Clean Up

God and I have been walking life together for nearly fourteen years and among our many chats I have only recently begun to listen to the words about cleaning things up.

My mom always had one rule about the playroom in our house, it could stay are messy as we wanted, but there had to be a path from the door to the window. My friends and I would finish playing with Barbies or video games or books or movies, run to the door and, shuffling our feet across the room, we would make a path to the window. Each day we did this. It worked for a while, then it got old not finding toys, playing in a small space with Bratz dolls, Star Wars Legos and N64 controllers all around. It didn’t really create the forever love atmosphere I was trying to build for Barbie and Ken. So I cleaned. And my friends cleaned. We picked up, cleaned up and worked through piles of nonsense together because when we did we had room. When we did we could dance around the room singing to the Backstreet Boys or make sheet forts that hung from the ceiling. We could do more and create more and play more.

I wonder how many times on the path with God I have just cleared a path, pushing aside my selfishness, pride, bitterness, anger, envy, sadness and guilt just to make a narrow path so we can keep moving. But that’s not living. That’s shuffling, just how my friends and I shuffled across the room. God wants to clean and work through our mess even when we hand our mess to Him when we have no clue where it goes or what it is even suppose to be. He takes it, gets rid of it, works though it with us or maybe even something else that I have never experienced before. 

But the point is He does stuff with it.

And when He does, it’s not this narrow path where I am scared to put one foot out of line because I’ll step on a doll's shoe or wrinkle paper. We move and create and explore things I never knew existed. That’s what He wants. He doesn’t want a path from one side of life to the other, but room in between to explore, dance or sit with the ones you love. Because life isn’t about pushing things aside or clearing a path to forge ahead or getting from one point to the next. It's embracing every detail of the how in your journey from the tear cry when a loved one died to the still peace that floods when holding a long awaited newborn. The path matters.