The cupboard of our mind

I was once contracted to paint a kitchen in a very nice home for a long-time customer. One afternoon the owner told me to get a pop out of the refrigerator. To my amazement, the contents of that fridge were lined up so categorically and neatly that I am sure it was a significantly better display than in any high-end grocery store. Later, it got to the point in the job when I had to remove the cupboard doors. That day I fully discovered what OCD is. Everything was perfectly placed, all labels to the front, all by category, etc. Here is some full disclosure—it was nothing like the cupboards in my home, nor, I would bet, many, many others.

The insides of my kitchen cupboards are vastly different. If one were to look, he would see disorganized clutter, random “what is that’s”, some stuff way past their expiration dates and thus completely useless, and other gems of uncertain origin and use. There is absolutely no trace of OCD there. None of that stuff which really doesn’t belong there for obvious reasons (yes, we do go on a cleaning binge occasionally) interferes in any significant way with anything. It just gets moved around every now and then during our need to find something we do need.

The point of this is that each of us have cupboards in our minds. We store everything in those cupboards, often a lot more than we need to store. Useless stuff like past shame, past hurts, past anger situations, past lies about ourselves and others, past guilt all of which takes up perfectly good space. The problem is, however, that it doesn’t just take up space. It affects us in many ways and the troubling thing is we aren’t always aware of it. That junk, as I call it, is often at the root of how we react to situations, and more importantly, to people. That junk, when it is (knowingly or unknowingly) in the driver’s seat, drives how we think about all things life. Most importantly, Satan is keenly aware of that junk and uses it to make us less than we can be as people, so the junk messes with our ability to grow spiritually. Finally, we often seem to just plain enjoy holding on to that junk.

The more we are open to allowing God to enter our lives, so that He can clean out the cupboards of our minds of that junk on the back shelves of it, the more we will grow spiritually. He won’t be OCD about it, and neither should we. We just have to get rid of it.