Holy Week

When I was a kid, we had a closet where we kept most of our toys. With four kids, you can imagine that it might have gotten a little cluttered over time. We'd just shove whatever toy hadn't been cleaned up in there, close teh door and forget about them. Over time it would begin to overflow, full of notebooks, crayons, things laid sideways and upside down and perched on the edges of the shelves, things on the floor, misplaced train tracks and game pieces that never made it back to their boxes, dolls and clothes, and thousands of other things that maybe didn't even belong in the closet.
Mom was finally declare ENOUGH, and we'd spend a day organizing. I loved days when we did that. I would run all over the house putting things back in their proper places. We'd stack up the game boxes with all of their pieces back in place. We'd put the little people all together, the matchbox cars back in their buckets, the crayons in the desk, the books on the shelves. Everything went back into place, and if it didn't have a place, it went in the giveaway pile. Sometimes we'd unearth something that had been missing for months. Sometimes we'd find nasty things at the bottom of a pile and pitch them. At the end of the process, we'd have a newly organized, tidy toy closet. Something I always found so refreshing and wonderful.
This week is "Holy Week", in which we remember the last week of Jesus' life on earth. I'm not from a litergical church so we don't do lent, but this year I decided that my life has become like a cluttered toy closet, storing up things that don't need to be there, disorganized, full of trash and misplaced articles. So I thought I'd take holy week to reflect and see what things I should take out, put in their places, and sort. I'm fasting from entertainment as a reminder, and as a way to renew my mind. Our culture is full of things that are fine in small doses and lethal in large doses. And I've been discovering how much of my life is sucked away by things like facebook and TV shows and movies and music, and how many of my thoughts are directed toward those things. Again, fine in small doses, but with too many, they clutter out the things I claim are the most important. So this week, I will be writing and reflecting and reading a lot, and hopefully not sitting around zoning out. I want to be intentional about my relationship with God and my family, not just shoving it into the closet with all of the other things in my life and hoping it stays on the shelf where it's supposed to be. I want to find all of the misplaced items that don't belong in my life and get rid of them. I want to pick up the things that have fallen off of the shelves and place them where they belong. ANd I hope at the end of the week I'll have found a better balance. I hope that God refines me and uses the time to teach me things I need to know.
So here goes. Maybe you'd like to join me in focusing more on Christ this week leading up to Easter. If not, maybe you'd be willing to pray for me and my heart, that I can "be transformed by the renewing of [my] mind" and "redeem the time, because the days are evil."