Most of our lives are filled with clutter to the point that we lose grip of the things we hold closest to us.  If you have a garage, I’m sure you know what I mean.  Unless of course you are some type of neat freak that has to have everything in its place at all times… that’s a sickness by the way.  At a minimum, I would venture to say that every home has some type of “junk drawer” – at least!

In my home, we have a set place where all of the small, seemingly important items are placed until we choose to do something with them.  The downside is that many of those items can be found in the same place several years later.  In fact, we built a new home a couple of years ago and actually moved the junk drawer from one location to another!  The only compromise is that the drawer is slightly smaller in the new house… but nonetheless, we moved the junk.

I can’t tell you what is exactly in that drawer, but I do visit it when I’m looking for something.  I rarely find the item I’m in serarch of but I have to start my search in the drawer.  Inevitably I become somewhat agitated when I have to move stuff around.  I have threatened the junk in the drawer (as if it were human) with the fate of being thrown away, but I just can’t seem to pull the trigger.  I’m certain that the only remedy will be someone other than myself going through the drawer and throwing away 90% of the unusable items.

Merriam-Webster defines clutter as:

“to fill or cover with scattered or disordered things that impede movement or reduce effectiveness”

Isn’t this the case with our lives?

It seems that the pace of life has gotten us to a place where we spend our days moving around the clutter.  Jesus Christ tells us in Matthew Chapter 6 that the pursuit of all this “stuff” is a wasted effort.  It seems that our faith is relegated to the junk drawer with all of the other “stuff” that we have to move around in order to find it.

How do we change this?  How do we get rid of the junk in our lives that impedes our movement, reduces our effectiveness, and keeps us scattered and disorderly?

I don’t know about you, but there is a good bit of clutter in my life that I am just not strong enough to throw out.  I need someone else to come in and throw away the junk so I can focus on the one true thing… my faith in God.  Jesus Christ Came as a reseult of our desire to collect things that overtake us.  He came to help throw out the old stuff that gets in the way of our relationship with God.  Our friends… my friends, are here to help me keep my junk drawer clean.

If you don’t surround yourself with people who keep an eye on your junk drawer, you will fall back into a cluttered life where God is relegated to another piece of junk in your life.  Don’t let that happen.  Surround yourself with authentic friends who are bold enough to wake you up when you are sleeping and point out your clutter.  Be big enough that you can take it like a man.  Don’t weep over what is thrown out… celebrate the discovery of God in a clutter free life!

Peace,

Greg  Arnold
Acts 4:31
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