One sure fire way to know if a major Christian festival has taken place, and you don’t have a calendar around, is to look at your pastor’s desk. If you can find it.
The season of Lent and the Easter celebrations have come and gone, and we now bask in the glow of the risen Christ, or maybe it’s the cumulative effect of the light shining of the piles of white paper that have piled up around me as I tended to the events surrounding these days.
As I clean my desk, discovering mail that needs to be sent, mail to be opened, notes to myself, musical pieces, receipts, long lost villages, all kinds of interesting things that fell to the bottom of the pile, knowing I would get to it “when I had the chance.”
So after some time of hard labour, my desk is cleaner now. The recycle bin is ready to be emptied in time for garbage day tomorrow, and there are just a couple of small piles that need to be filed or directed to other people in the church.
As I went through these piles of papers, I mentioned I found some mail that had to be taken care of, some to be sent, some to be opened, but I was distracted from all these things because I was focusing on the work had be done just to get through the days. Had I not stopped to clean my desk, who knows when I may have found these things!
When I look at our churches, how many of us are just looking at what has to get done now(!!) and not focusing on the bigger picture. How many of us are getting lost in the clutter that builds around us? How many of us really need to do a spring cleaning of our spiritual selves in order to get back to the basics of what it means to follow Jesus Christ?
Maybe we do need to clean out our hearts and minds. Maybe we do need to start with a blank slate again. We need to connect with the reason we are doing what we are doing, and by cleaning out the clutter, maybe we can see what really needs to be done!
The church needs a new direction. It needs to find a place where it can bask in the new life offered in the resurrection of Jesus Christ!
Just throw out the junk and find him! He’s under there somewhere!
And he’s waiting for us.