The Junk Drawer

I love a clean house. (Mine is not clean as I am writing this). It makes me so happy to look around the house and see that everything is in its place. I am gearing up to have a big cleaning day tomorrow. Today I promised my daughter I would play with her all day, and she is holding me to that promise.

I will clean the bathroom, the kitchen & dining room, the bedrooms and the living room, all of the rooms that will be seen by any possible visitors. However, I have a drawer that very seldom gets cleaned. In fact, most of the time, I only open it far enough to shove things into it because I have no idea where else to put them. I think everyone has one of these drawers, or maybe it is a closet, or a room. Somewhere in our house that we can close and no one can see. Unfortunately right now, my entire basement is kind of like a junk room. . .but that is a blog for another day.

Even though we would like to forget that we have a drawer like this somewhere in our houses, they are there. And I don't think we really forget about them. I think we just keep shoving stuff in them to deal with later, but later never seems to come.

I think along with junk drawers in our houses, we have junk drawers in our lives. We have things that happen to us and we try to shove them in our junk drawers. We are never sure how to deal with these things so we try to shove them out of our memories, forget they happen. But, guess what they are still there, and the junk doesn't just disappear. In fact, I think junk has the opposite effect. I think that junk grows.

We like to try to hide it from everyone. We make it look like everything is all cleaned up, but we would be horrified if somebody got a glimpse of our junk. We look at other people's lives and we like to tell ourselves that they don't have any junk. Guess what, I don't believe that. Everyone has it. Somebody else might only have a little drawer, but somebody else might have an entire basement.

A couple of years ago my family was out of town when a big rain storm hit. We had never had rain like this so we were really worried about getting water in our basement. To my absolute horror I had to call one of my girlfriends and ask her to check on our house. I wasn't worried about asking her because I knew that she would do it, but I knew that the state of my basement was horrible. She gladly came over and checked everything out for us. She didn't care that my basement was a mess. (It probably killed her to leave and not clean it, I love that about her). She helped me out, she didn't judge me for the mess I had and she knows, I do not have it all together. And I am pretty sure she still loves me just the same as before she saw my mess.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could start to deal with some of the junk in our lives. Wouldn't it feel good to start to take stuff out of that drawer, one thing at a time and deal with it once and for all. I don't think we are supposed to just dump out all of the junk and try to sort through it in one sitting. I think that would just leave us frustrated and we would shove it all back into that drawer and save it for another day.

Lucky for me, when I asked Jesus into my heart, he didn't care about my junk drawer. He opened His arms and welcomed me in with all my junk. I can't hide it from Him. He knows it is there and He loves me just the same.

I do know that He wants me to get rid of my junk and He is going to help me if I let Him. He doesn't want me to try to just shove it to the back of my mind and try to forget that it is there. He doesn't want our junk drawers to cause pain that never goes away. He wants to free us from it, all of it. Wouldn't it feel good to wake up in the morning and know that every drawer is clean.

For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:9