Cleaning my spirit house

There are times that life strips you bare, clean of all your illusions and comfortable ways of looking at yourself and the world. Though we can never be free of subjectivity, these moments of clarity can be painful as we see the flimsy props that hold up our self-esteem and our chosen way of life.

Some people experience this through a natural disaster, like the floods that have destroyed so much in the Midwest, or the terrible earthquake and its aftermath in China. Sometimes it’s personal tragedy like death, illness, loss of a job, or divorce, or financial ruin. As disaster sweeps away all the material belongings we surround ourselves with, as well as many of our relationships and our sources of identity, we are forced to re-evaluate ourselves and our lives.

For me, it has come over the last few weeks as I realized the identity I thought I had in my church was false. The people I relied on and thought of as friends did not behave the way I wanted them to. The many changes, job reversals, illnesses, goodbyes, and deaths of this past year have me floundering around in quicksand, while others around me ambled through them with a minimum of fuss and tears. I kept thinking I should be like them, be more resilient, be stronger, suck it up. Plaster on the smile and pretend. But that is not being true to who I really am.

I once thought that as you mature, you come up with a definition of yourself that you carry with you the rest of your life. Now I see that major and even minor events require you to adjust your identity or stagnate. We derive so much of our sense of self from outward factors. But our spouses, or children, our homes, posessions, communities, relatives, friends, jobs, health, hobbies – none of it is promised to us. At any moment those things that prop us up and give our lives meaning can be taken away. The only thing that is eternally promised to us is our salvation.

That doesn’t mean that I should lay back and wait for death, though on some dark days it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Instead, I believe it means that we should not hold so closely to the external things that decorate our existence. The primary thing – the one thing that will never disappear – is our relationship with God. Though the whole world might turn its back on me, God will never leave me and never stop loving me.

I’m cleaning house. I’m clearing my spirit of all the things I once thought were necessary, the things that I blindly thought defined me. I’m cleaning out the misplaced trust that I put in humans and the things of humans, those things that will never truly satisfy, and placing that trust back in the one who created me. I’m evaluating my life and developing a new sense of self, one in harmony with God and the world around me, one that is based on the eternal, not the ephemeral. I only have one life to live, and I’m going to make it a good one.