When my husband of 28 years died, we had been living in the house we owned for 15 years. His entire illness, surgeries, recovery, and subsequent hospice care took place in that house. When it was over, I needed to get away from that property.
The difficulty was that the house was overflowing with 15 years of the accumulated belongings of five people. I didn’t have the bandwidth to manage, sort, discard belongings during those years of illness. To begin the process of putting the house on the market, I held yard sales and filled the SUV to the roof many times taking items to the dumpster or the donation bin.
The task was overwhelming.
After I was settled into a new place, an even more difficult process of clean up, sorting and discarding began. Prior to this time in my life, I had not learned the important skills of managing emotional, mental, and spiritual health. Traumas, wounds, and pain had been accumulated and stuffed into every available emotional and mental closet, overflowing into my spiritual health.
I had “stuffed” so many events and hurts over a long period of time, the idea of even opening a metaphorical closet door was overwhelming and exhausting. Life had pushed me hard. I had to accept the notion that if I continued to ignore the unresolved issues, triggers and traumas, they would continue to randomly fall off the shelf and trip me up. Anxiety, overreaction to mental and emotional triggers, and the cycle of rehearsed and nursed hurts from the past would continue to prevent me from finding peace in the present.
Seek God
At this time in my life, I related strongly to the story of Job. He lost his entire family, his possessions, and his social standing. He had done nothing to deserve it, and it wasn’t fair.
When you read the story of Job in the Old Testament, it feels a little bit like reading a Shakespearean play. Job receives the news that his wealth and his ten children are gone. His wife speaks bitterly to him, and his friends add to his sorrow instead of helping.
The next 39 chapters are dialogs between Job and his friends and between Job and God. We find Job sitting in an ash heap covered in ashes with nowhere to go. All of his children, his herds, his servants had been killed. He is overwhelmed by the grief of losing all of his adult children. He feels like God has abandoned him and is afflicting him.
When Job’s friends arrive on the scene, they begin to chastise and mock him. They are convinced that Job is in this state because he has sinned against God. This kind of thinking is alive and well in today’s culture. “God punishes sinners and blesses the righteous” is a lie that has been circulating for centuries*. Neither Job nor his friends were present for the conversation in God’s presence where satan appeared and asked permission to test Job’s faith in God.
*Edited to clarify: God does bless those who love and honor Him. The incorrect assumption pervasive in human history is that if you are suffering, you are a sinner. Suffering is not a lack of God's blessing. Suffering is not a result of sin in this context. Suffering is the natural consequence of being human. Many blessed and righteous people suffer in life.
Job’s friends piled onto his misery. At several points, Job tells them to shut up and leave him alone. Job says he’d rather to talk to God about all of this but not to them (Job 13:4), stating that their so-called wisdom is a torment to him (19:21). Job lets his friends know that they are terrible at comforting others (16:1). Through numerous conversations, his bad friends tell him that because he is suffering, he is not right with God.
By the end of the story, we see that Job never spoke against God with Job saying all the way through “I know that my Redeemer lives!” (19:25). God answers Job and restores him to wealth, position, and family. Job was more blessed in the second half of life than the first (42:12). The three bad friends were rebuked by God for not “speaking accurately about God” to Job (42:7).
What Does Job Have to Do with Closets?
Here’s what Job did not do. When his friends arrived on the scene, Job did not say he was fine, thanks for stopping by. Job did not accept the empty platitudes offered by well-meaning (but misguided) religious people. Job did not try to pretend that he wasn’t suffering, that he wasn’t deeply hurting, that he wasn’t asking hard questions of God. Job did not accept shame for suffering and loss.
Job was honest about where he was in life. Job was honest about his thoughts and feelings towards God. Instead of stuffing his experience in a closet where others couldn’t see it, Job was open and real with people. Even though his realty made the people around him uncomfortable, Job pursued God and found him.
Doing the Hard Work
We all have stuff in our emotional/mental closets. The only way to be free of the stuff that has been dragging us down for years is to open the closet and deal with the hurts of the past, traumas, unforgiven injuries, bad habits, immaturities.
Everything that has been shoved aside and hidden out of sight has to be brought out into the open. This is hard and scary. But if we do not do the work, the overflowing storage spaces will spill the stuff in our closet out onto the people around us. We then pass on our unresolved issues to other people who happen get too close.
Making the choice.
It’s hard to go through life carrying the weight of all the things you’ve hidden in the closets of your heart, mind, and soul. It’s also hard to start pulling everything out and risk exposing your inner mess to the world. You have to choose your hard. Keeping everything stuffed and hidden is more comfortable, but it doesn’t lead to healing. Pulling everything out into the open and giving it to God is scary and overwhelming. But, what is given to God is healed and used for his glory.
When you gather the courage to clean out your spiritual, emotional, and mental closets, here’s some things to remember:
-Not everyone who sees your mess will say the right thing. It may be that they have never had the courage to be that open and honest. It may be that your courage makes them uncomfortable. Don’t stop.
-Find safe people to share your mess with as you sort it out, such as a counselor, mentor, friend that doesn’t judge, preach, or call you a sinner.
-We have all at some point in time been a bad friend to someone in a messy situation. We had theologically correct Sunday School answers when they needed compassion. Because we’ve been a bad friend, we can forgive those who aren’t the perfect friend to us.
-When other people don’t understand your closet full of crazy and condemn you as a mess, God is compassionate and caring. Don’t be afraid of being a messy human. The people who criticize the mess you make as you sort out and improve your inner self aren’t being honest about the messy human inside themselves.
-Where you are ashamed, God gives grace.
-Where you feel guilt, God offers forgiveness.
-When you are overwhelmed, God is with you.
In everything, make it your priority to find God. Throw open those closets and invite his love and mercy to cover everything you’ve kept hidden. He will sit down with you in the middle of that mess to guide and comfort you. By inviting his presence and asking him to “bless this mess”, you will find his peace.
“ Brothers and sisters, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.” James 5:10-11
Copyright @ TA Boland 2024
Image: Unsplash
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