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.
Published by angelawd on July 8th, 2008 tagged Healing
July 8th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Why is cleaning up our lives SO hard? Thank you and God bless you for the reminder that it is all in God’s hands and we need to clean our spiritual house!
July 8th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
p.s. this is beautifully written!
July 9th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Angela,
Sometimes when we are in the valleys of our lives we grow more spiritually than when we’re on the hilltops. Though we don’t like the experience of being in the valley, the spiritual growth, the “house cleaning,” may be just what we need. Praise God that you recognize what you need to do and are doing it.
July 9th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Wow…this post really hit me hard. What is so profound about it is that even our spouses and children do not define us, nor can they completely fufill us. That thought alone brings tears to my eyes because those are the most important things in the world to me. But it should be God. It’s hard to readjust that thinking and put Him first.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Thanks to all of you for your encouragement. This time has been an eye-opener for me, and I hope I don’t lose these lessons that I’ve learned.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Thank you for this encouraging post! This is included in the Christian Carnival, up later today at Diary of 1.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
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