More than the Mess

A few years ago, my house was pure chaos. We ran out of clean clothes and the laundry room floor more often than not. We didn't have clean dishes. We didn't have swept floors, sometimes we didn't really have floors. I didn't have company over. I was too overwhelmed with my house...I thought.

You see as I have been walking out the past few years of grief from losing two babies in two miscarriages, working through post partum depression, and dealing with my addiction to bingeing something weird has happened. My house started to get cleaner. I was suddenly filled with a need to purge the extras. Things that I never noticed started to bother me enough that I wanted to get them in order. The house would still get dirty and messy. We have four kids, a cat and two dogs after all but it never got to the chaos stage that it was. Not even when we were sick for months at a time last fall.

I've read numerous books on keeping house. I've tried a dozen methods. I do use a household binder but it's mostly to keep paperwork and to do lists in order. I don't use it everyday like I thought I would but I do use it at least once a week. It's a great tool but it's not what got my act together.

God did that.

You see, a messy house in my case (and I suspect in a lot of homes around America) was a sign of an overwhelmed and broken heart.

I didn't know where to start. I didn't know what to do. But God is a God of order and peace. He made the world, the law of Gravity, the complexity of the human body that scientists are still trying to understand, and the ecosystems that are so intricately intertwined that one teeny missing part can upset the order of life for millions of living creatures. He took away that feeling of being frozen in fear, my inability to see the mess, the scales were taken off my eyes and I could see the mess for the first time with clarity.

It wasn't about having too much stuff though we did have too much. It was about having too many thoughts in my head about not being good enough. Somewhere in my mind was a lie that said "I don't deserve this and I can't do it, so I'm not going to. It will always be this way, no matter what I do." It was a stubborn lie. It took God a lot of rewiring for me to see it as it was.

He taught me through His word that I was made for more than the mess that I surrounded myself with. He called me out on some truths about my behavior. I did it on purpose though I didn't realize it. It's easy to say you can't when people want to come over. It's easy to say you can't when you don't have clean clothes to go out. It's easy to say you can't when you've lost your paperwork again and again... That mess was a security blanket, a barbed wire fence that I used to keep people away from me. So they couldn't see the scared person that I was. The person who wouldn't measure up to their expectations, I was too afraid that they would find out just how inferior I was.

But I am NOT inferior. Neither are you. I am the King's Daughter. I am worth far more than rubies or gems. I do deserve to have a picked up house (it's not likely to be clean but picked up is nice) and I am worth the effort it takes to get it that way.

For the past five years, I have had the same prayer. "God, please get my house in order."
He is. It's not happening the way I thought it would. I didn't have a housekeeper appear on my doorstep but the job is getting done!