiously, most of those dandelions are on our side of the street. The houses on the other side of the street must have some kind of deal with a weed company. You don’t see the weed guy coming around spraying their lawns but none of them have these lovely spring flowers … certainly not like us!

This morning when I cut the grass, I cut the heads off of every dandelion on our lawn. It was a major killing spree. Then I stood back and looked at how green and even our grass looked. 

I was proud of myself. 

However, I really didn’t do anything to the dandelions. The roots are still there; the leafs are still there … and they will grow right back in their place again. 

But today – right now – looking out my front window, I don’t have any of those little flowery devils.

The one downside to all this is that, although I have immediate satisfaction with my lawn looking so clean, in reality I still have a mess on my hands that will have to be dealt with at some point … which sucks!

Here’s the thing: You can clean up your life in a very superficial way and it will look good to you and to all those around you. But unless you do a deep hard clean, you will always be looking for places to stash things. A deep clean can only be accomplished by dealing with the junk in your life – that is confessing it to God and doing the necessary work to keep it from coming back.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What in your life do you need to do a serious clean of? Post your comments and questions below.