Clear Your Mind with a Clean Office

It wasn’t too long ago that our home office had morphed into a dump-all.  Right around Thanksgiving, in fact.  My husband, a man with a very big heart but a very disorganized approach to paperwork, had stacks of stuff all over the place.  (I’m sure he understands it, but it is all madness to me.)  His desk nested under the window, on the wall opposite the door.  To hide the mess, the door had to always be kept closed.  I hate closed doors.

I decided to move the desk and filing cabinet to the same wall as the door and move the other furniture to the windowed wall.  That way, even if John left a few piles out, the door could be kept open as long as the rest of the room was tidy.  Passersby would be none the wiser. 

As I began to move the piles off the desk, I ran across a few piles that didn’t have anything to do with John’s paperwork.  Piles of my mom’s phone books dating back to 1999.  Piles of her old magazines.  Piles of sales circulars she thought it was important to keep.  A little poem she had written.  Whether one she authored or one she happened to read and like well enough to reproduce, I’m not sure.  But it was in her hand just the same:

Good Morning, God

You are ushering in another day

Untouched and freshly new.

So here I come to ask you, God

If you’ll renew me, too.

Forgive the many errors that

I made yesterday.

And let me try again, Dear God

To walk closer in Thy way.

But, Father, I am well aware

I can’t make it on my own.

So take my hand and hold it tight.

For I can’t walk alone.

My mom.  I remembered just where she taped it, on her own desk, when she lived. 

I remembered her computer.  We had taken it for Travis after she passed away, but he didn’t have a lot of use for it.  Since the computer was about 10 years old, the monitor alone took up the entire desktop space in his room.  I brought it into the office and hooked it up once the desk was moved to the door wall. 

I took that poem and taped it to the filing cabinet next to the desk.  I searched through the phone books, circulars and magazines to see if she had left any messages there.  Finding none, I recycled them.  I found a place for everything else in the office, working in spurts over the next few days.  By the weekend before Thanksgiving, everything in the office had a home.  Then I sat down and cried. 

I sobbed.  I called John in and grabbed onto him.  He is so good to me.  He just held me.  Held me tight and let me drench his shoulder with my tears, though he had no idea why I was so torn up. 

When all was said and done, I had cleaned the office.  The Lord had cleared my heart of some of the grief that I refused to face.  And my mind and spirit were at peace that day.