Cleaning Your Heart Home
There’s no time like a pandemic to catch up on odds and ends. If you’re anything like me, you’ve used this season of extended time at home to knock out the many projects that just keep getting pushed to the back burner. Organizing closets, repainting walls, deep cleaning the house, and so on…
A couple weeks back I was sorting through a box filled with papers that I’ve accumulated throughout my years in ministry. This box had been a catch-all for just about anything I thought might be worth keeping. As I shuffled through the array of bent bulletins, napkins with indecipherable notes on them, and various conference handouts, I came across a stapled-together booklet entitled My Heart Christ’s Home.
Written in the 1950’s by a Presbyterian minister, this short meditation reflects on what it means to make our heart an inviting place for Christ’s presence to reside. The author imagines welcoming Christ into his home and then goes on to explore what that might look like. Are there things throughout the house that would sadden Christ? Might the break-neck pace each morning – running out with a cup of coffee, barely even saying hello to Christ, the welcomed guest – be kind? The short booklet walks through each room of the house and imagines what Christ might observe.
Hopefully throughout this season of COVID-19 you’ve gotten some things organized and cleaned around your house. But far more important than house projects, is working to make our heart a better home for Christ.
So let me ask you – Have you done some hard, heart-work throughout this season? Have you spent time pulling out roots of bitterness? Have you lifted up the rug and started to clean out some of the things that you’ve swept under there? Have you gone after the cobwebs of sin and started to vacuum up the broken pieces of your soul? Have you Windexed the mirror so you can better see the image of God reflected within you?
I hope you have. It’s worth it. Because the heart-work we do today benefits us in the long run. The cleaner our hearts become, the quicker we are to notice when dirt and mess begin to accumulate again.
So maybe try this – next time you start to clean your house, pause for 5 minutes and do some heart-cleaning first. Pray. Reflect. Repent. Worship. Just ensure that your heart, Christ’s home, gets as much attention as your house does.