Remodeling is a scary word to me. Never ever has it gone well in our home. There is always some kind of catastrophe! We are redoing our floors. This time we had a pleasant surprise, good condition hardwoods in two rooms.

We had to take up 20 year old carpet plus a lot of tile, so as you can imagine the dust in our home is at an all time high. My kids could “almost” build a sandcastle in it.

Tomorrow the floor will be done. Then we begin the task of putting everything back. That feels daunting to me. If you could see the one room we have almost everything packed into you would understand very quickly. I’m not even sure where to begin to tell the truth. But I am planning to take it in chunks and go through and separate and discard things as I go. That way my home will be more organized and easier to keep clean because we won’t have so much clutter and everything will have it’s own place.

I was thinking about decluttering and reorganizing and realized we often need to do that to our hearts in front of the Lord. How many things do we have cluttering up our minds and filling the corners of our hearts where Jesus’ light needs to shine the most?

I have never participated in Lent before this year. But as I have considered it, I have just been very impressed that I want to be intentional about my time with God. Not just the time before Easter, but think of how important this is as a way to form a habit. I can decide to be intentional about extra time with the Lord. I can take inventory of my heart and clear away the cobwebs. As I do that, I am allowing Christ deeper and deeper into my heart and life. I begin to crave Him and His Word more than the things I used to fill my time with. Then, when Easter does come, I can rejoice more than any other year, because I have been able to be in close, intentional communion with God prior to Easter. And it won’t stop there. Just because Lent is over doesn’t mean that I should go back to my disorganized, cluttered state of mind. Since I did all the work, I want to keep my mind clear and focused so that I can keep Jesus’ light shining into every part of my heart and then out of my life into others lives telling them just how important Jesus is to me.

Lent is a stepping stone to a cobblestone pathway leading towards a beautiful relationship with God culminating in eternity with Him.