Anyway, my desk at school and my room at home are probably the greatest pieces of evidence of my inability to sort and organize. Piles of paper, piles of clothes... it's sort of the norm for me.
I don't want it to be the norm, though--it seems to me that I would feel better and my life would run much more smoothly if I put some effort into learning how to stay organized.
Otherwise...
The piles get so big that they cause collateral damage. Others complain. I may lose something (or more often, I cannot find something in a pile, though I know it's there). I may simply become overwhelmed or discouraged by the size of the pile.
So, at that point, I have to clean things up: I trash and recycle what I don't need and divide what I do need into logical stacks. The result is a clean desk or clean room, and me feeling amazingly liberated and relieved.
This is spookily like how sin accumulates in our lives. Sin weighs us down and we lack the skill and strength to put our lives in order ourselves. The more we try to do things on our own (or ignore the issues), the messier the issues become and the more hopeless the situation seems. Fortunately, God is the ultimate organizer: when we lay our problems before Him, we find our priorities renewed. He re-orders our hearts and cleans them. Sometimes it feels as though He uses steel wool to scrape away the plaque, and that can be painful, but we're left clean, unburdened, restored.
Two-fold point here: When I'm feeling burdened, I need to remember to take my burdens to God rather than letting them accumulate or being so naive as to think I can solve my problems through my own strength. The second point is, rather than letting the stuff accumulate on my desk, I need to sort, order and file right away--even if it may be a painful habit to form.
As always, I pray for wisdom and strength in developing habits that are so outside of my nature.
Appreciated the effort when I walked into 1st period classroom!
ReplyDelete