House Keeping

Yes, the irony is not lost on me that I am writing a blog titled "House Keeping". I have seen my house and am very well aware that keeping it is something I am miserably bad at. My friends know this about me and seem to take it in stride. My family, only the other hand, still loves to give me crap about it.

With the move impending, I have been tackling the long forgotten places in my house. Maybe these places don't exist in other homes, but boy do they in mine! Places like the storage room and above the fridge, the back of the linen closet and under the bathroom sink. I have found some things worth keeping and filled many a trash bag. After all, why move what I don't want?

But I do. All the time. The dark, hidden, almost forgotten corners of my heart are full of trash I carry around. Every day. Some days I pretend the trash is treasure, I act if it is something worthy, I lie to myself and everyone in my life. Sometimes I am forced to follow the stench to get to the root of the smell.

Emotional house keeping is something I also apparently suck at. God has funny timing, and let me assure you "funny" has nothing to do with "hahahaha". Right now is the last time I would chose to deal with heart issues. I kinda have a lot going on with single parenting as Matt travels and a move across the country, an upcoming wedding, house hunting, home repair...

The guys who lead our church (I would call them "pastors" but the title just doesn't fit with the mental image that pops into my head) have talked about how God is in the interruptions. But, frankly, I am not in the mood to be interrupted. I have stuff to get done and yet keep finding myself having conversations I didn't plan to have about heart issues I don't want to talk about. Someone keeps shinning a flashlight in the dark corners I like to sweep the undesirable things of my life into.

And so, as I dig into the back corner of the furnace room ( you don't want to know what I found) I find myself dealing with matters of heart (not pretty here, either). God never means for us to deal with these by ourselves, which is why He is so insistent on us living in community with others, some call it "Church".

But I hate it. Because humans are involved, it gets messy. And I hate asking others to bare my burdens. I would love to say that it is because I am such a nice person that I don't want to weigh others down, but that wouldn't be the whole truth. I don't like to be naked, exposed, and and kills my "tough chic who has her sh*t together" image that I like to portray.

Some days I so desperately want to walk this path by myself, deal with my issues in a clean way (meaning no one else gets to know them) and check it off the list and move on. But by dealing with it myself, the people in my life become nothing more than an audience I am performing for, not friends, not community, not love. This isn't what I was called to be, an actor who writes the script of who she thinks others expect her to be. I keep people at arms length, letting them in only the nicely scrubbed areas of my life.

So I struggle. I get uncomfortable. I make others uncomfortable. I get hurt and take others down with me. Life becomes unscripted, interrupted, unplanned. And maybe this is when someone might get a glimpse of God in my life, because I, in all my brokenness, with dark and dirty areas in all the corners of my soul, have nothing to offer.