If there is one thing I want you to remember it's that everything you do, say, feel, think, believe, invest in, work for, or love, has purpose. You have purpose. You are here on purpose, for a purpose. You are capable of great things. This concept was given to me during a season of praying about how I wanted my future to look.
I think sometimes we think we need to segregate pieces of our lives into boxes. Work here, school there, relationships over here, and let's keep all of our mistakes, short-comings, and failures in a box WAAAAYYY over there in a dark corner. I think naturally in our world it is easy to do this, to compartmentalize everything we have to do or have done, the people we are, and the tasks we need to accomplish by separating them.
Imagine when you clean out a room of your house, there is typically 3 piles. Trash, Keep, and Give Away. When we start to put things into drawers, closets, boxes, under the bed, or shoved away somewhere... it often seems like unboxing and finding everything, is way messier than leaving it be. Except that when you leave it alone you know it is still there, waiting to be dealt with, waiting to be seen or to pop out at the right moment. Our undealt with past is kind of the same way. Things we push down so others don't see them... they tend to come out at the worst times.
But, when we take out those pieces and bring them into the light... we can choose three choices. Do we acknowledge this item as trash, something we need to rid our life of for good. Are we holding on to it for no reason or because you're worried to lose it forever? Or do we acknowledge this piece as a treasured item we forgot we even had because it had been hidden for so long? Do we realize someone else would be better off with it and decide to give it away? Our memories, emotions, and short comings can behave much of the same way when we start to dig up things we have kept away for so long. And as I said, when you first start cleaning you might have the tendency to look around and think you made a mistake. BUT, when you are done... your space is organized, clean, and each part of that room can live together in harmony. Because there is no longer anything unnecessary inside. This is the image I think of when I picture how to live not just a good life, but a good good life. Willing to do the work to be better, by cleaning out the less than perfect spaces in our hearts, minds, souls, and lives. Willing to sacrifice the easy way, to take the better way. That is what Jesus did, and we are called to look like him.
And I know this may seem too challenging, and it will not happen all at once. BUT I believe that there is so much freedom when we realize we can't place all the little pieces of ourselves into small boxes. They need to live out in the open, together, and learn from each other. We need to let our successes AND failures be present, so that we can move forward on to the bigger and better things we are called to. I think when we start to compartmentalize everything we start to hide parts of ourselves. We start to ignore parts of ourselves because we focus on something else.
The best way for us to be our full and complete self is to clean out the clutter and junk and to dump all that we have left into one big box, and then leave it at the feet of Jesus. I truly believe He doesn't want us to live just a good life, but a GOOD GOOD life. Sometimes that involves cleaning out all the old boxes, getting rid of things you don't need, saving memories you want to keep, and making room for the new things that are to come.
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”
-2 Timothy 4:7-
XOXO,
Alie