I'm under house a-stressed...

Get it? My dorky little play on words there? Say it out loud and maybe it will come to you. Instead of house ARREST, I'm a-stressed. It's bad, I know. But seriously...

One of the ironic things about cleaning- and I mean REALLY cleaning- my house is that things always get way worse before they get better. Is it just me and my own deranged method of organizing and cleaning or does this happen to everyone? For example, I see one thing that needs to be put away, but before I can find a good spot for it, I end up having to pull everything out of a closet and reorganize it. While I'm in the middle of reorganizing and purging all the junk in the closet, I find 50 other things that need to find a new home which means I have to clean/organize a-whole-nother area of the house. In the meantime, all the homeless items are stacking up while I clean/purge/organize and after I work for a half-day "cleaning" the house still looks like a tornado blew through while I sat on the couch eating bon bons or something. And it's like a vicious little merry-go-round that won't stop and you can't off until you listen to "It's a Small World After All" so many times that you want to stick an ice pick in your ears. Whoa, I went a little violent there. But you get my drift, right?

So as I'm preparing the house not only for showing, but also trying to get some packing done ahead of time (non-essentials only, of course) I'm often finding myself in a bigger mess than the one I started with. Which can be infuriating at the time, but eventually leaves me with a deep sense of satisfaction once everything is in its place. It just takes awhile to get there. I wonder if our relationship with Christ isn't much the same. Just as He reveals an area of life to be cleaned up, it reveals another area of life that's in just as much disarray. I think we can sometimes become so overwhelmed by our filthy depraved lives that we just want to throw our hands up and quit. Thankfully, God's measure of grace gives us faith for the looong clean-up process of the heart and draws us closer to him.