ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
August 21, 2022
Guest Writer: Dr. Joel Plaag
It’s shelves, floor to ceiling – ugly metal ones at that; the kind that probably come as a knock-off from some half-witted container-store-esque style, but not nearly as hip and cool. At least they’re not rusty, I thought to myself, when we first moved into this place more than six years ago.
This closet holds all the medicines, the old eyeglasses and other general stuff. It’s similar in size to a closet in another house – the one that held all the medicines and things before. So when we moved, the junk was quickly transported from one closet to the other without much thought. Over the years it’s gotten larger – and more diverse – and larger still. This afternoon, I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Those awful plastic organizational bins that I’d bought years ago were full of old pills from the doctor when she thought a 110 cholesterol was too high but I quit taking them because they made my hands hurt. It was filled with allergy medications (expired 2015), heartburn medicines (expired in 2017) and random band aids and cotton balls – cotton balls everywhere!
Because all this stuff is in bins, it seems like everything is put together. Were you to look in that closet, it would look neat. Pretty bins adorn the shelves, cans of Lysol and Clorox wipes are on the top, towels on the bottom; yes, you’d think, those closets are nice and orderly.
That is, until you need a band-aid and can’t find it amongst all the expired over-the-counter heartburn remedies.
I have wandered past this closet an unfathomable number of times and even dug into it, looking for another electric toothbrush head or eyeglasses cleaner.
But it always comes back to all that “stuff” that’s followed me from one house to another, and another, and another, never to be cleaned or purged; never to be inventoried or watched.
It’s kind of like the “emotional closet” that we sometimes carry. You know the type – where we think about those things or people that hurt us in the past. We hold them up for display, and we never let them go. Sometimes we’re even proud of our emotional display cases, much like that organized mess of a closet. Remember when so-and-so did that awful thing to you?
This emotional bender comes in especially handy when I’m mowing the lawn. Behind the buzz of the mower, I can inspect all of my emotional trophies, reliving angry moments and carrying them from place to place, just like my awful closet.
Isaiah 43:18-19 says “Forget the former things; do not dwell in the past. See, I am doing a new thing… I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”
Now, let’s go back to that closet with the metal shelves. One more time this week, I looked for a band-aid, because I nicked my finger, and it was bleeding. One more time, I couldn’t find the band-aids because they were behind all the other junk I was holding on to.
That was it. I was sick and tired of carrying around all that stuff in that closet that served no purpose. Sick and tired of looking into that closet on the rare occasions where I needed to, only to not be able to find the treasure (or whatever it was) I was seeking. I reached an impasse – clean the closet or watch as it continued to devolve into a nasty mess.
So, trashcan under one arm, I cleaned it. All the old junk went first. I moved things I wanted to keep to other shelves, even though there was no rhyme or reason, yet. Once the garbage was gone, I reorganized – cold and allergy meds in this bin; cuts and scrape stuff in that one; stomach and digestive over there, toothbrushes and the little travel sized items over in that corner.
It looks better, and I can find the band-aids and the alcohol swabs, at least for now.
Maybe first, before we quit dwelling in our emotional closets, we must get sick of them – really sick of them, just like we get sick of the junk in our physical closets. Sometimes we can forget that our memories can be just as gross as our old closets, and we can’t always find places in our hearts for good things if we’re too busy dwelling on what may have happened a month, a year, or a decade ago. When we let go of past injuries, we make room for new memories. We quit letting people and things from the past take advantage of us. We learn instead of trying to live like this, or attempting to improve that, we just learn to be.
Isaiah mentions “streams in the wasteland,” implying that even from the most barren and useless place, good things can come from it, but it starts with being open to that “new thing,” and sometimes being open means just getting sick and tired of the same old clutter.
Even an ugly closet can get fixed. All it takes is getting tired of the old.
