Go Through the Junk

Have you ever let part of your house/property get messy and disorganized, and need to take time to sort through things and straighten it up? Maybe it’s your desk. Or your car. Or your basement. Or your attic. Or your garage. Or your bedroom. Or your whole house. 

We all have different things that aren’t in order as well as we’d like. We may even have dreams for those spaces to be used in a different way, but can’t do so because they are too cluttered.


I love to organize and clean up. Putting things away in a proper place is therapeutic for me. There’s just something about taking a mess and putting it right that appeals to me. 

When we moved into our house, the garage became the catchall room. Whatever we didn’t know what to do with went in the garage. And we want to get it organized so we can actually park our cars in there. (Is that crazy?!?)



But have you ever noticed that during the cleaning and organizing phase that things can look worse for a while before they look better? 



Suppose you have a garage that needs cleaning. (Who doesn’t, amiright?) Right now things maybe are on shelves. They aren’t organized and neatly placed there, but at least they’re off the floor. But perhaps there are other things, larger items, that are all along the walls and maybe boxes in the middle of the garage. Or maybe everything is just thrown in like a jumbled mess and there are piles of everything everywhere and you actually get the sweats when thinking about going in there. 



Once you start taking everything off the shelves, and moving things around, it may look more like a mess than ever. Maybe you’ve even had to move things into the driveway and yard to make more space, and you’ve certainly had to open the boxes to go through the contents. That means smaller piles, but more of them. In order to really clean up, you have to lay everything out and see what’s what. 


Looking at an unorganized or messy space can be overwhelming. Scary, even. Who knows what you’ll find lurking behind boxes, or under furniture you never use?

But it’s worth it to clean it out, because then you know the whole situation of things, you can take an inventory, and there won’t be any more surprises or hidden junk. You might find a dead mouse or six, or cockroaches (who never die), or even a cat that didn’t belong to you but does now. 

See, you can’t move forward without going through the junk. 

It’s like our spiritual lives. We have things we don’t want to deal with, and so we shove them into the garage of our heart and mind, piling one thing on top of another until suddenly we have things stacked so high it feels like we can never get a hold on any of it. It’s become a scary, towering mass that keeps us from going forward because we don’t actually remember what’s in there anymore. And we’re not sure we really want to know. 



When we start going through the ‘piles’, it definitely looks worse before it gets better. We unearth feelings and experiences, we uncover behaviors we’ve hidden away from everyone else (and maybe from ourselves- but not really), we start having emotions about all of this stuff, and it can be messy. It can look like we’re just making a worse mess, but the process has a purpose. 



Before we can move forward, we have to go through the junk and get it cleared out. You can’t bring in new, good stuff if there’s nowhere to put it. And you can’t effectively use the good stuff you already have if it’s covered in piles of things you don’t want to deal with. 

But you know what also happens when you clean out the garage? You find your high school yearbooks (never underestimate the fun your kids will have with THOSE), your old baseball glove, trophies from past accomplishments, that tool you’ve been searching for, and things that have value that you meant to use, but they just got lost in the shuffle. 

God has gifted each of us with certain skills, and everyone has a talent of some kind. But sometimes they’re just “thrown on a shelf with all the other stuff in the garage”. Unearthing those things as we sort through the junk makes it easier to keep going, to hope we find more diamonds in the rubble. And those things give us a needed breather, a time to reflect and be thankful we started the process. 

And in the end you not only have a space that can be used in a better way than it was before (and lots of junk at the curb where it belongs), but also rule over that area of your life. It can’t keep you in fear, dreading exposure. Bring those things into the light and move forward in faith!


Psalm 51:6-13
(6) Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
(7) Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
(8) Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
(9) Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
(10) Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
(11) Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
(12) Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
(13) Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.