Cleaning House

When Luke set down to write his account of of the good news he included a slew of Jesus stories that his gospel writing companions left out. One of them is commonly called The Parable Of the Lost Coin. You can find it in Luke 15:8-10. Today I want to call it the Parable Of the Sweeping Woman. Or maybe the Parable of Seeking and Finding. Or perhaps even the Parable Of Why the Hell Did It Take Loosing A Coin For Me To Clean My Stupid House?

Anyway...

Every once in a while I feel like the woman in the story. I've lost something of value and it takes working up a sweat with broom in hand before I can find it. It's just that instead of a coin, the lost treasure is my mind, or at least a part of it. Most of the time it's the part that helps me remember why I'm doing something. Sometimes it's the part that actually cares about doing something. Sometimes it's the creative part that helps me actually do something. This morning I woke up and felt like I had lost a combination of them all.

So I cleaned, I purged, and I created new space in my office.

A new table got cut down to size and mounted on casters. Drawers and files got unloaded and sorted. The recycling box got a few pounds heavier. A couple of dust rags got destroyed. And a few things that had been lying around for about a year finally got hung.

Then I spent some time helping Christy do the same thing in her space downstairs. The staff mailboxes got mounted in their new spot. And Furniture got moved, shifted and shimmed.

Then I headed outside. More salt made its way from Nawara Brothers to the Lighthouse. The two inch sheet of ice on the sidewalk got busted up. And the broken door bell got worked on.

And somewhere in all the activity my broom sent a few coins ringing out into the open.

It's a weird thing, cleaning, purging and creating. I found some things that simply got lost in the in-box, even though they seemed desperately important when they showed up there. Some of them were and I made a couple quick calls that were overdue. But for the most part the world kept turning just fine despite my not accomplishing everything I would have hoped to in the last half year. Kind of like Y2K playing out over and over as I sifted paper into recycling.

Somehow the filtering of my physical work space filters out the mental, emotional and spiritual work space as well. Same thing happens with spring cleaning or rearranging furniture at home. Same thing happens when I pull all the flies off their drying patch in late winter and rearrange fly boxes for the new season.

It felt like hitting a reset button where wiping away of all the clutter left me with the essentials. Remember why you walked into the office to begin with. Know your priorities and sacrifice everything else to their demands. Get back to basics.


So today I like to think that the woman in Jesus' story had a lot of time to think as she swept and searched in the soft glow of her light. I like to think that she didn't just find her lost coin, but that she also remembered what was worth spending it on. I like to think she smiled when she bought a measure of grain or a flask of oil with that lost and found coin. And I like to think that the blisters on her palms served as a reminder to be more careful with the wealth she had been blessed with.

How about you? What are the brooms you pick up when you need to find what is lost?