Whether we are talking about a closet, a shed, or the basement, I imagine many of us witness the same process.
At one point everything in the closet, the shed, or the basement is clean, clear, and in its place. Then over time, layer begets layer. More stuff gets pushed in, dumped there with the silent intention to put it back in its place, wishfully, “later”.
The challenge is that “later” never arrives. So, piles accumulate into a jumbled mass – essentially debris – flotsam and jetsam.
That works until it doesn’t. And then in a fever or organizational fervor, we clean it all out. And start again.
Welcome to a big part of the spiritual life.
Over time, life becomes burdened by “stuff” – the jumbled mass around the worries and concerns of our material lives. We feed into that, promising with good intentions to get back to first-things-first, until even the well intentioned promises slip from our mind.
And into that space, we often miraculously re-discover God and faith again. Tired of the mess, we finally clean out the closet… a new morning rises.
A nucleus of the church always remains in existence, unrecognized … When a church has been so thoroughly devastated that no more faith remains, it makes a new start; a new light shines out. In the Word, this is called “morning.”
(Secrets of Heaven 408, 409)
Our job is to remain patient with the journey. God gently allows us to run down the paths of forgetfulness, asleep to the bigger realities of life. He knows eventually we tire of the “mess” and find new seeds, a new morning, reborn in Him, yet again.