{Clean Heart}

It's at the end of our prayers each morning this Lent.

"Create in me a clean heart..."

It always strikes me as a bit mournful. I know what clean looks like and more often than not my heart is cluttered with many, many things. A smudge here, a pile of dirt there - a mess.

During Holy Week, I clean house. Not in the normal way we do, with six kids in a small house and lots of other things going on. A deep clean.  We take down curtains, hunt out cobwebs, wash windows and woodwork. We roll up rugs and scrub the floors underneath. I'm always surprised at the amount of dirt we discover, especially when it didn't look bad before. It all feels a little bit like confession. Probing the places and spaces we don't often look and ending up with a dirty bucket of wash water.

It's a ritual and it feels right in the week leading up to Easter. Dirt, dirt, dirt - everywhere. It feels marvelous on Easter morning to walk down the stairs and know that every inch of the house has had a going-over and is fresh and ready.

I know it won't take long for things to get messed up. Dirt and chaos is like that - it doesn't take long to seep right back in, finding a home in dark and secret places, like souls collecting sin. We're never clean for long before we find ourselves in those familiar circumstances of getting things wrong.

It's Good Friday and I'm cleaning house and asking Jesus to clean my heart. Knowing that He's a much better heart-keeper than I could ever be.

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