6. A Clean House

I imagine that some of you have had some of the same experiences I have when trying to clean up the house with little kids around. There is no pile of old toys that does not take on a fresh interest. As soon as an old, long-neglected sweatshirt is brought out into the middle of the room to be gotten rid of, it becomes precious and much beloved. Something about seeing old things that they really don’t want on their way out the door makes children wildly sentimental about them and desperate for their time together to be extended.

There is a version of this same phenomenon when you are about to leave the things you shouldn’t be carrying at the throne of God. You are getting out your old junk to get rid of it and, instead, find yourself playing with it again. You find yourself wanting to hang on a little more, to go through all the reasons you had that bitterness in the first place rather than to simply and swiftly get rid of it.

Introspection sessions provide a lot of opportunities to dabble again in the troubles of the past under the heading of “dealing” with it. If unpacking your struggles is something you love to do with friends, getting rid of the struggle altogether seems reckless.

But again, imagine your home—you are trying to clean it out and make it livable and functional and pleasant. But in every room, you have made a weird pile in the middle. It’s the stuff we should be getting rid of. The garbage. So, when you walk into the room that is your relationship with your husband, you do not really see the room. You see the stuff you don’t need. You kick it around or have to walk over it. Periodically, when you know you really can’t live like this any longer, you clean up the room again and find more new things you don’t need to add to the pile. But the thing that you are not doing is getting all the junk out.

Instead, every time you walk into the kitchen you are working around a festering pile of resentments or hurt feelings. When you go into the laundry room, you can barely work in there for all of the financial worries and burdens. When you are in the living room, there is such a pile of envy and complaints and fusses that none of the family members can see each other clearly, much less enjoy each other. And the thing that is really sad when this happens is that you are still spending all of your time “cleaning.”

For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 2 Tim 3:6–7

This passage in Timothy speaks to something that looks to be as old as women. When your whole house is full of garbage and baggage and troubles, you are really up for an inspirational talk. You are really ready to look at this new Caboodle system you could purchase for all the old hurts you want to keep available to you. You’re ready for Tupperware that will set you free by helping you store resentment in a more orderly manner.

But knowledge of the truth is not things to do that make you feel or look freer for a little bit, while you are still weighed down by all the sins and struggles. When you know the truth, you need to walk in the truth—freely and unburdened. Without all those piles.

And the miracle of it all is that the Lord sets you free. You don’t need ways to store it all until you need to process it all again. He can take it all away from you, and what you will suddenly find is that you can see the house again. You can see your children again. You can see the work that you were meant to be doing in here again.

What we are talking about in this issue are the sorts of routine struggles that every woman has that build up to create a malaise. Everything starts feeling sad and overwhelming. You don’t have the joy of your work anymore because the work has started to become just messing around with all the things that you know you should forgive or confess or do something else with. One of the sweetest verses in the whole Bible is 1 Peter 4:8 which really just says it all:

And above all things have fervent love for one another, for “love will cover a multitude of sins.”

This is the heart of the matter right here. But what if we cannot see straight, much less conjure up a fervent love big enough to handle this disaster? If our love was sufficient for this, then we wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place.

But try thinking of it this way—Let Love Himself cover it. Loving the Lord fervently equips you to let Him take it all away. He is the Love that can and will cover a vast multitude of sin—and He will not cover by putting it all under a thin lumpy tarp of our good intentions in the middle of the room. He takes it away as far as the east is from the west.

This is the freedom we all desperately need! So as you go about your life today, as you encounter yucky little piles of things that should have been dealt with—give them to the Lord freely and gladly. Shove it all straight into a trash bag, and don’t start rooting around in it in case you lost a Starburst in there. Call on the Lord Jesus and let His love take it away, trusting it to Him completely.

Heavenly Father, give us all the courage to let Your love cover our troubles. Open our hands that we might receive Your overwhelming grace in place of our resentments and anxieties and fears. Bless us and all those around us mightily through Your mercies, amen.

Rachel Jankovic