Mystery Puddle

I have this friend who has been motivating me to tackle the clutter and mystery puddles in my home. Every day she emails a task to complete with before and after pictures from her own home. If you need a friend like this, I will share her with you. I could never be this friend because I can't manage to do much of anything every single day for months at a time. I've barely completed half of the list and I'm OK with that. Something is better than nothing.

One of this week's challenges was to clean the fridge. This is was an excellent week for me to do it because I used up my grocery money a week before the month was over so by Wednesday there was almost no food in there. Ketchup and celery anyone? Mmmm. What I discovered when I finally juiced all of those oranges and grapefruit that were getting kind of wrinkly in the "crisper" drawer was that I had a couple of puddles of some unknown substances at the bottom of the fridge. From the way they were all dried up, I'm sure they've been there a really long time. One was definitely meat juice and the other was something super sticky.

Why am I telling you this?

I'm not sure.

Maybe it's because I revel in gross things. My little sister claims that I purposely try to weave the word "poop" into every conversation. It's not true. Sometimes, like on Sunday when I was being interviewed at our church's annual meeting, I accidentally talk about "pee." I can be really, super inappropriate without even trying.

Maybe it's because I want to prove that I have done something productive with my life. My goal to blog every day has obviously fallen by the wayside so what have I been doing all this time? What do I do all day when my kids are at school and I'm "working" from home? Sometimes I'm unearthing marvels of science in my very own appliances. Do I have a fabulous life or what?

Maybe I'm being philosophical and I just want to show that sometimes you clean out one area of your life only to uncover something even worse lurking below. My shriveling grapefruit were covering up the really gross stuff. As long as they were there, I could ignore the puddles. It took a close friend and a really tight grocery budget to get me to the place where I couldn't look the other way any longer. But now that I've done it, I feel so clean and so free!

Let's go there. I feel that way about my heart. So often it's a mess. I long to be clean and free on the inside, but sometimes I don't want to reveal the mess underneath. It's too painful. I'm thankful for friends who listen to me and let me process in my own way and tell me the truth and help me to live in the freedom that is mine because Jesus lives in me. I need to let that wash over me a little bit right now.

Ripping it open a little bit. What is it about my children that just wrecks me? I was feeling in such a great place until one of my kids started melting down and not behaving how I would choose for him to behave. I put myself in a situation that I thought I could control and guess what? I couldn't. Can you believe that? I cannot control my child's wayward mouth. The insanity is thinking that I can when I clearly can barely control my own!! Poop. See? Just had to work it in.

I leave you with the one Word that leaves me with hope:

"Search me Lord and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting." Psalm 139:23-24