I’ve spent much of the last couple of weekends cleaning junk out of my house and creating space. One reason is because we need to make as much room as possible for our first child, but to tell you the truth this is something we probably needed to do a while back. My wife and I have lived in our house for almost two years and we are finally getting around to hanging pictures, shelves, cleaning out closets, throwing away junk and so on.
Strangely enough I’ve been doing the same in my office, which has been just as much of a challenge. I think a lot of youth ministers by heart are pack rats or at least collectors. I don’t know where it all started for me, but I know when it comes to certain areas of my life I hate throwing stuff out. I’ll hold onto food past the expiration date (well past it), I have books from college (I studied Electronic Media), I think I even have a t-shirt from middle school. My office to me is organized, to my Pastor it looks as if a hurricane hit…what can I say, I’m a youth minister.
But, one thing I will agree with is that the state of your office/room/house reflects how you are feeling. Now, I’m not an emotional hurricane, but I will admit there are times when my office looks worse than a mess. And if I don’t take the time to address the mess it will take over my life and even though I don’t like doing it, I do take the time every once and a while to purge through the junk in my office. It’s hard for me to go through the mess because it means facing a lot of things I have a hard time letting go of, a lot of things I just don’t want to lose. But in the end I feel better, in the end when I look at my clean office, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s like our emotions, sometimes they clutter up, sometimes they are hard to let go of and often we need to address them. So what do you need to clean out?